And so, quietly, we begin. (i.e., Episode 1: Playlist)

Happy Tuesday!

We are beginning a podcast. Michael and I (Marc) have dreamed up this project as a season of 24 weekly episodes appearing on Tuesdays. Each one's going to be a short story or vignette [Marc] set to music [Mike]. What's short? Five minutes, or on an extraordinary week we might stretch to ten.

Our opening number on this grand May (not to be confused with grand mal) Tuesday is about a man living in solitary confinement. It's good to start off light! But the quiet and spareness of the piece - even the guitar-tuning notes that open it - these maybe-just-maybe evoke the idea of a story creating itself out of the void. So we picked it as our starter.

But sure, ok, it's dark, and there are even brief moments of cussing. Don't play it at top volume in your work cubicle, which seems unlikely anyway.

The story is called "Playlist".




REFERENCES
Yeah!, I actually have references, as I often might with these pieces.

(1) Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices From Solitary Confinement, Jean Casella, ed. This anthology of writings by men and women who've lived through solitary confinement, or who are still incarcerated, appeared just earlier this year. It is terrifically powerful, and proceeds go to the nonprofit Solitary Watch.

(2) Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There. Mark Baker, ed. I read this book in the late 80s, and the story never left me of Col. Thomas Moe, who was imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton and built houses in his imagination during solitary confinement. I distort his story somewhat here (Deer Hunter, in water up to the neck in a bamboo cage etc.) as the conflations of a semi-unreliable narrator. Sorry! The jist is the same.

(3) Solitude, Ella Wheeler Wilcox. "Laugh, and the world laughs with you / Weep, and you weep alone". A self-conscious allusion.