I read recently about toxic bread in a sleepy French village, about mass hallucinations and the newly revealed hypothesis that the CIA was responsible for covert LSD experiments. Apparently, the same thing might have happened in the subways of New York. And suddenly, so much is explained, especially as pertains to cockroach-squashing memories. [...]

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I have a good excuse to spare you my blathery scrawl about the show-stopping beauty in this story -- the hot cats at Electric Literature have done so in a flashier way, and before you even tap the PLAY button on your baubly mp3 players, you ought to watch this:

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Sometimes I think you haven't lived until you've been given the shoulder by a drunken horse in a bar. Other times I think the very stuff of life happens from being the drunken horse in a bar. But usually, it has to do with neither of these things, and I'm fairly certain that none of it would be worth the slightest damn if there was no Queneau to neigh by.

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The other day I was walking through a blistering, blustery, blinding-white below-zero snowstorm, cursing the day I decided not to live on a Caribbean island, and doubly cursing the day I decided not to be born with antifreeze for blood. Because if I had been born with antifreeze for blood, I'd probably have other alien characteristics as well, such as the ability to launch an anvil from my hand that I could drop on the head of the person walking in the snowstorm next to me when that person proclaimed: "at last! This is what January is SUPPOSED to be like."

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So, I know very little about the author of tonight's story. He has no Wikipedia page in any language that I can gather, one used copy of an out-of-print collection of stories available in English (that I can cursorily find, anyhow), and a slight dusting of a presence in literary anthologies, including one in which I dusted off this. In fact, the only thing I'm certain of regarding tonight's author is that I really ought to attempt to learn basic Greek pronunciation if I'm going to crack at anything like this again.

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Oh, aren't we lucky!? A double-bluffed, double-dipped, double-headed dose of Isaac Babel. When you've had a listen here and discover that you're still running low on your recommended daily serving of Babel, you might head here to find a new recording of an old reading of another one.

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I can think of nothing more apt for the rounding-out of a year than a fleeting little fable on outplaying inevitability. If you're anything like me, Inevitability is one collector you've managed to send off-course at least once this year, and that itself is cause for champagne. Happy New Decade to all, but especially to those who continue to believe relentlessly in the potential of literature.

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There was a time when I was little (and I was so cute, and so little!) when I wanted to be Jane Bowles. I was obsessed with the puppet show, unhealthily so, though thinking back now, I can't think of any self-respecting adult who'd have introduced such a cute little thing to it.

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I'm more than a little eager to introduce this bit of Jean Stafford-- in fact, the last time I was this eager, I was about to jump out of an airplane, an activity I was undertaking using age-faked identification, which was, to the best of my memory, the only time I've ever vomited directly onto the feet of an airplane pilot (the pilot then said this wasn't the first time his feet had taken ablutions this way). And wait, I don't mean to conflate Jean Stafford with my own underage retching.

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My friends, a confession: I am a sucker. Little stray kittens and musty books and vegetably steamed dumplings.... these things were basically made for me. And stories like this belong on the list of things for which I'm a true sucker, and by "like this" I don't necessarily mean Austrian (though I don't mean "decidedly not Austrian" either). And I don't necessarily mean the sort of story that plucks your arteries and uses them to serenade you corrido-style. Although, again, I don't have anything against that either....

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For those of you who will not be spending the weekend dressed scandalously and behaving just as badly, or scaring young children, or throwing personal hygiene product in the trees of your enemies, ...

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It was recommended some time ago by a guy named Alex that I read the entire four-story cycle of The Rajah's Diamond, and it is a request I'll perhaps fill someday. I'm in the throes of a mini Stevenson obsession right now, so it seems the proper and selfish thing to do. But for now, I wanted to warn you that as an aperitif, what I'm offering here is, in fact, the last story in the cycle.

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It's probably one of the better things in life -- right up there with creative breakthroughs and lasting love and the slurp of streetside oysters -- to have one's hat tipped to new and great authors. In my case, it doesn't happen often, because I'm finicky and discriminating with my own tastes, or as others have said, snotty. Some of my closest friends, in fact, have sworn never again to share enthusiasm of their own discoveries, for fear of my response. I'm not proud of this....

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So I have this tendency, as you may have noticed, to take a sharp left at matters of personal divulgences, which is a difficult thing to pull off today, given the severity and somber-ity of a story like this one. But so, okay, here you go, three very revealing facts about my own self to accompany a story of introspect and plaintivity and other words existent and non-:

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Can I tell you something about my speculative fiction habits? Of course I can-- this my barroom restroom wall and the red marker's in my slimy mitt. Here's the thing: I just love stories about sentient animals. I can't get enough of talking dogs or super-intelligent rats or telekinetic polar bears-- this is the stuff of unconditional love.

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Well, I've been reading some unavoidable news about Death Panels and baby killing nazi zombies terrorizing in the Norwegian mountains and all sorts of incessant catfighty nastiness which I suppose our world can take, given that it's really all pretty hopeless, when confronted by the threat of health care. Or zombies.

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The other day I was lying in the woods, on a hammock on a mountaintop, reading aloud to young people, and wondered, for a second, why there was no professional job market for reading aloud on hammocks to young people, why there isn’t a real market demand for just such a role and why imagined [...]

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Oh ladies! Oh men and oh boys and girls, the sexiest man alive is BACK. Patrick has been threatening to start up Patrick's Bedtime Story Podcast, and with a voice this smooth, he might have to do it, much as I'd miss his occasional guest posts here. I'll warn you that there's an outburst of laughter in the middle of this that I didn't have the heart to cut out, and also that he does a killer bird caw, and that Olla's voice is a little on the saccharinely fey side. It's that good.

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Breece D'J Pancake was brought to my attention only a couple of years ago, one of those writers who didn't leave a whole lot left behind for us to gluttonously swallow, and one who was willing to grab the short story by the balls of its form and steer it where he wanted. In his forward to the collection of Pancake's stories, James Alan McPherson quotes from a letter he received from Pancake:

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I'm so excited about Bloomsday that I'm sharing the love a day early this year. In fact, I was so excited that I almost went ahead and read all the stories from Dubliners that I haven't yet done for you, but then it hit me that I'd have to move forward next year with my plan to do Ulysses in its entirety. And, well, I don't know if I have the pipes for that yet. And I don't know if you have the perseverance to listen to me indulge the Joyce itch.

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Twice now I've sat down to read something from Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales , and twice when pawing through for a good story, I've ended up spending hours re-reading the stories in here, to the point of distracted negligence, but to the point of great self-satisfaction nevertheless. One day I'll just relent and read them all to you, but that'd be a big project, and if you're anything like me, you're already running on the fumes of big projects. ...

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Okay, okay, you all keep asking for me to read writers you know, and I keep dipping into the well of obscurity to pick up writers you've never heard of. I know! I'll read the writers you know, maybe, but you have to tell me which ones you want to hear. And until you do, I'm just going to continue to flip over rocks and turn up amazing archeoliterary pearls like this. Do you know this story? Probably not. Should you listen anyway? Yes, if you want your socks knocked right off your feet.

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It's always a little weird to me to read a sports story, with idioms like "burning one in" that are just so far removed from my patois that I can barely even get my mouth to go in that direction. And it's equally odd to try and project teenage boy-speak, because it's been quite a while since I've taken an interest in the mannerisms of teenage boys. But it's springtime, and nothing's more appropriate than boys and baseball. So here's a little bit of both, no matter how much "burning one in" seems like the last thing you want a teenage boy to do.

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Boy, I sure am all kinds of flushed with the Scandinavs these days. Maybe it's my compassion for others plying their way through long cold winters, or maybe it's my assertion that gravlaks is a flawless food, or maybe it's just what they're willing to pay for a beer is a most resonant sacrifice. Or maybe they're just loaded with great writers. But if you had to lay a fresh twenty on what countries would sit atop Miette's Trove of Literary Masters (and god knows you should let me in on such a bet were you to place one) you'd win big by betting all on Nordic.

