Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A storyteller who enchanted America with folk tales of Lake Wobegon on radio and in best-selling books.
On the island
Eight records
Leo Kottke, playing a piece called Ojio. [ASR mangling: 'Ojio' corrected to 'Ojo' per canonical title.]
Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah
Guide me, O thou, great Jehovah, from the Huddersfield Choral Society.
This is a blues tune by Jelly Roll Morton. And it's played by a friend of mine. Named Butch Thompson.
Pinka Zuckerman... a little um violin romance by Dvorak
Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson singing A Capital Ship.
Abide With MeFavourite
This is the hymn that was sung at every funeral in our family… This is the hymn that should make me cry.
In conversation
Presenter asks
12:34What would have been your complaints about your childhood?
The Statute of Limitations has past … and one is not allowed to … complain … past … your mid twenties. I'm way past that.
Presenter asks
13:02You had this desire to be invisible, and this desire to escape, didn't you?
But it was easy to escape because I was the third child in a family of six. … I discovered … when I was about eight or nine years old that it was not that hard to walk out the front door and just keep walking, get on your bike, and ride down past the cornfields and ride down to the Mississippi River. … Oftentimes when I came back … They hadn't noticed that I'd left.
Presenter asks
23:16Why do you think a shy man enjoys fronting a two-hour live radio programme?
It's not really fronting. It's siding. He stands off to the side. … And it's not hard to say here's Chet Atkins, and then when Chet Atkins is done with his tune, you say, Thank you, Chet …
The keepsakes
The book
Roget's Thesaurus (latest edition)
Peter Mark Roget
so that I could have the English language at my fingertips.
The luxury
a set of China (four place settings)
We could set a table and sit up at the end of it. And imagine people sitting there with me.
Presenter asks
Was one of your reasons for leaving New York that you fell out of love with the New Yorker?
I fell suddenly out of love with The New Yorker. A new editor came in … Tina Brown … She came in with a sort of a flurry of pronouncements about how the old magazine needed to be sort of tatted up a little bit. My heart sank, and I'd decided after twenty some years, I really do not want to go through this. … So just quietly pack up your tent, I thought, and walk away. And I did. And with amazingly few regrets.
Presenter asks
31:28How much has your religion stayed with you or have you left that behind?
I've left the Plymouth Brethren behind … definitely left behind the separation theology … The great sin … is smugness and … self-righteousness. And the failure to recognize joy and to respond to it, and the failure to use one's own gifts. I think I have used gifts of my own that I don't even have. I have lived far beyond my gifts.
Presenter asks
32:42Do you see yourself becoming a kind of garrulous and lovable grandfather with children gathered at your knee?
My children have been very slow about providing me with adoring grandchildren. … I don't want to bring it up. … If I don't become a grandfather, then I guess I'll just become a reclusive and eccentric old man in a log cabin at the end of a long road.
“I do not come from backpatters. … These people do not bring up their children on heavy doses of praise. They believe that it would corrupt us, that it would turn our heads, that we'd get too large an idea of ourselves. We'd become foolish, and that would be the worst thing that would happen to us.”
“The beauty of the stories is in a way their emptiness, which allows the reader … to place themselves into the story and to put their own relatives and people from their past into the stories.”
“If you are alone, you might as well learn how to enjoy loneliness and nobody can enjoy loneliness so much as country singers.”
“I think that I have used gifts of my own that I don't even have. I mean, I think I have lived far beyond my gifts.”