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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton delivers her 1996 budget address later this hour. Sayles Belton says local leaders across the country need to become proactive in their efforts to offset what are expected to be deep federal budget cuts to cities.

Twin Cities voters will have the chance to weigh in with their presidential preferences when they go to the polls and local elections tomorrow. The FM news station's Karen Louise Booth reports.

KAREN LOUISE BOOTH: Voters in nearly 20 cities around the country will be asked who should be president as part of city vote. City vote is intended to heighten the presidential candidate's interest in urban issues. The ballot features the names of 21 people. They include the names of all candidates who have announced a campaign, as well as names of strong contenders such as Colin Powell.

Organizers expect over 200,000 ballots to be completed. And if the projection holds true, it would mean the number of city vote ballots would exceed those cast in the Iowa caucuses or the Democratic or Republican New Hampshire primary elections scheduled for early next year. For the FM news station, this is Karen Louise Booth.

KAREN BARTA: Striking workers at Badger Equipment Company in Goodview are scheduled to return to work today without a contract. Members of the United Auto Workers Union reportedly were to vote yesterday on a proposed agreement, but that did not happen.

The state forecast today-- cloudy this morning with patchy fog, becoming partly sunny this afternoon. Highs in the middle 30s in the northwest to the upper 40s in the southwest. For the Twin Cities, becoming partly sunny with a high in the middle 40s, Tuesday, windy and colder with flurries possible and a high around 32. Around the region this hour, in Rochester, it's cloudy and 38. It's partly sunny and 36 in Duluth. In St. Cloud, it's sunny and 35. And in the Twin Cities, cloudy and 39. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

PAULA SCHROEDER: This is Midmorning on the FM news station. Six minutes now past 10 o'clock. And I apologize for inflicting my voice on you. I promise I'll try to get better. I'm Paula Schroeder. Thanks for joining us today. Well, Monday at 10 o'clock, as always, means it's time for Voices of Minnesota.

[PIANO MELODY]

Poetry, China, and Bach are among the many and varied interests of native son Bill Holm. A musician and writer, Holm taught at a historically Black college in Virginia and lived in both Iceland and China. But Holm has chosen Minneota, his hometown in Western Minnesota, as his home base for writing books of poetry and essays. We hear from Bill Holm today in our Voices of Minnesota series. Each week at this time, we hear extended interviews with notable Minnesotans.

52-year-old Bill Holm teaches writing at Southwest State University in Marshall. He's the author of Boxelder Bug Variations, The Music of Failure, Coming Home Crazy, and several other books of poetry and prose. He talked with the FM news station's John Biewen.

JOHN BIEWEN: Bill Holm, we're sitting in your house in [AUDIO OUT]

BILL HOLM: Unless somebody died in the last few days.

JOHN BIEWEN: OK. And it's a town that I suspect even a lot of Minnesotans have never heard of, let alone people on the coasts. And I suspect that a lot of people who have heard of it have heard of it because you live here. And you have spent-- you grew up here. And then you came back 15 years ago after being away for a long time. Why are you here. How does this town feed you as a writer?

BILL HOLM: The first answer is an obvious one. I'm from here. Where else would I be? I mean, somebody's got to be from here. All my relatives are either dead or alive, are here in the graveyard, are still farming or living, most of them. And this is the place that nourishes me in language.

I think writers are best able to listen to the language that they heard as a child. You hear the metaphors rolling around under the kind of English that you heard when you were growing up. So in some way, that English nourishes you. And it doesn't mean that you're incapable of listening to other Englishes or other voices, but simply that in some way, that one has got something for you. The language has got some gift to give you.

Flannery O'Connor once was commenting on a school of fashionable novelists. And she was a writer who took no prisoners verbally. And she said this wonderful sentence. Do you know what's the matter with them? They're not from anywhere.

Well, I decided as a writer that I wanted to be from somewhere. And since nowhere else on the planet had presented itself, here I was, stuck with Minneota. And it has a very great virtue. It's cheap. And given the vast resources-- financial resources available to writers in America, it's good to be in a cheap place.

JOHN BIEWEN: You grew up-- were born in, what, early 1940s.

BILL HOLM: 1943, year of zinc pennies.

JOHN BIEWEN: On a farm near Minneota.

BILL HOLM: Eight miles north. I was an only child. My parents-- I was the ultimate nerd. I got my one round of applause for announcing that when I went to the new Twin City-- the Minnesota Arts High School. And I began my reading by saying it's nice after all these years to be in a room entirely full of nerds and misfits.

I was an only son. My mother decided I would go to college. And I spent most of my youth trying to figure out how not to do farm work. I wasn't always successful. I sometimes had to do some. But it cultivated in me a certain ingenuity at avoiding labor.

JOHN BIEWEN: When did you start writing?

BILL HOLM: Oh, I wrote from the time I was a little kid. I would bring poems to my old Icelanders and to my parents. And they would say, how clever, the boy can write poetry. He probably will be a failure as a farmer. And they were dead right. But, of course, the real money is in poetry, not in farming.

JOHN BIEWEN: Mhm, yes. Do you think you had a very unusual environment living in a small town and people who appreciated the fact that you wanted to be a writer instead of not only a farmer, but perhaps a fireman or an athlete?