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Tonight’s story came from one of several boxes of books that were recently given to me by a stranger, someone apparently vying for the title of Miette’s Best Friend. And as I mention when reading tonight’s story, this alone makes today one of the best days anybody’s had, in a good long while (if [...]

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This is on the lighter end of Horacio Quiroga’s stories, which (of those I’ve read) tend to have more to do with death and desolation than the streetcar indiscretions we’ve got here. But it’s March, and I’m springing forward and bringing you with me, merrily because there’s no unsightly wad of money in our [...]

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More Canadian Short Fiction? You damned well bet– just check the calendar. On that note, I’m starting to think Carol Shields herself is somewhat of a miracle. For starters, look at this, from an interview on Canada as a landscape for writers: “We?re not big on heroes, either. The concept of heroes is alien. [...]

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Canadian Short Fiction Month continues, as promised, with a story that seems obviously designed to be delivered from the lips straight to the ears. There’s so much beauty tucked away in here of the sort you wouldn’t necessarily see on the page, unless you read to yourself with one of the voices in your [...]

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If you’re reading this before listening to the podcast… and you know, I have no idea whether you read or listen first, or if you just read, or just listen, and find yourself lost on those rare occurrences where I can hold a thought long enough to prattle BOTH orally and epistolarily about it… but [...]

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I was sitting here eating little sugary hearts with terms of endearment printed on them. They’re pretty popular with the young people, and surely you must know them: cheap things, sort of disgusting in the way that totally fructosified food product is, but sort of terrific for the same reason. And besides, [...]

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I was talking to the resident genius here about false memories and the publishment thereof, when an idea emerged, an idea with such potential for industry salvation that there’s no choice but to document it here, in the interest of knowledge open-sourcing, or whatever. The idea involved all these made-up memoirs floating about these [...]

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Well, pilgrims. It’s that day once again when the poisoned blankets of history are celebrated with turkey and squash. And I want to get all excited with you about Delmore Schwartz, and rave a while about how you should be able to listen to the rhythm of his narrative with an almost painful [...]

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So it was decided that I needed a table, but in thinking about the sort of table I might need, for the purpose the table would serve, it was further decided that the table needed to have certain bench-like properties. A hybrid, as we say in these times. The problem is, as you may have [...]

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This was going to go up during Banned Books week, but then I got a nasty visit from Uncle Rhinovire, and then there was the trip to the Akvariet and then it hit me that neither a short story nor the oral presentation of one qualify, really, as a “Banned Book,” although for reasons that [...]

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As I noted in the whole wide verbal megillah setting up tonight’s reading, I’m taking great issue with the Wikipedia entry on tonight’s author. Here, again, is the first sentence, with my call to fix it: Jesse Hill Ford (December 28, 1928 – June 1, 1996) was an American writer of Southern literature who produced [...]

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But in order to be mad scientists, first we had to learn how to be normal scientists. It’s funny, imagining John Fahey sitting in a hotel rampantly scrawling. Not because he’s so otherwise voiceless, or should relegate his expressiveness to the steel-stringed style, or other reasons fascistic or idiotic. He’s just one of those [...]

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This story was brought to my attention a few months ago, making its way inbox-ward on the anniversorry of my trip down Amniotic Lane, timing not unintentional. Now, I would share with you my thoughts on why this was selected as a Birthday Story, but that would involve psychographic profiling of the sender’s right [...]

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So it’s summer right now, if you’re with me hemispherically. Although if you were to zoom in a little closer you’d see that in some places, we’re tying up that chapter, it’s cooling down, and that means it’s time to read you some Tove Jansson. Now, I was going to read you something [...]

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In the two days since first reading of tonight’s story, I’ve been deeply ensconced with this idea of show-and-tell, to the irrational (read: batshit) point of showing-and-telling the objects comprising the contents of my desk to the various beasts kicking about the place, or showing-and-telling one runty waterlogged piece of the garden to another. [...]

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A couplefew nights ago, catatonic with fatigue after a couple days of travel, I found just the right pace of entertainment watching my cat chase a furry little squeaker all around the place. My conscience wouldn’t let me object– it was nature’s way and the mouse deserved whatever was coming to it, after all… [...]

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During a trip by car I noticed a guy on the phone in a parking lot frantically trying to start his car, a kid really, a kid in trouble, just laying into the ignition while the engine was turning halfway over which indicated, to my limited capacity for automotive troubleshooting, that maybe his vehicle was [...]

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“But when it thinks, I feel like vomiting.” With these words, it is clear that if Nigel Dennis were still around I’d be his groupie. I’d start the FaceBook Club and make mashups on Youtube for him and disguise myself as an editor at Rolling Stone Magazine to obtain his personal email address, which I [...]

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Were I a listmaker, and perhaps I am, you would be the warm recipient of many reasons to be grateful when the internet goes for broke on Bloomsday. This list, were I to make one, would include the subcategories: FOR ME and FOR YOU. Topping the FOR YOU list, were such a thing [...]

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So I read in the news today about the Indonesian macaque monkeys who’ve learned to successfully catch fish, and how exciting this is for biology, and how it’s a living and breathing example of the adaptation of a species to its conditions and environment, and really it was all astonishing stuff to read. But [...]

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So, my "identity" was stolen recently. And not for the sake of sordid members-only internet sites or international travel or a weekend of Spitzering other scandalous activities that, if you're going to have your identity stolen, would constitute Theft in Style. No, my identity was used to buy clip art and stock photography and website services, which is about as exciting as cutting school to go and get a root canal, sneaking out of the house late at night to mow the lawn next door. You get the picture. So a personal note to identity thieves in training: when you're done with me, at least return me with a few heavy anecdotes and a thrilling punked-up haircut. OK?

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Fishing season began early this year for your Miette, with the streetside discovery of a freshly abandoned goldfish with wonky telescopic eyes, in its bowl and with a note reading: Free Fish! Please Give Steve Buscemi a good home. And of course I did. I found an exceptional home for him, a home where he’s [...]

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After a week of muscle-burning manual work and long long drives, some of us settle in with a nice cold beer. For others-- maybe like me, who's to say -- it takes more that that... way more, maybe, to relax muscles as sore as these and attempt to put together nerves which have been plucked to the bone. For that reason, perhaps it's best to just shut up and read (if you're me) or grab a beer and listen (if you're you) and maybe write the Pulitzer committee about considering a Podcasting category.

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All week I've been wanting to read this to you, waking up more excited than the trashman on the day-after-Christmas, and running into my.... uh... recording studio (read: three paces from the bed) to see if it's quiet enough...

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A saw a sign the other day while out on a drive, a sign that said this: Frost Heaves. And I almost had to stop and compose myself, because I was so deeply distressed by the fact that frost can't heave in private (and I'm not a histrionic sort of girl), and saddened that a frost's heave has to be announced clearly for any old asshole who happens to be driving by...

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The question that's been asked a few times of me now: why don't I read more African writers? Actually, it's been asked more than a few times... enough times, in fact, to warrant the sort of qualifier most accurately described as MANY.

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It's confusing, the name of tonight's author, right? I mean, the better known writer sharing this name didn't bother with a middle pseudonymous initial, and there's a slight tweak to the surname, but we readers would be none the wiser, push-to-shove, and would settle back with a cup of tea and upperclass accent.

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A mildly embarrassing problem when getting under way with tonight's story, confessed in full in these lines: when I first sat down to read it to you this evening, I got caught on a raft in a sea of lexical continental drift, and over and over I stammered out the title only to have it read "Roadsome Load." No kidding: again and again.

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As I lay writhing on my sickbed I was catching up on my milehigh stack of unread periodicals, and made my way to an article about one of the leading competitors for an upcoming race for a high position of public office in the country in which I'm living. Because, you know, there aren't many articles written about this, which is surprising, because from the sound of things, the race for this public office is not of no importance....

