Namaste & More

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Playing music on the radio is a delight.  I grew up first listening to a NY Oldies station, where I heard “help!” by the Beatles for the first time, before moving on to Progessive radio on WNEW-FM.  WNEW featured wonderful radio DJs like Pete Fornatell, Vince Scelsa (who used to read letters from Bayonne Butch), Scott Muni, the velvet-voiced Alison Steele who always staerted her show with “Nights in White Satin,” and my favorite, Dennis Elsas, who had the 6pm show. What I could intuit was that the WNEW DJs were nice people, genuinely interested in music, respectful fans.   I was one of those kids who read Liner notes on albums with a passion, and was crazy for The Beatles.  

When i first moved to Provincetown, MA for a fellowship in early Eighties, and stayed an extra year, a friend gifted me her radio spot.  I got my license, and for a year, I hauled an armload of albums to the new local community radio station.  It was something I bragged about years later, as I taught my way to the West Coast and back, the one thing guarranteed to impress my students.  I even substituted for a show on Princeton’s college radio station, when I worked at McCarter Theater’s Box Office and ran into a  a folk music DJ whose show I admired (“You Can’t play That On the Radio”) buying tickets. 

I never imagioned I’d move back to Provincetown, but going back to the radio station was something I did not even think twice about.  The community at the station is so supportive, 97% are volunteers.

So here I am on Namaste, on Sunday mornings, playing ragas by sitar players on the air.  I am learning as I go, for I still know more about The Beatles than Ravi Shankar.  I work on my pronunciation, and when all else fails, I fall back on rock n’ roll.  Join me from anywhere in the world; this Sunday, I am going back to my roots, and playing two hours of Indian classical, before moving on to rock, and a weekly David Bowie highlight selected by our station manager (officially, Executive Director.) You can find WOMR online at womr.org.  And you can listen to any show for two weeks after its aired on the station website’s Archieves Page.   

Reading Jan 27 @7pm ET

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So pleased to be invited to read from As Sweet As Honey at the Vassar Club of New York’s Book Club on zoom. If you are an alum, just register at the alumnae page or register directly at VCNY Book Club Author Reading.

I was lucky to be part of an extraordinary group of student writers in Bill Gifford’s Senior Composition class as a college senior. Several of us went onto publish books, including Jeff Wallach, Terri Cheney, and Heinz Insu Finkl. There are many other writers from other classes at Vassar, among them, Carole Maso, Jane Smiley, Ralph Sassone, and Lilias Bever, and of course, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Edna St.Vincent Millay. I drop these names because all of them ( as well as many more whose manuscripts I read in classes, and whose words I remember to this day) influenced not only my work, but my approach to life and art. It was an incredible education, and one I fought hard to get. Our teachers believed in us, and in turn, we respected them, but what really mattered, more than anything, was literature—the story and the words.

Losing Democracy

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Last night, I could not sleep, thinking about what it might mean to take our rights taken away. As an American citizen, I have the right to say what I want, and the responsibility to abide by the law. It is a simple concept, but adheres to my consitutional rights as a voter, a tax-payer, as a participant in the larger community. But what if I could not say share my political opinions when running into a neighbor on the way to post a letter, duly masked and socially distanced? What if I could not even write the letter without fear of censorship? I have a bumper sticker that says, Is it Fascism Yet? which is not actually on my car, the place where I share my allegiances and opinions in traffic. A bumper sticker is more effective than, say a sign on your lawn, because you are broadcasting your opinion wherever you travel, among people who may or may not share your views. If I get tail-gated, sometimes I wonder if it is because a bumper sticker that says Madame President, indicating my preference for a female leader? Or perhaps someone who might not want to Shop Local Farmers Markets? But I never used my Is it Fascism Yet? on my car because to me, it was too strong, too close to a truth that I did not want to acknowledge yet.

But now fascism has been nipping even closer at our heels. When a people can no longer trust that an election is a fair determination of a government because members of one party decide to brazenly lie and disregard the people’s choice, as these officious Republican sentatores and Congress members did even after they dove for their lives in a seige by Neo-nazis and White Supremists in the Capitol, then perhaps we are losing our democracy. We live with certain truths in our culture: if you are a person of color, you are more likely to be suspected of criminal intent. How many times have I been watched closely or followed in shops because as a person of color, obviously I might be a shoplifter? How often have I encountered micro-aggressions and patronization in daily encounters at work or as a neighbor because of my color? Too many times to count. Yet I never believed that my vote might be counted and then subject to an outright lie.

I was relieved to read Timothy Snyder’s essay in the New York Times last night, and I hope you read it too. It is a clear analysis of just where we are, and how we got here. I don’t know what will happen on the road to the 20th of a January, or even in the first 100 days. I tend more to optimism generally, because my other choice, dread, is not very useful. I do hope that sense overcomes sensibility, that reason throws a light to follow. There is so much more at stake now with a pandemic and inequality.