BILL HOLM: I was lucky in the old people in Minneota. I sometimes jokingly credit it to the fact that they were Icelanders, and Icelanders respected books. So instead of humiliating you for wanting to read, and to write, and to talk about ideas and books and to have some pleasure in language, they praised you for it. So I got praise from old people.

And 50 years ago, it was hardly the Dark Ages. And you can't imagine that human nature and human culture have changed so much in 50 years that that's impossible, or that it's eccentric, or exotic in some way. I can't help but believe that there's some version of the same thing going on for children today. The details in the circumstances may change, but for lucky children, the same thing happens and always has.

JOHN BIEWEN: You're also a musician, classical pianist, harpsichordist, singer, composer. You've been known to throw a short composition in here and there in a book of poetry. Was music also there from early in your childhood here in Minneota?

BILL HOLM: I loved music. One of the things I'm grateful too in the Lutheran Church is that they used to sing hymns in four parts. So I learned voice leading, and I suppose learned to read the notes by reading out of the hymnal. And I loved the old, dour, sad, German chorales in four parts. And the gloomier, and the slower, and the more counterpoint, then the better.

Then when I was about 12, or 13, or 14, I started playing the piano, and I loved it from the time I touched it. So music was, to me, another escape from the life of the farm. But imagine what a nerd, a fellow was who wanted to write poetry and play Bach fugues in Minneota in the 1950s.

JOHN BIEWEN: What is it like to think that many people associate rural places with lack of culture, with lowbrow country music, if anything, not classical music and literature?

BILL HOLM: That's half true. But how many books and how many pieces of music do you need? In America, we assume that you have to have a station that plays 24-hour classical music, and you have to have a library of a thousand CDs, and you have to have up-to-date equipment, and you have to be able to listen to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, or the Hammerklavier's Sonata, or a Bach's Fugue 27 times a day.

In the 19th century, people maybe-- if they traveled a lot, and they had lucky lives, they maybe heard Beethoven's symphonies three, or four, or five times in their lives. And it represented some real effort to get to them and to be there and to hear them. And yet that experience meant so much to those people that they had no doubt that they were in the presence of genius.

There was enough books in Minneota. There was enough music in the Lutheran hymnal with hymns by Beethoven, and Schumann, and Bach, and by Izaak Walton, and Christopher Smart, and by the old Norwegian composers that one could learn what music was there. And you would have no doubt what Beethoven was when you heard him, in fact, in a hall.

So there's some notion that we've got that human beings have to be in the middle of a city where everything is available, or they somehow have deprived lives, and they're in need of programs and culture. Somehow we seem to have more culture when it was harder to get, and it meant more to get it.

JOHN BIEWEN: When you finished school in Minneota, you went down the road to Gustavus Adolphus, a Swedish, Lutheran college in St. Peter. And then from there, you went to graduate school in Kansas in the Vietnam years. What was it like to be on a campus at that time in the late 60s?

BILL HOLM: Well, I was one of the people holding a sign when Bobby Kennedy came to give a speech in '68. And I think my sign said, "Where were your principles in New Hampshire, Bobby?" I was a great Gene McCarthy fan. I thought McCarthy the most honorable and distinguished man ever to have run for the presidency of the United States since maybe Jefferson or Lincoln.

I spent my years in graduate school. In fact, the years of my life, really from 1963 to 1970-- and everybody my age would say this, one version of it, that their view of what the United States was, what it meant to live in a community, and what the level of public truthfulness or lying, and what the respect that you owed authority consisted of was altered by those seven years that began with Kennedy's assassination and continued with the Vietnam War and the other assassinations and disasters and went onward to Watergate and Mr. Nixon leaving in ignominious disgrace.

When there's some talk these days about the '60s and the '70s having produced something terrible in America, having wrecked the country, I was very cheered because it seemed to me that my fellow citizens had discovered-- were finally standing up to the world of lies and of abusive authority in some perfectly sane and civilized way. They were behaving like Americans for almost the first time in American history. And evidently, in the United States, it's bad manners to behave like an American citizen.

So that was-- I was formed by those years. I was in graduate school during the whole-- during the whole contraption. I left Kansas just as the Student Union was burning and the things were falling apart and then went off to a Black college where, of course, there was an equal amount of political energy. My students there had enormous Afros and red, black, and green armbands.

And in the creative writing classes, I was teaching. They were writing poems in which they had various interesting notions of what ought to be done with the honky and the man. And I would smiled sweetly, and I'd say, well, is it safe for me to walk to the cafeteria? And they'd say, oh, we don't mean you, man. This is just kind of generally, the man.

JOHN BIEWEN: Now, this was taught at the Hampton--

BILL HOLM: Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, an old Black college. And I think I was probably hired there because as a 6 and 1/2 foot tall, pink-cheeked fellow who looked like a Lutheran brotherhood salesman, the people who ran the school decided that I couldn't possibly get into any political trouble or cause any upset among the students, that I was likely to be a perfectly inconsequential fellow.