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A few days ago I was driving down the street behind a car which, as was warned by prominent display of rooftop sign, was being operated by a Student Driver... a sign which really wasn't necessary, given the stammering mid-intersection braking and sideview-mirror clipping taking place all the way down the road, and I had this great idea that it'd be a real public service - a true exercise of civic duty - if other drivers could collectively contribute to driving lessons, by driving like raving lunatics around students, just to get them on their toes and on the lookout.

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A message from the author of today's story: Do you ever wonder as you are reading a story, or hearing one, such as on a podcast, for example, what or whom has inspired a particular story? Picture this: imaginary "directions" or "instructions" for a story that the author creates-- after the story has been written--or told. Imagine that these "directives" led to this story--which in actuality they did not--well at least the author had no idea of any directives of any sort when the story came into being.

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Returning soon with a much-awaited all-new MBSP. Leaving you with a mightylong one to hold you till (the longest yet in one sitting, I think). For Dream, remembered always, and loved even longer.

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HEY, Internet, I want to tell you all about Earideas. Wow, that sounded a little snake-oily- let me try that again:

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I was thinking about the last story I read to you, and thinking it’d be nice if other events of this variety, the sort of events that are difficult to explain to small children, were similarly reimagined. And not just on a large scale, either. I’m talking about The Pulling of My Wisdom [...]

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I hope those of you celebrating All Things Autumnal are settling into it well, the roast fowl and the hot cacao and woodfire smoke for dessert, and, well, you know the picture I'm aiming for here. It does wonders to the general countenance, I think:

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I read in the news yesterday that television writers here in the U.S. have gone on strike, and that because of the strike, everybody's arms are collectively thrown up in a great wide panic, because nobody knows what's going to happen on Charmed and because there's nobody to script the next great Wardrobe Malfunction, and this sounds like very bad news indeed and I was sorry to read it.

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At times during my podcastressing career, I have stumbled upon authors about whom I know very little, and have been fortunate to find that you, resourceful mariners of the Internet's belly, have proven yourselves well worth your collective avoirdupois in gold and other fine metals, and for that, I thank you.

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Andrea was kind enough to suggest and supply a sufficiently Halloweeny bit of ghoulishness to reconcile the setback of temporary lack of access to mine own troves. In the hopes of exponentially increasing the sympathy factor, let it be known that in addition to being without books, the chief operating offices of Miette's bedtime have been largely internet-free for the past weeks, in what would, under normal circumstances,

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While settling in and to avoid the appearance of mothballs, here's another Mansfield. And while this isn't the first time we've rocked her boat, she's a voice so nice I'll read her unspliced.

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Last night, I was thinking of what to write to you today while starting to doze off just prior to handing over the wheel. I woke up with one of those Holy Mother I'm Dozing Off kind of starts, and, as I was now more alert than usual during this leg of the trip, I made the sad discovery that what I'd read as the Bikini Avenue Exit was actually something far more G-Rated, and significantly less scandalous.

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Herbert Goldstone, what are you going to tell me about him? Writes crazy sci-fi about thinking machines more human than man. This story in dozens of brilliant anthologia. Very little else to be found. The wiki draws a blank. This story is not a drop shy of Wondrous.

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A delivery truck pulled out in front of me the other day, freshly deflowered by a graffiti artist who chose to express him- or herself by relaying the following, in big blue caps: I LOVE SARAH, KINDA?

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Some days, as a podcastress, you find that it's about a billion and two degrees of sour sunshined degrees outside, measured by the scales of Daniel or Anders either/or, and while the last thing you feel like doing might involve heavy lifting dressed in black, the next to last thing, on days such as those, might involve trying to get discernible sound and meaning to emerge from your throat.

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Happy Bloomsday to you, and happy third Bloomsday podcast from your Miette, an event which many of you will remember is dear to me.

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Dearest listeners of the internet, I know. I've been gone. Many of you have pointed this out to me, though by the time I returned to read your pleas and queries, I was back, relieved of goneness, and racked with guilt over how abandoned you'd all been left, was at a loss at what I might read to redeem myself.

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A caveat for you listeners. Hell, a full-out warning: this is a long one, today's story, long and, dare I say it, a little dark, and not in the "change the bulb" sort of way. Which is just my way of saying to you:

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As a rule, yours (very) truly takes a big dollop of pleasure in knowing just a little something about the authors I'm reading to you. Where there are exceptions, they are serious exceptions, resuscitated from beyond the brink and leaving their snot in my mouth.

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Never having been one for bandwagonry (after all, the bumper's too high for me to jump, and I don't have much in the way of carnival skills from which is allegedly derived the phrase), but it can't be helped: if everybody and their thrice-removed step-great-uncle

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Riding the big train today and started to daydream, in the daydreamy style of reductive logic unique to the accompaniment of a train horn, the subject which was What I Might Read to the Internet Tonight.

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Given that Tonight's Story invokes the Mann Act, and given that the Mann Act is bar-none the best Congressional Act of 1910 (and I dare you to find a better one. I mean, Chuck Berry was charged with violating the Mann Act. Frank Lloyd Wright too.)

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What we’ve got going on here, for those assiduous enough to parse their eyes over these words (and I suspect that I’m not speaking about many of you, that most of you just download the listening bits, which is quite all right) — but for those of you reading, I thought I’d thank you with [...]

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At times, this little podcast of ours is thought of not unlike a nice helping of ice milk-- not bad for you, tasty even, in the right circumstances, but of questionable nutritional value. Not harmful, necessarily, but nothing that might be considered Useful For You. At then sometimes, someone will say otherwise, and that's not bad, usefulness.

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NOTA BENE This podcast is published with permission of the Guy Davenport estate. To further enjoy the works of Mr. Davenport, please see amazon.com or abebooks.

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Listening to this one earlier, I noticed something. A noise, behind the entire story, not unpleasant, entirely, but a nuisance, distracting, and not unfamiliar. And then it hits: The dog, oft noted in these recordings, had used the moments of storytelling to enjoy an early repast. And given the fact that a) the dog lacks lips

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Plenty of you (because I'm supposing you're all geniuses) are aware of the arguably unattributable (King Solomon? Buddha? Lincoln? Miette?) aphorism, idiom, and, notably, universally applicable phrase "This Too Shall Pass.

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While I suspect that some of you might be nursing a yen for happy wishful and firmly resolved pick-me-up for annus novus, be warned that it's not going to happen with today's story, with which you should prepared. If, on the other hand, you need a story in preparation for dirtying your hands or drinking too much, consider yourself In Luck.

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To offset or maybe just counterpoise the thin slice of news conveyed in the audio introduction to today's story, which, as has recently been pointed out to this podcastress, might be the most poetic science headline ever:

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In the interest of spitting a sluicy cobwebbed thread to tie together the conversations in and around this corner of the infoweb and its earbound counterpart, I wanted to offer up one more chance to allow our space to double as the hotbed of information on the social and biological activities of the Tree Squirrel, and bring some attention to our relationship with tree squirrels.

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Because nothing says Hither Holiday Season like the Kris Kringle of Krabby, and because as you will soon hear, your Miette has learnt that nothing says Hither Holidays like a Headcold, tonight's story speaks for its self.

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Nice title, right? In my efforts to knock your socks to obscurantist skies, I'm willing to offer a dollar to the first listener who can prove he or she already knows of this story (currently in the running (BY THE WAY) for Miette's Top Short Fiction Find of the Decade, and how's that for a reason to listen?). And how to prove this? I don't know.

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Today's is another story by an author of whom I know very little, which I've plucked from a collection of Big Guns German fiction including Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Hoffmansthall, Hermann Broch, ad krautium,

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But would you believe that I spent the last couple of weeks dedicated to trying mightily and hard to uncover the identity of tonight's author before hurling the fruits of these findings to splat on your walls. Maybe I spent the week after mired in self-pity at having failed you... failed YOU, the Internet, whom I adore.

