As I have indicated here over the past couple of months, I have some new addictions. One of these is The New Yorker‘s fiction podcast. I commend this to you for several reasons, not least is that hearing short stories, and hearing people talk about how to read them, has the potential to help make you a better reader, a better hearer of Story. We need more of that kind of competence.
Another is The Mountain Goats. As I mentioned before, these songs are to me like listening to Flannery O’Connor in song.
But a third addiction is a new one. My friend Mark Traphagen, a.k.a. The Foolish Sage, has begun pod-casting short stories (mostly about his life) in his League of Inveterate Poets Podcast. These are fun, humorous, and entertaining, and often with more than a hint of redemption thrown in.
If you have 9 minutes to spare as you walk about with your iPod (and if you have or would like to develop a category of “Redemptive Use of the F-Bomb” [i.e., consider yourself warned, there is strong language in this (but why do I feel compelled to tell you that about a podcast when I'd commend a movie with F-bombs without a second thought?)]), I commend to you his short story, “The Bus, the Bench, and the Chamber of Doom.”
Well thanks for the shout out! Wish I’d had time to get another podcast done before my next chemo infusion tomorrow. Will probably knock me out for about a week. I’ll try to get another episode up soon