And in some ways, that's true. So I learned a good deal. I think the gifts that I got from teaching at a Black college for those years were infinitely greater than whatever teaching that I did. And I learned something about a culture quite unlike the Scandinavian culture of Minnesota.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Writer Bill Holm of Minneota, Minnesota, talking with the FM news station's John Biewen. This is our weekly Voices of Minnesota interview heard every Monday at this time as part of Midmorning. I'm Paula Schroeder. We'll continue our interview with Bill Holm in just a moment.

18 minutes now past 10 o'clock. And it's 38 degrees under cloudy skies in the Twin Cities. It's going to be a little bit warmer today across the state than it has been with highs in the mid-30s in the northwest to the upper 40s in the southwest. Look for a high near 45 in the Twin Cities today. Then it's going to become cloudy and increasingly windy overnight tonight and much cooler tomorrow with highs only in the 20s and 30s.

Well, coming up later today, we will continue our coverage of the death and funeral of Yitzhak Rabin. At noon, as part of our Midday, we will hear the Rabin funeral eulogies by President Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and King Hussein of Jordan. Our guest in our studio will be Rabbi Bernard Raskas, distinguished visiting professor of religious studies at Macalester College and rabbi emeritus at Temple of Aaron in St. Paul.

That's coming up at noon and, of course, all the latest news at 11 o'clock as well. Talk of the Nation will devote its entire two hours to the life of Yitzhak Rabin and also the future of the Middle East peace process. So stay tuned to the FM news stations. But we continue now with John Biewen's conversation with Bill Holm.

JOHN BIEWEN: Let's talk about the time you spent in Iceland. It was a year on a Fulbright.

BILL HOLM: Yep. And then I stayed part of another year just to do a job for the university. I had nothing really to come home to. I had no other job. And by this time, I had begun to learn a bit of Icelandic and had adjusted to life in Iceland. And I liked it. Again, what I discovered when I was in Iceland that though genetically I am a perfect Icelander, my genetics are impeccable.

But some transubstantiation takes place when people come to the New World. There is something called an American. It's not what we say it is, at least in our pious and foolish public moments. But it's something different than a European, or an African, or a Mexican, or a South American, or a Chinese, that there is some kind of sea change that takes place.

And that you become part of the world's most unruly, and chaotic, and disagreeable tribe of citizens who don't even like, or admire, and respect one another. But you can't go back. You're not an Icelander, or a Mexican, or a Chinese, or an Albanian, or a Nigerian. We're all stuck here in this insane place.

And so after-- that's what I learned in Iceland. So I came quite consciously back to Minneota, thinking I don't much like Minneota. I wish to God I had been born somewhere else, somewhere with better weather, somewhere not so far out in the country, somewhere with an ocean close at hand, somewhere with fresh fish, somewhere with an interesting little bookstore, somewhere with French restaurants.

But I didn't have that choice. You have one life on the planet. And I was at that time nearing 40. And, of course, you always think you're eternal. And I still do. I have no intentions of dying. I don't know about you, but you thought you have to get your work done. And this is where you do your work.

JOHN BIEWEN: Was that a relatively new insight? Is that something that you didn't-- they wouldn't have understood 10 years before that when you were off exploring New World?

BILL HOLM: I was helped in that perception when I was younger by this place. When I was in college, I met Robert and Carol Bly, who were at that time living in Madison. I simply drove up when I was 19 years old and knocked on their door. And they were kind to me and took me in this plump thing that had read too many books and was full of opinions. And I dearly loved going to their house. I loved the talk. I loved the books. I loved their work and their minds.

And then I met Fred Manfred. And I had always thought myself the world's oddest looking writer because I was this enormous fence post. Yeah. And then I met Fred and reached a half a foot upward to shake Fred's enormous paw. And that somehow cheered me up. I thought, here's a guy who's written 30, 40 books that I love and respect, who's bigger and otter looking than I am. And he lives here. So Fred and Robert and Carol were great helps to me in that regard. They shouldn't be blamed for my presence here.

JOHN BIEWEN: You-- by the way, you're what, 6' 4", 6' 5"?

BILL HOLM: 6' 5".

JOHN BIEWEN: What is it with Minnesota and tall writers? Garrison Keillor, Fred Manfred, these 6 and 1/2 foot tall Minnesota writers. What's going on here?

BILL HOLM: Well, I mean, it's simple genetics. You can't choose your parents. I mean, if I would have chosen, I'd be a ballet dancer. I'd be one of these small, graceful people leaping back and forth on a stage instead of something that's 1/8 of a ton and 6 and 1/2 feet tall bumping his head on doors.

But we come from large stock. I mean, this is such a matter of chance in the universe. Like the blue whale, people-- the size of Fred and I are probably finished on the theory of evolution. We're probably a little side branches, but we're handy to have around when people need things on top shelves, or they need to put books away well over their head, save some money.

JOHN BIEWEN: So since 1980, you've been-- have you been living in this house?

BILL HOLM: I moved into this house in 1980 when I came back. Real estate in Minneota was cheap. And it continues to be cheap in case anybody wants to corner the market. I paid $5,000 for the house in 1977. And I feel sure it's gone down now, though. But I'd still-- if you wanted to make me an offer, I'd still expect as much as $3,000 for it.

JOHN BIEWEN: And you did-- as you suggested, you settled down and wrote and wrote. All the books that you've published have been-- since you came back.