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So, Ilf and Petrov met while working on a newspaper for railway workers, which is intriguing to me. For starters, where's the podcastresses' newspaper, and why have I not been invited to participate? My life's literary collaborator could be waiting there, slinging the pen on the audio-coding equivalent to pieces on socialism and coal hauling,

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Another Listener has asked whether I might be kind enough to share a few words about my reading process for aspiring podcasters and podcastresses. I am, of course, always glad to share secrets, although in this case I don't think there's anything illuminating about it. In typical sarcastresse fashion, I could just say that it's a matter of opening a book and opening a mouth.

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I know the great controvery of the Scarlet Ibis has bothered you, and I confess to great shame at using this controversy to draw attention away from the various corporate scandals, celebrity affairs, and political horrors that are sucking the steam off the almost pervasive media coverage known to some as HurstGate.

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A Listener (you know who you are) wrote to me recently requesting that I laugh hysterically for fifteen minutes into my microphone and post this as a short story for you. Now, while I agree that this would be a particularly amusing johncagey experiment, I have not, unfortunately, seen hyenaic laughter transcribed this way, [...]

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Does the title of today's story affect you in such a way that the person nearest you is now asking what you're sighing about? Or maybe you rolled your eyes so far to the side that you now have a stress headache and need to refocus before reading the rest of this blurb? (If so, please, take a moment.

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There is a bottling facility close to where I live, and while "bottling facility" might look like elusive high-security stuff to the random passerby, between you and I, it's best described as a warehouse for bottled beers.

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If this podcast was Miette's Themetime Story Podcast, the theme of today's story might be 'coming-of-age,' or it might be 'how to make beans in Egypt,' or maybe it's 'reverence,' or perhaps it might be nothing more than 'how to charm the socks right off of both feet of Miette.' Outstanding questions, answers, and requests to come, but this first for evident reasons.

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Because I am a good, supportive, helpful sort, I took a friend recently to purchase a new pair of running trainers. Which isn't a very exciting way to begin a pre-podcastal anecdote, but don't go away yet! You see, it wasn't at all what I'd come to expect from my Friendly Local Sneaker Salesperson. No!

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As you know, there's not much room on these pages for political soapboxing, both because there are already plenty of internet playgrounds for that sort of thing, and because I'd rather freestyle on such endlessly gripping topics as the weather or this podcast's sound quality. However. I have an opinion that must be voiced.

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Today's bedtime story has been requested by Patrick (as for the O'Connor, I will do, yes, but for now, have you heard this one?), and I looked all over town but couldn't find a more appropriate selection for today, so you should all join me now in thanking him.

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My friends and compeers and heroes at Librivox are celebrating their first birthday right now, and so I felt it necessary to add my kudos to their basic first-year achivements:

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A question too often asked of me: how is a specific story or specific author on a specific day selected? Rather than answer the question directly (because what's the use of renting one's own outdoor space if not to desultorily blather around or plant cobwebbish morning glories around it?), I thought I would instead give you insight into the metrics, processes, and rationale behind today's selection. Steel yourselves:

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The plot of tonight's story involves a gaggle of young children who go to stay with their frail old grandmother, and who, more or less, are swallowed up by a house that I imagine to be uniformly mothballish and denture-gluey in nature. And I'm disclosing this to you now not so that I might spoil it for you (because I'm sure you're all remarkably brilliant listeners who are after more than rote high-concept plot anyhow), BUT!

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For your bonus bedtime track this week, I've decided to double up on (I suppose?) relative abstrusity, author-wise. But this time, I'm in the fortunate position of already knowing and loving and potentially endlessly blathering about today's subject, to prevent us all from hitting the high mile dudgeons ove

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Is there anybody out there who has a cure for acute compulsion? The thought had entered my mind that I had very little knowledge of tonight's author, and that, further, I was quite curious to know what he looked like. And, given the tendency toward googlification of the nubs of my fingers, this curiosity was one that I felt compelled to satisfy.

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Okay, adventure seekers, listen up! For reasons that need not be enumerated here, I should warn you that tonight's story was recorded in a hushed whisper, late at night, and I didn't dare play it back to sample the condign commission of my own bedtime story. In other words, it was read quietly and is being posted blindly.

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In general, I don't like to use these few pre-sound-bytes of Web page space to be topical for reasons that I hope are obvious (I'm not here to depress you), but I can't help but make note of the talking chimps who've gabbed their way back to the news. Now, there are plenty of questions here for an autodidactic but still dilettantish (honestly pedestrian) linguist who moonlights as podcastresse--

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Allow me now to guide you most gently out of the first week of July: those of you in America, lie on your side and listen quietly, finding pause only to burp out the last taste of your hotdogmatic overindulgences. Just focus on the voice -- the beer is two days old and will make its way to the outer side of your pores eventually, I promise -- and let me repeat -- you are NOT going to always feel this way.

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WhoAm asks whether Flannery O'Connor can be expected soon. Now, I'd thought of saving O'Connor for a while, for obvious (or perhaps not-so-much-so) reasons: the desire to wait until my face gets older and wrinkles become a more permanent part of its own social fabric, or maybe I've wanted to save her for the debut of the sequel to Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast.

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A Warning: it's that time of year where, given the current coordinates of yrs (truly!), you may be exposed to endless nattering about heat exhaust and revelation of podcasts recorded in ice-cubey bathtubs and a relentless boycott of any outergarment. And I hope you will consider this a proper warning because I will, as desperation sets in, become especially doting to those of you in Nordic states, at the poles, or even in climate controlled golf carts (solar-powered of course), I might beg, or quickly become your best friend.

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When we compare tonight's with last year's Bloomsday podcast, just t' pose a friendly comparison, we see an almost incredible improvement in sound quality, due either to a highly paid audio engineer or a reluctant purchase of a piece of equipment.

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Have waited nearly a year to read Hardy on his birthday, because I strongly suspect that Hardy’s just the sort of guy who should be birthdayishly feted, and in neither in an ironic nor a pointy-paper-hat way. I missed his birthday, as it happens, but not by long… and actually, missing it seems appropriately [...]

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Yes, I've missed you too and thanks for the well wishes, and yes, you're right: it would have been RAD to podcast from a women's prison passing the mic around my circle of hardened women criminals and reading while taking turns with the tattoo needle. Maybe next time.

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Perhaps you might use Miette's short sabbatical to catch up on some of the classics that you might have missed the first time around.

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True to form here's a nice short one to balance out the more time-demanding Gogol from last time. And let me add that just because it's short doesn't mean it's not gruesome, contentious, vitriolic, or even a little caustic, because when lagged by the potentate of a jet, that's all you want waiting for you at home:

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Ahh, so you've noticed that I still hadn't read any Gogol, despite a-hundred-some readings including enough of a Russian contingency to keep a stronghold on the world weight-lifting championships for the next few centuries, and despite a story by an Italian all about Gogol, in its own peculiar way.

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I'm going to keep this one short, because you really ought to be phoning your mothers right about now. And tidying your rooms. And standing up straight. And not talking with your mouths full. And not wasting your money on chewing gum and nosejobs. And not making that face, unless you want it to get stuck that way.

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Do you know about Ben Hecht? I only ask because a lot of people don't, and because as a responsible Purveyor of Fine Information I ought to clue you in, and in the interest of living up to such, I should tell you that Ben Hecht was best known to many as a screenwriter, that the same mind is to be held accountable (in some ways) for Hitchcock's Notorious, His Girl Friday, Gone with the Wind, and Scarface, although largely in an uncredited stop-the-presses-who-can-fix-this capacity.

