As an Aside: A Little Snow on the Radio

Every morning on NPR, the American public radio, Garrison Keillor’s voice gives life, in a serious and suave tone, to a short poem which, with one stroke, rises over our too-warm winter. A poem delivered in a few seconds, as an offering to better get through “difficult times,” repeats Keillor. That’s a good idea which, however, it seems no one in the land of maples and Her Majesty wishes to take up.

Otherwise, Garrison Keillor is the creator of the stories from Lake Wobegon, news broadcast in the context of an eclectic program of which he is the creator: A Prairie Home Companion. I’ve been a faithful listener of the show for years, a faithful among other loyal fans, whether they are in the United States, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, England or Canada.

The stories from Lake Wobegon — unaffected, full of tenderness and sensitive observations — reveal the sinuous traits of a profoundly human America. These stories have resulted in several books to date.

Although he cuts the figure of a defender of oral culture, no one is surprised by the intense love that Keillor lavishes on books. In this old French-Canadian center that is St. Paul in Minnesota, the radio man has even opened a bookstore. He constantly distills his love of books into his broadcasts where, gathered around Lake Wobegon, “the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”

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It is in this Lake Wobegon, in the heart of a fiction that meets reality, where Bernard-Henri Levy in some way went to drown himself when he decided, with American Vertigo, to devote a book to America. Keillor slayed the one who so pompously fancied himself the new de Tocqueville. He did it in The New York Times, explaining that BHL spoke of realities about which he, through gross, repeated generalizations, revealed his ignorance. Every 10 pages of clichés, Keillor writes in his review, BHL manages “to walk into a wall.”

It obviously takes much more than Keillor’s review to take down this white-shirted thinker who ceaselessly rides spirited new drivel in order to end up grazing, as hurriedly as possible, in the meadow of ludicrous conclusions.

In his latest book, “La Guerre sans l’aimer,” BHL imagines himself as one of the main leaders of the Arab Spring uprisings and, in particular, of the Libyan revolution. Through this jumble, we encounter Alain Delon, Nicolas Sarkozy and broad areas in the infatuated life of this philosopher with a chauffeur who, this time, fancies himself as André Malraux.

If pretension had its world championships, BHL would immediately be eliminated from them on grounds of doping.

But back to Keillor, in his mythical Prairie Home Companion show. Musicians of all kinds come on it including, on occasion, Quebecers. Keillor himself sings on it, marvelously well. One can also hear, in addition to the news from Lake Wobegon, brilliant radio theater of the kind that has not existed here for decades.

It must be said that, on the airwaves of NPR, intelligence and talent often meet. Even a program devoted to the automobile, Car Talk, presented in the guise of a simple hotline run by two hilarious brothers, manages to bring up the whole play of complex relations that our American societies maintain with the automobile. What’s more, Car Talk is interspersed with unexpected mathematical games that one will not find elsewhere any time soon — certainly not, in any case, in the annual pages of the Car Guide.

I could also underscore that this American public radio offers a daily rebroadcast of the international news as seen by the BBC. To think a bit about anything other than the usual refrains — Pauline Marois’ crumbling concrete, Harper’s monarchist celebrations, Star Academy — let’s just say that it’s not bad.

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But why do I speak to you about National Public Radio? Because it is, as might be expected, the station where our southern neighbors speak ever more often about books.

But this week, in the Boston Phoenix, they showed that, even in this rather exceptional radio, when it comes to literature, women are relegated far behind men. There is less chance that a book will be talked about there if it is written by a woman.

For 70 percent of the interviews done on NPR, they speak about books written by men. Moreover, these men are sometimes interviewed on more than one of the station’s programs, while only one woman was treated to a second interview.

A conspiracy? No. A system. An old system that is found everywhere.

Last year, another similar study had already shown that it was the same at The New York Times: Concerning the number of critics, men are widely favored.

Does this not translate into a reality of publishing itself? Of the approximately 300 novels published annually by the major American houses — Simon and Schuster, MacMillan, Random House, Hachette, Penguin — about 60 percent are the work of men, while their readers are primarily women.

In short, the written press, like the electronic media, at least in the U.S., speaks more about male than female writers.

Is it different here? Without a doubt, no.

So, an editor named Furia Francese is republishing, it seems, John Berger’s brilliant classic, “Ways of Seeing,” translated under the title “Voir le voir.” Painter, art critic and novelist, Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972. In “Ways of Seeing,” which was originally a television series, he showed, among other things, and in his brilliant style, what place women occupy in museums. Guess what? He noted that the place given to women in these institutions was essentially as models for the artists’ paintings.

The more things change, the more they are alike?