BILL HOLM: Yeah. I had written all my life. And I had published small poems. I decided to start writing prose rather consciously, because another thing that happens when you're near 40 is you realize that you don't want to speak into a vacuum. And the poetry didn't mean very much to Americans. I love poetry beyond all things. I am-- whether I'm any good at it, the inclination of my heart and my soul and my sensibility is toward poetry.

I watched the other night an Italian movie Il Postino, about Pablo Neruda teaching an almost illiterate postman to write his poem to win the heart of the fair Beatrice. And Neruda sits in that movie on the shore of this wonderful Italian island, reciting poetry to this postman and trying to coax poetry out of him. And I began weeping like an idiot at the mere presence of those metaphors and Neruda's absolute faith and trust in them.

But, of course, Neruda came out of a South American culture that valued poetry. I mean, Neruda was not only a state senator, and an ambassador, and a diplomat. He was hunted by secret-- the secret police had enough courtesy for his work to hunt him down and try to kill him. That's taking poetry seriously. We don't want to kill our poets. We're bored by them.

So at that point, I decided that it was best to try to disguise what I had to say as prose, something that went all the way to the end of the line and looked like a memorandum or a progress report, that if I was going to get somebody to pay some attention to what I had to say about the nature of things in the universe, that I'd better disguise it.

But I should warn people that I sneak poems into all my prose books. And if you don't watch it, you'll be bitten by a poem when you're least expecting it. It could be right there in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph, hiding, waiting for you with its teeth sharpened. [CHUCKLES]

JOHN BIEWEN: Is it only getting harder to be a poet in this country?

BILL HOLM: For me, at the moment, it's getting harder not to write satire. I think we're going through a very bad stretch in America. America goes through bad stretches now and again. This is a perfectly awful one. And just at the point when you think it can't get any worse, it does.

The meanness, the smallness of soul, the greed, the fear of ourselves and of our neighbors. our money hysteria, our seeding, our mental life to the media are not a dignified spectacle in the richest and the most powerful country in the world. I think the only possible response to it is pure disgust and loathing. It doesn't mean that you loathe and disgust and are disgusted by the country or by its ideals, which are as grand and as marvelous as they ever were.

The notion that human beings can live without king or priest as adults, as grown-ups, and can honor the privacy and the dignity of their neighbors in a democracy-- that's a wonderful idea. It hangs like some beacon in the sensibility of an American. But we're not doing very well at the moment. And it seems that we don't want to do very well.

JOHN BIEWEN: You often talked with contempt about wealth, hipness, fitness, a lot of the things that are associated and valued by the dominant suburban and urban culture. Is that-- do you think that comes more out of a prairie populism from having grown up in Minneota? Or does it have to do with what those values really are?

BILL HOLM: I wouldn't call myself, by any means, an Orthodox Christian or a Lutheran. I am a Lutheran. I was born into it. The Lutherans are stuck with me. But I did, as a child, read and pay some attention to the Bible stories that I was taught in Sunday school and also to the grand old prose of the liturgy and of the King James translation.

And Christianity has got a wonderful phrase. It's the title of one of the essays, "Glad Poverty." Human beings are not-- poverty is not an ennobling thing, but to be without things is not to be without a soul. Emerson has a wonderful line. He said, "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Well, if it was true when Emerson said that in 1850, my God, how true is it now?

And the idea of power shopping, the idea that we can remake our bodies and remake our lives and have lifestyles-- I mean, it seems to me you have two choices in your brief time on the planet. You can have a lifestyle, or you can have a life. And a life is somehow full of difficulties and troubles. And things are irresolvable, irresolvable. I mean, that life is full of paradoxes.

You are going to die. People you love are going to die. Things are not going to go well. You're going to be angry a lot. You're going to eat the wrong things. You're going to smoke cigarettes. You're probably going to have a few too many drinks some night. And you're just a human. You're just a human. We're meat. Meat smells. Meat digests. We're higher mammals. We have bad breath. We have bodies. We live close to the dirt.

So it's more than prairie populism, obviously. It's a sense somehow that Americans live such abstracted lives in such miserably self-conscious lives. The notion that you can remake your psyche, that you can remake your body, that you can remake your lifestyle-- why don't you just live it? Just live it. Accept the contradictions. Live it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Writer Bill Holm talking with the FM news station's John Biewen on Voices of Minnesota. It's a regular interview series heard every Monday as part of Midmorning. The producer of the series is Dan Olson with help from research intern Ellen Hatch.

[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

29 minutes now before 11 o'clock. And of course, the news from around the world is focused on Jerusalem today, where the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin was held this morning. A crowd of 4,000 said goodbye to Israel's Prime Minister. The assassinated man was eulogized by world leaders and honored with a 21-gun salute in a private ceremony.

He was buried in a Jerusalem cemetery. President Bill Clinton spoke at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin. And many, many other American dignitaries were in attendance at the funeral as well, including Senator Paul Wellstone, who joins us on the phone now. Good morning, Senator.

PAUL WELLSTONE: Good morning.

PAULA SCHROEDER: This must have been a particularly moving experience.

PAUL WELLSTONE: Yeah, I told Sheila that there is no place I think I would rather be today than here in Jerusalem for the service. I have the honor of representing Minnesota and sending love from my state to the prime minister's family and to this country.