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Maybe I'm obsessing a little over the idea of tissue cultures, but I can't help it - it's my personality. But tissue culture and bedtime stories, of course! It takes me back to when I first discovered I could put the -expensive- mustard on my tofupups: prior to the discovery, it seems inconceivable, then suddenly nothing short of self-evident.

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There might be times when you're reading the newspaper and you sit up straight and say to yourself something exuberantly monologic, such as "HOLD THE PHONE, this is ACTUAL news, I need to remember where I was when I read this, which is RIGHT HERE" and then you take a mental inventory and make sure that twenty or thirty years from now, you'll remember?

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We all have those odd things that happen to us more often than we might owe to nature or coincidence. Some people find themselves on their fourth marriage to a fourth guy named Mario*; it happens. For me, that thing is the ceilings. In my apartments. That seem to have a difficult time staying above my head.

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A fable! About thieves and liars and moonlit wishes, fair ladies, conjurations and broken bones. Not your mother's fable-- no talking animals here. (This, a short entry for the same reason as short fable, which I'd post invisibly if you could read my mind, or at least my file structure, and know where to find it. I'm supposed to be in bed!)

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I know that I should be wishing some of you happy Passover, others happy Easter, others the goodliest of Fridays. But more importantly, more important than sweet Haroseth and pastel eggs and chocolate covered matzoh shaped as salty rabbits, let us not forget today's holiday, the one hundredth anniversary of Samuel Beckett's birth, which is deserving of thrice-leavened gilded eggshells.

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I packaged up, compressed, and uploaded today's episode before discovering that I had inadvertently mentioned the brand name of a popular consumer product in the few introductory seconds before the story starts, so I thought it might be wise for me to insert a little disclaimer, for the sake of my legal hide. Here goes:

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From over here, Evie says: I would like to recommend "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It has to be my favorite short story... no matter how many times I read it it still gives me the chills!

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When you listen today, I will disclaim now, you will hear a boxing story. Not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood boxing story, or the other girlie fight boxing story, or the what's-his-brutish-name-from-New-Zealand-with-the-attitude, not that one either.

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Don’t say I didn’t warn you about today’s story, because admittedly, I didn’t warn you yet, but I’m about to: it’s a scary one. Frightful! It might cause you to go to sleep with all the lights on, and even then, you might suffer nightmares. You might find yourself short of breath, [...]

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I have to tell you about a brilliant little moment that happened today. I was on a train, at an hour in which far too many people take the train, leaving us all sardinically resentful of one another's smells, oversized totebags, and inter-seasonal viruses. This was, or would have been, evidenced by an isolated high-pitched sneeze from the far end of the car, -except- that from the far side of the other end, someone yelled out a brazen "bless you!"

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I beg and implore you, dear listener: don?t be misled by the title of today?s podcast. Today?s story features neither the lovely Ms Farrow in her prime ?nor- jokes about Hasidim, dental extractions, or polygamy. However, if you can recommend a story about any or all of these subjects, a cookie and a song for you.

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In the plot of today's story, you will find mentioned a real-world conversational device that I can't help but love, in a guiltily pleasuristic sort of way. I'm not sure what to call it, though I'm sure the modern linguists have had their way with it.

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I've just spent the past hour editing down today's podcast while witnessing the almost compulsive bathing, brushing, trimming, grooming, and otherwise torturing my beast by someone who claims to enjoy this sort of thing.

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Ow. It hurts to type this right now, and I'm not talking about the endless afflictions of emotional pain. This is not something I'm especially proud of, no way, but to be entirely honest with you, because I like you: a little too much had been drunk last night (and I'm not talking about water), by me.

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Yes, I have mighty big arms to give myself such a massive self-congratulatory bearhug, but, you know, I'm entitled, it's my special day. And so, here are a couple of things I am considering for my next one hundred podcasts: -- podcast in Estonian -- serialise a novel (eh, a short one)

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I began scheming for the one hundredth podcast several weeks ago, thinking that I'd gather all the voices that were most important to me, personally and podcastionally, share the wealth and spread the love, and, let's be honest, go soak on a beach in a land where all the drinks are pink, while all my friends hang out in the trenches of pops and hisses.

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Chances are, you're going to listen to today's podcast and think: "That's it?" Or "maybe the audio file got cut off... I'm missing half the story!" Or "Miette's such a lazy snot to pick such a short story." But the truth is: I am lazy, it's true, but that's never stopped me in the past from reading much longer pieces, you know this! However, the next one, the very special one, is going to be among the longest ever podcasted, and I wanted to make sure you were ready and well-rested for it.

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There's this new higher-than-hightech device that's now mine, intended to make my podcasts sound better for you, and while I'm not sure of its success rate at doing so, I do know that it's got every kind of tech-sounding hypermegaphonics that should make it crisper than a blade of grass blowing in the wind in Surround Sound (do you know they really make those noises using cabbages!

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So sport seems to be in the air these days. There's something going on tonight involving hundreds of pounds of helmets and costumery, complete with grandiose spectacle and and pretend warriors, and I'm told this has nothing to do with Wagner. We'll see. And the Internet tells me the Olympics are coming up soon, though I thought we just finished with one of them? And let us not forget a tiny little event called the World Cup...

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There are a few things that leave you so exhilarated, enchanted with simultaneous possession and dispossession, blown away punch-in-the-belly style by battles of bliss and bewilderment. It is these moments, precious listeners, that are boiling the bean this eve. Podcasters and/or storytellers among you might be familiar with the feeling from the discovery of a new story,

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Don't let the title of tonight's bedtime story deceive you... this is actually an affair of considerable importance. Consider, for example, the success that is XBox. Or the X-Men. Or X-Treme Sports, for that matters. And the importance of X as a roman numeral. Or X as a universal icon of the unknown.

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The other day, I dropped off my laundry on my way to work as I do sometimes (because some things you really should leave to the professionals). This was a different laundrette, one that stays open a half hour later, because sometimes I've been unfortunate enough to miss the closing due to a late night at the office,

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Questions That Have Been Asked, at Varying Levels of Frequency, of Miette and Her Podcast: How did this get started?

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A riddle: What could possibly be better than an unexpected new book of short fiction turning up in your mailbox? The answer: When that new book includes short fiction from Zamiatin, Zweig, Zantner, and Zugsmith.

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A few blocks down from my apartment is a utility pole, and on that utility pole someone has graffitoed the following in black marker: "Romanse [sic] is the death of enlightenment"

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The other day, I broke from my own morning convention and fetched my AM coffee from a coffee chain whose name shall not be uttered on this page. It was quite likely the simplest order the coffee-servicer had fulfilled that day: a no-frills “medium coffee,” with nothing even vaguely representing an “-ino” suffix, [...]

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8 of Miette's 2006 Predictions for the New Year: -- I will really really do all those things I meant to do in 2005, including those things in 2005 I was really really going to do after neglecting in 2004. -- Ditto 2003. -- When thinking of these podcasts, I'll follow at least three of the Dalai Lama's instructions, and be better off for it. (Though that one about silence; I'm doubting I can do much with that one.)

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All week I've been in the nether regions, the sticks, the country, the bucolic boonies, the hinterregions of the backwoods, fretting over how much I'd have to read to you upon my return, how many hours I'd have to try my larynx to make it up to you, just how many stories I'd have to penitently tell.

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Not necessarily a festive mistletoe-and-chestnut sort of story, thus, but for those in need, want, or glimmering hope of a holiday story, this unpodcasted tale from the vaults should suffice. Happy days, holly and otherwise!

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There's a common Yoruban idiom, "oruko lonro ni," which means, more or less, that your name affects your actions, defines your character, determines your destiny. For instance, if you're named Lady, you're going to end up exceptionally feminine. If your parents were brazen enough to name you Klepto, you might find yourself in a spot of trouble.

