The Year in Public Radio

In the climactic scene of Tom Robbins' novel Skinny Legs and All, the lead character performs the dance of the seven veils. With each veil removed, a truth about life is revealed.

One of them states, "the reason we are here is to enlighten the mind, enlarge the soul and liberate the spirit."

I've grown to appreciate public radio more than ever before this past year, possibly because its mission is to provide programming that does all of the above. As I started graduate school I realized just how important public radio is to me. I found myself citing programs and interviews I'd heard or found on their site, such as StoryCorps, Fresh Air, and This American Life. (Free podcasts have made the shows even more accessible.) Frequently these shows help bring together my artistic and academic goals. For example, I'm considering an audio doc based on StoryCorps for my thesis.

So set aside some free time if you can and check out the National Public Radio year in review.

Flora and Fauna, 2007, Southwest Michigan

Year In Review

Enjoyed by some, dreaded and ignored by most, it's my annual Year In Review. (printable format here)


THESE WERE THE MOST ENJOYABLE MOMENTS OF 2007:


THESE WERE THE MOST CHALLENGING MOMENTS:


MY BIGGEST INSPIRATIONS OF THE PAST YEAR WERE:


FAVORITE MEALS WERE:


BEST READS:


BEST NEW MUSIC:


BEST LIVE PERFORMANCES:


NEW FRIENDS I MADE:


OLD FRIENDS I GOT TO KNOW BETTER:


MOST MEMORABLE QUOTES:


BEST TIMES WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY :


BEST DISCOVERIES I MADE:


GOALS I REACHED:


DISAPPOINTMENTS AND LOSSES I EXPERIENCED:


THE NICEST THING DONE FOR ME IN 2007:


THE NICEST THING I DID FOR SOMEONE ELSE:


IF I COULD ELECT A PERSON OF THE YEAR FOR 2007, IT WOULD BE:


FOR THE COMING YEAR, THESE ARE MY PERSONAL GOALS:


THESE ARE MY PROFESSIONAL GOALS:


AND THESE ARE MY PREDICTIONS:

City Recycling Update

In early August I proudly posted a photo of our brand new blue recycling container. We're lucky enough to be in Chicago's 47th ward pilot program. Our awesome alderman, Gene Schulter, apparently convinced the city powers-that-be that at baseline our ward had the highest recycling rate in the city, 30%. The pilot program has certainly been a great success in our household. Before the blue container, we routinely had two full black garbage containers (regular, unsorted garbage) every two weeks. And though I tried, we never really recycled. Now we're down to about one small grocery-sized plastic bag of garbage PER WEEK. I put the other black can by someone else's garage because we just don't need it. An old laundry basket on the floor of the pantry holds all junk mail and catalogs (which constitute about 80% of our garbage), all rinsed food containers, flattened delivery boxes, just about everything we no longer want to keep. The great thing about using a laundry basket is that it holds a lot but does not require a bag since everything going into it is dry. I need to empty that large laundry basket about every other day. We are AMAZED how much of what we thought was garbage is actually recyclable.

Reading

You'll notice a widget to the right for a site called Shelfari. I saw it in another blog and really liked it, so I got my own shelf. In the process of joining, I accidentally sent an invitation to the site to every single auto-added address in my Gmail account. I was mortified at the realization. But to my amazement, within the next few days, fifty of the maybe two hundred people I'd emailed actually followed the link, joined the site and many now have virtual book shelves of their own. I was heartened by this, the fact that people still care about books enough to share their favorites.

But my email address book tells a different story than the National Endowment for the Arts' new report, titled "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence." The chairman of the NEA, Dana Gioia, summarizes here:

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. This detailed study showed that Americans in almost every demographic group were reading fiction, poetry, and drama—and books in general—at significantly lower rates than 10 or 20 years earlier. The declines were steepest among young adults. More recent findings attest to the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life. These new statistics come from a variety of reliable sources, including large, nationally representative studies conducted by other federal agencies. Brought together here for the first time, the data prompt three unsettling conclusions:
• Americans are spending less time reading.
• Reading comprehension skills are eroding.
• These declines have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications.


Doris Lessing offers an explanation in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature last Friday:

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

I agree with Lessing, as I blog, of course. I'm tempted to ask, "doesn't using the internet involve reading and writing?"
Yes, I realize, it does. But what I find is crucial is that much of the reading and writing on the internet, as democratic and free access as it wonderfully is, is writing absent the editor, even if simply the self-editor. We find ourselves often reading poorly written, unedited blatherings like this one. As writers we escape the editing process entirely. My partner, a professional editor and despiser of blogs, pointed out to me as I whined about the painful editing my recent school paper required, "It's in editing that you learn to express your thoughts. What's the point of having great thoughts if you can't express them clearly?"

What we're left with is an epidemic of inappropriately used apostrophes. And that's just the beginning of it. I'm as guilty as anyone - but I am in graduate school, which I hope is a step in the right direction toward sucking it up and editing. And editing. And editing. God, I hate editing.

But back to reading. Salon today unveiled the first I've seen of the many best books of 2007 lists. I've read none of them, though I plan to in the coming year.

The books I have read this year that I would call my top 10 of 2007 (that is to say, they were not all released this year) are:

1. The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
2. Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America by Michael Bechloss
3. Population 485 by Michael Perry
4. Narrative Medicine by Rita Charon
5. Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project by Dave Isay
6. The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron
7. Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
8. I Am America and So Can You by Stephen Colbert
9. Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney
10. Thunderstruck by Eric Larson

I end my list the same way Salon does - what are your favorite books of 2007?

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Dogster photo winners

Dogster (the Friendster for dogs) has posted the winners of their annual dog photo contest. This is the winner of the naughtiest dog contest.


Daisy is a Worlds Coolest Winner! at Dogster.com!


Check out all the other winners at their link above.

Vocabulary List

I'm pleased to have officially finished my first quarter of graduate school yesterday. Before I pack away the notes, articles and books that have been strewn all over the house for the past three months, here are a few of the great vocabulary words that I encountered. Some of them I thought I knew but then had to look up to be certain. See how you do. The test is, as it always was, to use it in a sentence. Good luck.

LACUNA

SPECIOUS

CASUISTRY

IRENIC

SURD

PROBITY

TELEOLOGICAL

HEGEMONY

ADUMBRATE

PHRONESIS

HERMENEUTICS

EXEGIS

PHENOMENOLOGY

ONTOLOGICAL

PRAXIS

DEONTOLOGICAL

APORIA

OBEISANCE

DIACHRONIC

ANALEPSIS

AMPHORA

CAESURAE

OBDURATE

VITUPERATIVE

World AIDS Day, 2007