And it was a very, very moving ceremony. When his granddaughter spoke, I just found myself weeping. It was so beautiful. And she talked in very personal terms about how could a stranger take my grandfather away from me. He was someone I looked to. I feel empty. And it was just so beautiful.

And then the commitment to the peace process-- I mean, I hope and pray that that will happen. I feel more determined. I know, as a Senator, to continue to push for it. And I really believe that that came through in the words that were spoken today as well. I mean, the Prime Minister Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin, gave his life for peace. And I think we have to honor that.

PAULA SCHROEDER: There were many words of reconciliation spoken today by all factions of the people involved in the Middle East peace process. I would imagine that it is everyone's hope that that reconciliation will continue.

PAUL WELLSTONE: That is correct. I mean, there are clearly extremists who don't want to see it happen, but I think so. Another thing that what happened today in some of the press here was some of the editorials were very hard-hitting, saying that some of the right wing attacks on the prime minister, calling him a Nazi, calling him a traitor, calling him a murderer, that this creates the climate of hate where then the next thing you know, you have somebody commit a monstrous crime.

And I think that, there's going to have to be healing in this country. But today was a day of sadness. And it's a-- but it was a very moving day. And I cannot help but be inspired by Prime Minister Rabin and all that he did in his life. And I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to be here today.

PAULA SCHROEDER: How is it that you were able to attend the funeral? Were there a limited number of places available for Americans?

PAUL WELLSTONE: Yes, there were. They were altogether, I think, three planes that went, Air Force One, Air Force Two, and I don't know the other one. And I received a call. Sheila and I were at home in Minnesota. And I received a call from the White House right after the president spoke and asking me whether I would like to go. And I right away said yes. And so, again, it was an honor to represent my state, and let's just hope that we can honor this man's life, and that the peace process will go forward. Thank you for the interview. I better. get going.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Thank you. Yes, senator, thank you so much for joining us. Senator Paul Wellstone, who attended the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin this morning in Jerusalem. Time now is 25 minutes before 11 o'clock. You're listening to Midmorning on the FM news station. Well, the slaying of Prime Minister Rabin has raised new questions about the continuation of the Middle East peace process as we hear in this report from Jean Hacklander.

JEAN HACKLANDER: Nearly six weeks ago, prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in Washington to sign a breakthrough peace agreement with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. The accord, which is already being implemented, provides for the staged withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from major Arab towns in the West Bank. Despite Rabin's assassination, many analysts predict that those efforts will continue virtually uninterrupted. Bernard Reich is a professor of international affairs at the George Washington University.

BERNARD REICH: The short term-- I think we'll have a brief period of slowdown during the period of official mourning and while the government of Israel formally re-establishes itself as it must with a vote of confidence from the Knesset or parliament. After that, I suspect that we'll see implementation of the agreement with the Palestinians, so-called Oslo II agreement, because this will be seen as something of a legacy for the prime minister.

JEAN HACKLANDER: But the longer term picture is less certain. So-called final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are set to begin next May and could last for years. And the Israeli-Syrian talks remain deadlocked over the future status of the Golan Heights. Although acting prime minister Shimon Peres has played a crucial role in the peace process, Reich questions Peres's political ability to negotiate new agreements.

BERNARD REICH: Mr. Rabin brought a unique ability to convince Israelis that their security would be protected because of his own background. Mr. Peres does not bring those credentials to the peace process. Israelis have less confidence in him with regard to security judgments and issues.

JEAN HACKLANDER: Israeli parliamentary elections are to take place no later than November of next year. Robert Satloff heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He predicts Rabin's assassination will not lead to an early vote and a disruption of current Israeli peace efforts.

ROBERT SATLOFF: It's much more likely, I would think, that Peres would take the mandate of forming a new government, would create that new cabinet, would seek a vote of confidence, would take advantage of the fact that the Likud has said that they will not oppose the creation of a new labor-led government. It would try to govern as long as possible.

JEAN HACKLANDER: But the political uncertainty in Israel following Rabin's assassination will likely impact Syrian attitudes toward peace, according to Michael Hudson, professor of international relations at Georgetown University.

MICHAEL HUDSON: My guess is that Syrian officials who might have thought that they could come to a deal with a strong Israeli government over a total withdrawal from the Golan in return for full peace will be thinking that the Israeli political situation is likely to become too confused and divided in the future. And therefore, they can't really trust any Israeli leader or expect them to negotiate in a manner that Damascus would find satisfactory.

JEAN HACKLANDER: Observers also warn that as Israel struggles to put its political pieces back together, any terrorist attack by Palestinian extremists could harden Israeli public opinion. That might jeopardize future concessions at the negotiating table and deal a near lethal blow to the overall peace process. For the Christian Science Monitor, I'm Jean Hacklander in Washington.

[GUITAR STING]

PAULA SCHROEDER: 22 minutes now before 11 o'clock. This is Midmorning on the FM news station.

SPEAKER: Not all of the great music for Christmas was written 300 years ago.

[GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL, "EVERY VALLEY SHALL BE EXALTED"] Every valley

SPEAKER: Call the Public Radio Music Source at 1-800-75-MUSIC and rediscover the joyous musical celebration of Christmas.