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What else is a podcastress to do when a great writer dies? Sheckley wrote hundreds of exceptional stories, hundreds, and though I wouldn't rate this one his best (I See a Man Sitting in a Chair, and the Chair is Biting His Leg rates high on my list, and very few of life's experiences top a first glance at Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (and I'm only just barely exaggerating)).

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This morning, as with all mornings, I took She Who Must Bark At The Most Inconvenient Times on an early morning walk, which, given the several feet of snow on the ground (read: a few inches), was less an "early morning walk" than a "mighty difficult time staying afoot for the bipedal member of the walking party, as the bipedal-squared one trounced happily and darted into snowbanks and tried her best to cause the amputation of the fingers on my icicly leash-bearing hand."

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I know, I know. It's morning. Nowhere near your bedtime. You listen now and get all confused, expecting a glass of warm milk and sugarplum dreams, only to discover it's ten in the morning and you've got to drag yourself to work. It's just, well, Out Of The Ordinary that I'd be sending a story now. But Boris Vian.

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I've had a long meeting with myself just now, myself, who has been thinking for months that I ought to read Mann for you. After all, Mann is nothing if not the one empty corner in the squathouse of growing up, and although my romance with Mann ended years ago, I can still smell him at the thought... you know how it is. And so, month after month, I look at his stories, and I Just. Don't. Know.

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Darling Listeners Thought Id try an experiment and read something that was obviously designed to be read on the page and not delivered aloud bedtimestorily. But after that bit in Bookforum I'm just so v. curious how all these things sound you see, goodness how sad, and you'll just have to indulge me.

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For years, the only time I've ever been the slightest bit jealous of my carnivorous confreres has been in those moments after a Thanksgiving feast, watching them settle into the tryptofanatical haze of blissful near-slumber. The rest of the year I laud my healthful eating habits, but in those moments while sitting sprightly and alert at attention after the traditional Overindulgence In Side Dishes that defines the plight of non-flesheaters at such feasts,

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If Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast was a CD**, today's would be the secret bonus track hidden at the very end. If this was called Miette's Bedtime Story TV Miniseries, today's would be the Exciting Second Half that you'd be Staying Tuned for, except without the special effects. If it was Miette's Bedtime Story Green Salad, this would be the succulent bite of endive to Friday's sweet pear.

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Okay, someone was a little smartasinine requesting this one, for reasons that most of you will never know, given that this is not one of those soundbiting autobiographic shows and hence most of you don't know that my real name is, in fact, Jemima, and I, too, paid my way through school with whiskey. Curious, that.

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I dreamt last night that I made a big squash soup for an even bigger party, a party full of people from the past-- people I hadn't seen in years and didn't care about when I did see them. I was nervous; it was a recipe I hadn't tried before and I'd decided after a torturous dreamlike decisionmaking process to add a dash of some sort of smuggled mutant super-habanero sauce to the stuff.

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If I could read your mind (and how do you know I can't???), after the first few seconds listening to this podcast I'll bet your mind would say something like this: "I know she said she was sick, but a strepped throat doesn't do that to a voice!"

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Well, I didn't think I'd pull this off. A particularly invidious houseguest in the form of streptococcal has left my coccyx surprisingly unscatched, but the pharynx, well, I don't recall gargling with rusted staples after my razorblade dinner, but gosh it hurts in there. And so here I sit, throatily challenged to forego my Saturday podcast, but, compulsive as I am, couldn't stand the thought.

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A confession: I've been loath to podcast Kafka, only because I wouldn't know which one would be podcastable, which is to say Kafkaesque enough to be delivered storyhour-style, but not so Kafkaesque as to leave listeners beating themselves with the oars used to row the macabre waters of their own tears. You know, that sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, I love that sort of thing.

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Like Miette? Love Jack London? Not getting enough of either today? Don't fear, Librivox is here.

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Last night, I did something I thought I'd never do. I went dancing. And not seated dive-barstool dancing when your picks come up on the jukebox, or late-night loftparty dancing, but proper dancing, at a Dance Club.

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Okay, for those who found the new audio setup too sophisticated (and I agree, to an extent; this is proudly a lowest-of-the-no fi podcast experience, but everyone needs to be heard, you know), a compromise: I adjusted the sound software, I -think- to pick up more room noise, to let it breathe. Breathing, in podcasts, is important.

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Remember the early days, when this was entirely scrappy, when you sometimes heard the dog or the bus passing by or the pins drop (for pins do drop in my house of chaos) more than you heard the reading? Those were the days, eh? Then, a couple of months ago, we upgraded the microphone and suddenly, you heard the voice. Clearer. At that was it, I'd promised myself.

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There are times when even the most prepared podcasting events turn to podcatastrophe, when even the most professional podcastress forgets to turn off the phone for a reading, when the most sedulous podcaster leaves pages stuck together entirely underestimates the length of time spent podcasting, when the most meticulous discovers halfway through that the hard drive is filled up with newly downloaded Restoration Comedy with no room for the podcast file, or that Suddenly Traffic Has Taken Off and Who's Going To Pay For This?!

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It's been a long week Au Pays De Miette, signified, I suppose, by the fact that we've gone quite a few days without a new podcast. And to complicate things, I've just posted a new one which, like the Fante or the Murdoch or the Dostoevsky, is close to my cuffs.

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I wonder if there's anybody who can read into a podcastophone and take dictation of his or her inner monologue simultaneously. I can't, much to my own absolute dismay. If I could, the past half hour would have been written up this way:

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I dreamt last night that I was a reluctant part of some Truman Showy podcasting reality television show, forced to read literature into one of those cellphone hands-free microphones round-the-clock from a text that was projected onto the insides of my eyelids, with the occasional pauses in my reading at chapter breaks to sip coffee or talk to people or, you know, to breathe and stuff.

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A secret: Endurance Reading is nothing new for Miette. She's participated in marathon readings of epic Greek poetry, she stays up on Bloomsday and reads along, she reads you Dostoevsky five straight nights, no sweat off her permanently furrowed brow, not your Miette, no how.

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On a walk this afternoon, I spotted curbside an abandoned 1972 volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume 4 (BOTHA TO CARTHAGE!!) which somehow mysteriously made its way from its landfill destiny to my grubby paw and later, to a treasured position on my mantle (or my world's equivalent of a mantle... equally special. Mantleworthy)

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Quite possibly the quietest, most listless, bottomless podcast of Kerouac you've ever experienced, this. Possibly? Quite possibly. But not without due charm on its own, and intent at that! For listen: do you hear the passing buses in the background, the motorcycles, the car horns, the screaming pedestrians?

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Oh boy, oh boy, guess who's excited about tonight's podcast? It's me, Miette-- I'm excited, silly listener. You see, in the insuppressible excitement of putting books in boxes for an upcoming move, I found, surprisingly dust-free and hidden behind a small stack, a volume of Rilke prose!

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MEMORANDUM To: fair listeners From: Miette Re: the random audible aspiration to be heard in this podcast

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Presenting the first somniloquent entry to this Our Podcast, and if only I were kidding! Regular aural peekers might know Miette as a determined and faithful insomniac, and I wouldn't dare disappoint. Upon waking this morning I found...

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This longish-short comedo-tragic bit just about covers everything. And for those things not covered in the "just about" disclaimer, you might have fun over a few spare moments with this Barth reference. Or if you don't, well, I sure did, and do I need further reason to P'cast?

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Um, there must be some mistake, I think. Climate Change means that weather systems need to be... well... not the same muggy filthy smoggy dogbreath-upon-shoulders-every-time-you-step-outside. I accept, grudgingly, the current sorry state of the skies, but really: it's going to change, right? Some day?

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Carrying on with the recurring theme of Is It Possible That It's Really This Hot?, we go now to Norway, lovely Norway, land of good design, natural air conditioning in August, symbolist screaming, gabbling Heddas, and oh yes, have I mentioned it's probably not ninety degrees there right now?

