Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 139: sounds of summer, replay, poets


Here are three things that moved the needle of happiness and gratitude in the week that was.

Three Things from Edmonton, episode 139:

                            


1. Sounds of summer 

When the snow comes and the land in this part of the country sounds its long steady note of winter, other sounds will drift out of range for a time. That’s why I ignored the voice inside me that said get up and go do something productive, and, instead, stayed where I was, sitting in a chair in the backyard, listening to rain falling down onto the gazebo roof overhead. 


When the snow comes and the side streets and back roads are shined up like glass, access to other sounds will lie buried for a time. To prepare, I looked down and listened to my bike tires bite into a gravel road at the University Farm as I pedalled to pick up a dozen fresh eggs. Not a bite as much as a sizzle, to hear it.


When the snow forces bare feet back inside socks back inside boots, the delicate sound of the badminton birdie pinging off racquet strings will be suspended in time.

Gone with the snow will be the jangle of the ladder being positioned against the garage eavestrough as Shelagh, in a backyard sporting life ritual, ascends and retrieves the birdies from a gutter soon to be papered with soggy yellow leaves.


2. Replay 

I dig conferences. I haven’t been to many, but I enjoy the scene. Get my coffee, get my chair, wear my lanyard, listen to the speaker, take notes, check the program, try to make connections, hear new things, experience other minds, try to come home better.

“The point is you’re seeing he’s playing with Ginsbergian language, trying to put two words together, almost a cutout method of Burroughs, finding words, as he said, that sweat,” said Douglas Brinkley.


Hearing  Brinkley talk about Dylan at The Beats conference in Tulsa was a good experience. Experiencing Michael Long from Georgetown explain story at a speechwriters conference in Washington, DC, was a thrill. Prying open a fresh way to experience winter at the Winter Bike Congress in Minneapolis has been an ongoing conference takeaway. I spent a good chunk of last week at a conference put on by the Columbia Journalism School. The conference itself, in the flesh, happened last year. It’s preserved on YouTube. 


The Harvard English professor Louis Menand was a keynote speaker at the conference, which gauged the impact of Walter Lippmann’s landmark book Public Opinion, still in print after a century. It’s slow work attending a conference on my laptop. But there is one key advantage to all the stopping and scrolling back and replaying video of a speaker’s thought that one could not do in person. The advantage is all the stopping and scrolling back and replaying a speaker’s thoughts that I could never do in person. The word “scrolling” is a tipoff here. Video stopped and started resembles a piece of print that can be inspected, run back over, made to stand still. Like the printed word, it won’t accept any questions. I don’t get the advantage of dialogue and I don’t get to wander New York City this way. But I save on traditional conference registration.


3. Poets 

Long live the rhyming couplet and those from whose expert hands it is bequeathed as a kind of consolation to the rest of us. 

Chaucer for one: 

But al shal passe that men prose or ryme/
Tak every man his turn, as for his tyme

Shakespeare’s Juliet for another: 

Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow/
That I shall say good night till it be morrow. 

And in 18 syllables across two lines in Come Monday, all the pulverizing world the heart is up against:

California has worn me quite thin/
I just can’t wait to see you again

RIP Jimmy Buffett.

Thanks for being out there, friends. 



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