(SINGING) Every valley shall be exalted, yeah

Shall be exalted

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, in the weather today, it actually looks pretty decent compared to what we've had for the last few days. But enjoy this day because it's going to be getting plenty cold again. We're going to experience considerable cloudiness this morning, but becoming partly sunny for the afternoon. Look for highs in the mid-30s in the northwest to the upper 40s in the southwest.

Excuse me. I apologize for my voice. I'm trying to hang in there. It's going to become cloudy tonight with increasing winds, lows from 20 in the northwest to the upper 20s in the southeast. And tomorrow, windy and colder with scattered snow showers and flurries. Possible highs in the 20s to 30s. Look for high in the Twin Cities today around 45. And it's going to be getting windy and colder tomorrow.

Well, this probably sounds horrible to our guest from California that's in our studios today. He's here for a world debut of a play at Theatre in the Round in Minneapolis tonight. The subject is AIDS. Voices That Care is by, for, and about people with AIDS and HIV and those who love them. Julie Barnes Weaver adapted the work by Neal Hitchens to the stage after a close friend of hers died of the disease.

Hitchens is himself HIV positive. And his life partner, Christopher Esposito, died of AIDS in June of 1994. In his interviews with family members and friends of people with AIDS, as well as those with the disease, Hitchens discovered a remarkable depth of feeling and strength. And some of those stories are told in the stage production. Neal Hitchens and Julie Barnes Weaver joined us in our studios this morning. And thank you for coming in today. Tell us more about it.

NEAL HITCHENS: My pleasure.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Good morning. Thanks for having us.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Neal, I want to start with you because you were really the inspiration behind this production. You wrote the book, after all. What prompted you to interview people who love people with AIDS about the disease?

NEAL HITCHENS: Well, when Christopher was sick, and we spent so many hours in the hospital, I saw so many people who came to see other people who we're just so supportive and so loving of them. And how it affected them after these people died was very interesting to me. And I would talk to them.

There was-- in the hospital, there was a room that families could go to. You could stay at the hospital all day, and you could go to this room. And I would intermingle with these families. And their stories were just so touching and interesting. And I thought if everyone knew this and everyone could experience this, it may change some attitudes about AIDS.

PAULA SCHROEDER: This is indeed then what comes across in the stage production, Julie. And some of these stories are actually told on the stage.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Exactly. The book itself is a collection of these interviews that Neal did. I think you sent out something like what-- you had a thousand responses to a request for these stories. And then from that, you put about a hundred of them into the book. And I got the book from my book club, started reading it.

And because their interviews and the people speak directly to you, the reader, as a theater person, I immediately saw actors speaking to the audience. And I thought this would make a-- I could translate it in some way if I gave it a shot.

And that's what I did. I selected a variety of those stories for a lot of different reasons, for the different points that were made, what was important to these various individuals and through the words that the actors and made them go on stage and talk to the audience.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Do you consider this part of AIDS education? Because that is what is emphasized so much is to educate people about AIDS, how you can get it, what it does. But this is a whole other aspect to it.

NEAL HITCHENS: Oh, absolutely. I think that there's-- teaching people how not to contract the disease is just one part of AIDS education. Once you've contracted the disease, there's a whole different ball game that you have to go through.

And a lot of that's emotional. And I don't know how you prepare someone for the things you go through when you're taking care of or loving someone who has AIDS or if you're fighting the disease yourself. And this book does that through courage and inspiration from the people in the book.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Tell us a couple of the stories, would you, that our feature-- there's one in particular about a grandmother whose daughter and granddaughter die of the disease

NEAL HITCHENS: And son-in-law.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: And son-in-law in one of those related incidents. That's correct. Well, this particular piece-- the lady's name is June Kenney. And she talks about her daughter, Jennifer, and her granddaughter, Angie, both of whom contracted AIDS from the HIV virus.

And the interview itself-- they're very much in a drama-- they're presented in a dramatic form even within the book because as people are speaking in their interviews, June, for example, would say, my daughter wrote this in her journal. I just translated that into real words and put them into a young woman's mouth so that she became Jennifer on stage. One of those AIDS-related deaths, unfortunately, takes place within this piece.

Jennifer is a young woman. She died at age 29. She was married to a young guy named Doug, who unfortunately, through the grief and the guilt that he felt because he was HIV negative, his wife was HIV positive, and their second daughter was HIV positive, he didn't know how to deal with that.

And apparently, there wasn't enough support within the community for him to get help. And he killed himself. And according to Neal, he said that's one of those statistics that you never hear about as an AIDS-related death, but it's not from the disease itself.

NEAL HITCHENS: And there's many of those. That's why when statistics are given on how many people have died of AIDS, I never looked at those as accurate because there's a lot of deaths that result from someone having AIDS that they don't include in that list.

PAULA SCHROEDER: So this would be somebody who is HIV negative, but what about people-- is suicide common among people with AIDS?

NEAL HITCHENS: Well, a month ago, a person that I know lost a friend. He was HIV positive, but he was healthy. And he just couldn't deal with it anymore. They thought that he was making progress. And it was so desperate that he drove his car into a brick wall.