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Another short one for another short day, and the beauty here should be evident: how lovely it would be if our physical presences existed as waves of sound, if physical injury were a momentary blip of discord, if your emotional duress a note hit flat, if inner harmony was literal. Yea, that's the stuff.

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On occasion, another excruciatingly bleak day will end with a moderately edifying insignia etched onto your nightcap, and on those occasions, you want nothing more than to return home to tranquility and a nice short harmless podcast. And sometimes, sometimes even on those occasions, your environs just won't comply.

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Too. Hot. To. Type. But I leave you a nice. Long. One. Triviatum: This from a college short story anthology, with notations, footnotes, the works. There's one worth noting-- when the doctor reveals his Christian name, 'Trifon,' we see footnote #10, which reads:

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I don't know much about where you are, but where I am, I can tell you a thing or two about the heat right now. The thing being: it's hot. Mighty hot. The sort of hot where you pile your hair up off your neck and sit in your skivs and wish you possessed a Homer Simpson gracelessness that might allow you to put a floatie, a few cans of beer, and a thousand ice cubes in your bathtub.

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If anybody ever asks you if you're a happy prince or a sparrow, you should be prepared with an answer: I tell you now, you never know when it might be asked of you. And it might. To prepare you for such a day is today's podcast, and in helping you answer this question, it should now be obvious which I am.

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In reality, we also are fallen folks, and, so far as I can see, very deeply fallen into the abyss of self-sufficiency and the conviction of our own superiority. But enough of this. It is all as old as the hills--so old that it is a shame to speak of it. Very old indeed--yes, that's what it is! Ahh, Maksim Gorky, Maxim Gorky, Maksim Gor'kii, Maxim Gorkii, Maksim Gorki, he'll always be Aleksei Peshkov to me.

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For those not out barbecuing or picnicking or watching cosmic collisions or stealing carbide:

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Happy 49th Podcast! The 49th is, of course, a notable one: it's our last perfect square until 64, and even then, both digits won't also be perfect squares. And, of course, it's the last podcast of our extended youth together; next time I post, we shall be plainly geriatric.

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Is there anything, and I mean anything, italics and all, better than a good fortuitous bookend to a good podcast? Not only does this story have one of the best first lines of all stories ("It was the middle of August and Myers was between lives," that's right, shaazam!), but the 9:54 bus, usually a harbinger of noisome bus distraction to many a clear podcast, passes just at the last line, in perfect atmospheric equanimity.

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This may be one you remember from your schooldays, maybe one that made you a liberal, or a feminist, or a prolifer, prochoicer, or antichoicer, or the other way around altogether or none of these things at all. But now, I will break from objective narratress and tell you something very personal and even embarrassing about your Miette:

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Despite the fact that someone (Miette, no Man's Wife), is showing evidence of growing fatigue by the stammering end of this, and despite that fact that someone (yes) has rarely rendez-vous'd in a cemetery, and certainly never one in a place such as Simla, I can't help but think that we should all have a Tertium Quid of our own. Even if I've never spent as much as a single rupee.

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How better to celebrate new clarity in sound than with a bold new header image? What think ye? Sound better? Yea?

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Happy Bloomsday! If your house is at all like mine (and let's hope it's not, let's hope it's, in fact, very little like mine, with the tangerine walls and the petting zoo and the flora and god knows what sort of fauna hidden in the balls of hair BUT), tonight you will not sleep at all, as you lie awake waiting up watching the clock tick down to Bloomsday morning and what might be waiting for you in your stockings.

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a.k.a. John Whelan. Look him up (if I were the type to end an avowal with a "yo," this would be the time, as in "look him up, yo."). Also a worthwhile nonfiction writer if you've a yen for Irish history. That said, it should be well past your bedtime. For the insomniacal among us, may this lull you softly.

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Big news today, as I'm sure you've all read by now: our Miette has just been found not guilty on charges of committing vainglorious podcasting exercises for the sole purpose of hearing her own voice while increasing the regularity with which she reads short fiction. Her first response to the verdict:

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From New Scientist's feature 11 Steps to a Better Brain: A DECADE ago Frances Rauscher, a psychologist now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and her colleagues made waves with the discovery that listening to Mozart improved people's mathematical and spatial reasoning.

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Days like today you should really be outside. And so, to those listening on lumbering machines, for an optimal podcasting experience I should recommend the following: 1. Put the POD back in your cast. Download it to anything portable (for the byzantine that might mean holding a cassette recorder up to your computer; whatever it takes) 2. Go outside.

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Diabolically brilliant phantasmallegory of what must be a creepily Schulzian sort: it's not necessarily a bedtime story for children. I worry about the children!

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This might be best remembered as Modern Experimental Fiction (MEF) or Possibly Obvious Catholic Allegory (POCA), but when I think of it, I think only of Impending Sneeze Preventing Absolute Clarify (IS-PAC), except when, in this recording anyway, a cough is stifled, at which point it reminds me to Clear Throat Before I Read (CLEAR-T-BIR).

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This was recorded from the verdant overgrown idyll overlooked by my fire escape (which, if you can ignore the fact that you have to climb out a window to get to it, and get over the fact that you're squatting on metal bars, and that it's, you know, ILLEGAL, is just like a terrace. A balcony! A rooftop!).

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A rare gem at the bookstore after work today: a nice old hardcover copy of Tess D'U for fifty cents. Now, Tess was once on frequent rotation at Miette's Lending Library, until Miette woke up to see that the Library had become not a Library so much as a Free Book Bonanza, and the unwritten rule of rotation not "you take this sweetheart and read it and I'm sure I'll get it back someday" as "you take this and I will never see of it again and years from now, when I have a yen for it, god only knows where it may be."

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Here's just one of the many fine things about reading stories into my iPod to be read to you: I can read a story like Olesha, and stop and get all breathy in the middle because I've forgotten that he constructs it that way, or I can catch myself from snickering in the middle because I'm just IN AWE of how someone can be so sharp and funny as to turn an isolationist rant into a beautiful dreamscape

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"Nothing but spaces of light and dark..." these peripatetic obstacles of thought made connected. That's the good stuff, Ginny, that's the stuff that brings respite from daily restiveness and yes Virginia, this is scant a clause.

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The source of one character's restless despair is another woman's interlude between the busy minutes of other days. Then again, carried out for too long and it becomes the very same restlessness. A forgotten treasure.

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For at least the last five or six minutes of this reading, I was stifling an enormous sneeze, which came out promptly the second I rushed to stop recording (there may or may not have left physical evidence of the sneeze's disdain for having been ignored for so long... but I'd never tell).

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Never you mind the perceived furtive abscondence of Miette these days. I could never leave you in a state of raw list(en)lessness, that just wouldn't be fair, and if there's any fairness at all in this world, you can bet it'd be in the form of Miette's shaky tenor. For now, this is what we've got: absurdity, in its most concise form. Better absurd than inconsiderate, at any rate, no?

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A longish truancy calls for a longish return, so this one clocks in accordingly on the longish side. Given his penchant for regular oxygen-free plunges into plots and thoughts of strained family relations, self-imposed exile, cultural alienation and melancholia, it's also counterintuitively uplifting. Enjoy.

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Reading the story while entertaining the dog with one hand, fumbling with papers of the evening’s podCAST while trying to prevent the disruptive thud of bone-to-floor, then sacrificing my own right hand to the dog’s playful tugowar teeth: this, podCASTee, this is sacrifice. My great sacrifice, your bargain.

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Babel: exposition follows drama, form follows function, violence follows funny, and sin is quickly and heartily followed by impossible Russo-Jewish names.

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In the dystopian fantasy of my days, we would each have our own child in the toolshed. For Ursula, of course, we need only one. Not a bad daydream, if you can prevent yourself from drawing the natural comparisons... oh, I do hope this doesn't cause you nightmares.