I mean, he didn't die. He pulled himself out and threw himself into oncoming traffic. And a car ran over him. And he didn't die. He went to the hospital. They put him in the psych ward. They released him. And the next morning, his mother found him he had wrapped his entire head in duct tape and killed himself.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Oh, my gosh. There are terrible, terrible stories, and yet those are not the ones that we hear.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: No, that's correct. Because the subtitle of Voices That Care is Stories and Encouragements for People with AIDS or HIV. What I have tried to do is choose a wide variety of pieces that will be presented by actors for the next four evenings at Theatre in the Round that show how do you live with it. If you have it, how do you live with it? If you have a child or a family member who has HIV or is already living with AIDS, what do you do to support them? What do you need to understand about them?

June Kenney, for example, at the end of her piece, says, a year ago, I would have judged. I did judge no more how someone got AIDS. Doesn't matter. It matters that they have the disease and that we deal with them with love. And that is very much a message that's throughout this show.

NEAL HITCHENS: Absolutely it is. And of the thousand people that wrote to me for the book, I picked an incredible cross section of people because when you pick up this book and read Voices That Care, you can relate to somebody. Anybody can relate to somebody in this book.

And I didn't put it gay men, drug users. It's mixed. And you don't know what it is because I don't want you to just flip to a section that you feel comfortable with. I want you to read every story. And that's why the book was done the way it was done.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Well, for example, there's a priest in here who talks about being an AIDS buddy. And what he learned from this gentleman who then died and what this gentleman brought to his life and showed him how he could live his own life as a priest better. So it's not always even just families. It's also others who have contact with people who are HIV positive or have AIDS.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Tell us more about this. As you said, Neal, this cross section of people-- and you use the term it could be anybody. You don't know who you can relate to. And I think, Julie, you were saying that that's one of the themes in the production as well is that you never know--

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Absolutely.

PAULA SCHROEDER: --whether AIDS is going to affect your life or not.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Absolutely.

NEAL HITCHENS: Well, I think it's very naive for anyone to say AIDS can't affect them and won't affect them because you can't trust everyone in your life 100%. People have weaknesses. People are human. And I think that you need to realize it could affect you, and it will affect you at one point in your life. And I know that people don't get involved or don't care until something personally affects them. And it's at that point that people then rethink and think, well, I need to do something.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's 12 minutes now before 11 o'clock. We're talking with Neal Hitchens, who is the author of a book called Voices That Care. And it is being-- well, it's been transformed into a stage production by Julie Barnes Weaver. And that will be presented at Theatre in the Round tonight through Thursday night. And that is in Minneapolis. Is there any difference between this particular production and other plays about AIDS? Because there have been others done certainly.

NEAL HITCHENS: Well, yes. I mean, from all the plays I've seen on AIDS, this is one that goes from the stage right to your heart. And it's not just one story. It's many stories. And that's the difference, I think. It's on all levels. It's with-- it crosses all sections of people. And when you see it and when you read it, you're going to-- at the theater especially, you're going to say, that could be my daughter, that could be my son, that could be my mother, my father.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: That's right.

NEAL HITCHENS: And so it's more personal, and it's more intimate. And I think that's the difference. With some AIDS plays I think alienate certain people, this encompasses and includes everyone into it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: We were talking a little bit earlier about how seemingly complacent we, as a society, have become about AIDS.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Yes.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Certainly, people with the disease or who know those who have it are not at all complacent. And yet the shock has worn off. It's almost that it's become an accepted part of our-- the diseases that are out there. Is that a danger to become complacent about it?

NEAL HITCHENS: It's an incredible danger because the numbers are still stagnant, people who are dying and people who are getting infected now. There's a younger generation coming up, which I'm not a part of anymore.

KAREN BARTA: You're not that old.

NEAL HITCHENS: Yes. And they have grown up with it. And so the shock and fear to them is not there. And teenagers feel that they're mortal, anyway. And so because they're so used to hearing about it, it's not a threat to them as much as it is to at least me and my generation, because most of the people I grew up with are dead. And the teenagers-- they don't think it's going to affect them. They know about it in the back of their mind, but it's like there's no threat to them at this point in their mind.

PAULA SCHROEDER: So what kind of education do you think they need to make it real to them?

NEAL HITCHENS: First of all, I think parents-- it starts with parents. And parents have to educate their children that if they're going to have sex of any kind with anybody at any age, they need to protect themselves. And as a parent, that's all you can do. And you have to be open with your children about that because if and when they do have sex-- and they will-- you've educated them.

If they then don't take the responsibility, you've done what you need to do. It's up to them. And that's all you can do. You can't be there with someone at that moment they're going to have sex and tell them what to do. So as long as you educate them, that's your responsibility, and that's over for you at that point.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Julie, do you-- is there anything in the play particularly about parents, I think, and maybe some regrets that they have about not doing that kind of education? Or, Neal, maybe you have some stories about it.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Well, I'm looking at the pieces that we're going to be doing. And there's such a wide variety here. We have business women infected by a co-worker with whom she had an affair. And we have the priest. We have a lesbian. We have the grandma, and her daughter, and grandchild.