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Why did Miette stall before posting the final chapter of Dostoevsky? Was she sad to have it end? Having second thoughts about finishing it? Did she lose her voice? Building suspense? No. I, Miette, was too occupied thinking of an excuse for not posting the final chapter of Dostoevsky to post the final chapter of Dostoevsky,

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We're nearing the end of this little mini-chronicle. Can you handle it? The few I've heard from have been most encouraging, but one must be careful with encomia before this turns quickly to Miette's Bedtime Story Proustcast (and I'm only half kidding). For the rest of you, one more night, fess up, you love it.

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Still with me? Hope so-- this is the turning point. The Dream. Quite possibly the best dream sequence committed to print, or at least the best committed to ridiculous Russian print. Nothing Ridiculous About It... excuse me while I contain my excitement.

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Yes, don't be misled by what you hear in the opening seconds of tonight's bedtime story. This was going to be chapters 2 and 3 (they're short), but then from nowhere appeared a chainsaw, and who can podcast when the sun is out and the chainsaws are calling...

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Nothing says hither-springtime quite like the spin cycle of alienation, dispossession, malaise, apathy, and indifference! Perhaps it's best to go for a long stroll in your nearest park, have a couple of classes of wodka, break your own heart and maybe a dish, and then listen?

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Did you miss me yet? Thanks to all of you for your determined and consistent telephone calls, e-mails, and picket lines to my internet service provider (although to those of you with the eggs and tomatoes, I have to say that while the gesture was appreciated, I cannot condone violence of any sort).

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Miette read a very big book last night, it's true, and after a marathon thirteen hours of podCAST-free oral storytelling, only two thoughts remain in this once-nimble head. One, that why-oh-why didn't we just podCAST all thirteen hours, and how can I find a piece suitable, yet short enough for what's left of these droopy nerves, and two,

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It is the storms of March that prepare us for the flowers of April and May. The Italians would be so naive. Regardless, the Italians, they know their fairy tales; this from an out-of-print collection, which only means that ultimately they will all need to be read, for the sake of the verisimilitude of indelibility. Just you remember who has it in print! Remember, and be thankful for March.

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It's so wet here and even upon peeling off my socks I can barely make out where the water ends and the feet begin. And then my olfactories open as the dog greets me with lick-to-nose and it's the same thing: where does the wet-dog smell stop and the dog herself start? I dare not eat under these conditions, which remind me of Maugham.

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In my ongoing efforts to impress upon you my unparalleled prowess at podCASTrophilia, I've spent the evening downloading all these applications that allow one to do things like "Normalise" and "Reduce Peak" and "Remove Hiss" and "Shift Frequency," all of which I, with my many skills, understand perfectly well and can do with ease, while sipping tea with one hand and scratching my head in the other.

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Nothing says Eve of The Second Coming of Christ like a longish existential short story by a forgotten Swedish Nobel winner (repeat: not nepotism) about a delusional old urchin who lives and preaches as the saviour of man. I don't know where you can find this in print-- Jesus knows, I'll bet. I have it in a tattered dimestore paperback anthology called The Existential Mind, Documents and Fictions,

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Is it a revelatory outpour of inner monologue detailing one man's confusion on racial, political, and sociological identity, leading to violence and resignation? Or could it be just another day at the office? We should all listen, briefly, then settle up and cose together for a nice long nap.

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It was only a matter of time before we get here, deep unsettling irony, psychosexual abandonment, romantic antipathy and just a soupcon of background traffic. A passing bus, a ghetto lowrider, a few dollups of plaster falling from the ceiling, and if you listen very intently, introspection.

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Much as I would love to read the entire Decameron, and one day maybe I will (when the sound quality is improved to the point where I no longer sound like a podcastrati... and yes I am working on it!), for now, here's enough of an excerpt to give you pleasantest of dreams of romance in the time of plague. Besides, it doesn't get much more hypercritically metatextual, reading a bedtime story that is a bedtime story being read.

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If I were a more professional podCASTresse, I might have added a subliminal background track to this story, and if that were to have happened, you might have finished listening to tonight's bedtime story thinking one thought: Paul Bowles Can Be Touching and Humanistic. But, I'm not a professional

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It's true, it is, that Miette has bought something special to aid in her PodCASTing, though in the true ghetto style she so cherishes, she (or rather, I, Miette), didn't do much to prevent the background sounds of discs spinning up, or dogs turning to dervish, or other random technospatter.

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It's a lovely springtime afternoon, and you should be outdoors, at the park lazing about, not cramped inside looking for the cheap thrill of an afternoon bedtime story. Go on, go to the park now, and come back and listen later. But I can only hope you've taken my advice, and I'll assume that it's later. So here's a little Lawrence, replete with lovely Lawrencian descriptions of lovely springtime Yorkshire afternoons

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Am almost too beat to read this evening, but like dear Mr. Neave, I press on. Enjoy a crackling, hoarse, stammering attempt to clamber through Katherine Mansfield's An Ideal Family, one of the great short stream-of-conscious experiments. Some nights, when I can sleep, I have clay-puppet-wrestling-match dreams of Mansfield and Va. Woolf, and if only I had a television and

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Crikes, in the haste of a working week I'd completely forgotten that despite not wanting to go straight to Calvino (because let's face it, everyone expects Miette to read Calvino, and when have I ever met something so vile as an expectation?), I had mentally dog-eared this one for yesterday. And yes, I could wait a year, but in another year, who's to say we'll still be podCASTing at all?

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Here's a nice short one to make up for yesterday's nice long one. From Robert Walser, a master of the short-short story, and the closest anyone's come to Swift since Kipling. Basta is one of those fine Italian words that the Germans have managed to appropriate (read: swipe), and I've long wished we would adopt it. We, English speakers, you know, not savages.

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This is both perhaps just-too-long and read by a just-too-tired head; maybe just assume the intent is to separate the yolks from the hen's asses... or something. Kudos to you if you make it... Despite not wanting to overwhelm the Internet(s) with too many Russians in too short a time, Vlad is really a nomad, as we all know, no more or less a Russian than I am a humvee. And yes, I can refer to him as Vlad,

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I had wanted today to read Philip Lamantia (what was I thinking?), because he understood living more than I (and probably you, Internet, but that might be presumptuous) ever will, and because he's now dead, so a tribute seems fitting. But, that said, I don't think I can read his poetry, because I don't think it will convey anything at all as it's supposed to, and besides, Miette's Bedtime Poetry Hour PodCAST is another project, isn't it?

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A personal secret: I, like many, have long succumbed to seemingly endless bouts of insomnia. It's not clinical, and I love sleep very much, but I often have a difficult time performing when called on to do so. Bedtime stories don't help much, because once I find one I'm particularly fond of, I will read all night. Another personal secret: I, Miette, am a bit compulsive with the reading. This could well be clinical, but I've never been fond of DSM labels, as we all know.

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Some days, especially those in which my lack of tolerance for this city is only matched by my impatience with the job, I suffer the wildest joyriding fantasies of working at a used bookshop. To elucidate, the fantasy usually involves moving to smalltown Americana and opening up one next to a Wal-Mart, grabbing curiosity-seekers on their way out, and making recommendations based on their blue-light purchases. If they were frumpy housewives whose impulse buy was the latest People magazine to go with their two cartons of Virginia Slim 100s and sale-rack throw pillows, I'd toss a Flan O'Connor their way.

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Hypnalgiaphobia, the nightly quest for a real OOBE, learning to read more slowly and maybe with no accent, elas, these are the things that make us turn in the wee hours and if ether were the answer I'd be first in line. But maybe a new bed is a fine substitute? Maybe just a bedtime story?

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Welcome to this, the humble inaugural edition of Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast, which is really nothing more than my excuse to have a podcast. You see, I'll bet that other people don't read to you enough. I know that people don't read to me enough. So this way I can read to you, and then later listen to it myself, and take care of all our problems. Or at least take care of this one. For all of us.

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