And we have certainly some gay men in there. We have a mother whose child was infected with HIV through a transfusion when he was a baby at the hospital, things like that. I don't so much see places where people regret it, except that, as June said, she used to judge. She doesn't anymore because it doesn't matter how anyone gets the disease. You just have to love them.

One of the other women here at the very end of her presentation says, if you have AIDS, don't hide it because the person-- because you might find that the person you're hiding it from might have it too. The person you're sitting next to could have it. When they say if you want to see someone with AIDS, look in the mirror. It's the truth.

PAULA SCHROEDER: That play is going to be in production at Theatre in the Round in Minneapolis through Thursday night. And, Julie Barnes Weaver, I want to thank you so much for coming in. She is the creator, producer, and director of that. Neal Hitchens, thanks to you as well, the author of a book called Voices That Care. Is it still out and available?

NEAL HITCHENS: Voices That Care is. Yes, it is in bookstores.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Great. Thanks so much.

NEAL HITCHENS: Thank you.

JULIE BARNES WEAVER: Thank you, Paula.

[MELLOW MUSIC]

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's six minutes now before 11:00 o'clock. Coming up on Midday today, during the noon hour, we'll hear the Rabin funeral eulogies by President Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and King Hussein of Jordan, also talk with the rabbi emeritus at Temple of Aaron in St. Paul, Rabbi Bernard Raskas. And during the 11 o'clock hour of Midday, of course, all the latest news and weather. First, here's Garrison Keillor.

[PIANO MELODY]

GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is The Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the six of November 1995. It's an important day in music history, the birthday of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone in 1814. John Philip Sousa, the March King, the man who composed "The Stars and Stripes Forever," born in Washington, DC, 1854, on this day. He enlisted in the Marine Corps band when he was only 13 years old.

It's the birthday of the great Polish pianist and patriot, Paderewski, born in 1860 on this day. And also on this day in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. The Democratic vote was split between Stephen Douglas in the north and John Breckinridge, the southern Democrat.

It's the day on which in 1935, Edwin H. Armstrong demonstrated his FM transmitter. The wide frequency range made possible the practical method of high fidelity broadcasting. It's the birthday of James Naismith in Ontario, 1861, the man who invented the game of basketball. And it's the birthday of Charles Henry Dow, in 1851, who was the Dow of the Dow Jones Company.

Here's a poem, a cowboy ballad that you, I'm sure, could recite some of. And here's all of it, at least in one version.

As I walked out in the streets of Laredo,

As I walked out in Laredo one day,

I spied a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen,

All wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.

"I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,"

These words he did say as I boldly stepped by.

"Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story.

I'm shot in the breast and I know I must die.

It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing,

Once in the saddle, I used to go gay.

First to the ale house and then to the jailhouse,

Got shot in the breast, and I'm dying today.

Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,

Get six pretty maidens to carry my pall,

Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,

Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.

O beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,

Play the dead march as you carry me along,

Take me to the green valley and lay the sod o'er me.

For I'm a young cowboy and I know I've done wrong.

Go gather around you a crowd of young cowboys,

And tell them the story of this, my sad fate,

Tell one and the other before they go further to stop their wild roving before it's too late.

"Go fetch me a cup, a cup of cold water to cool my parched lips," the cowboy then said.

Before I returned, the spirit had left him and gone to its maker.

The cowboy was dead.

We beat the drum slowly and played the pipe lowly,

And bitterly wept as we carried him along,

For we all loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome,

We all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong.

[PIANO MELODY]

"The Streets of Laredo." And that's The Writer's Almanac for Monday, November the 6th, made possible by Coles magazines, publishers of Vegetarian Times and other magazines. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PAULA SCHROEDER: That's Midmorning for this Monday. Stay tuned for Midday and over the noon hour, of course, eulogies from the Rabin funeral.

ANDREI CODRESCU: I'm Andrei Codrescu. Join me, John Rabe, and the Washington crew for the news and long looks into the human soul. It's All Things Considered every day at 3:00 on the FM news station, KNOW-FM 91.1.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. 39 degrees under cloudy skies at the FM news station, KNOW-FM 91.1, Minneapolis, St. Paul. It's going to be mostly cloudy this morning, becoming partly sunny this afternoon and a high around 45 degrees. Windy and colder, some flurries possible tomorrow.

GARY EICHTEN: Good morning. It's 11 o'clock. And this is Midday on the FM news station. I'm Gary Eichten. In the news this morning, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been laid to rest in Jerusalem. Leaders from around the world gathered in Jerusalem today to eulogize Rabin. He, of course, was assassinated on Saturday.

President Clinton is leading the US delegation. He called on Israelis to rededicate themselves to the peace process. Here in Minnesota, a memorial service is being held this evening at Bethel synagogue.

Minneapolis-based First Bank System has worked out a deal to merge with first interstate Bancorp. The merger, if it's approved, would create the ninth largest banking company in America. And the Federal Food and Drug Administration is considering a proposal to clear the way for the use of additional anti-AIDS drugs. Experts say the drugs could substantially reduce the symptoms of AIDS.

Those are some of the stories in the news today. Coming up over the noon hour, we'll hear from President Clinton, Egyptian President Mubarak, and Jordan's King Hussein. They all spoke today at the funeral for Yitzhak Rabin.