Oh, and as can only be expected, we talk about the St. Louis Cardinals and the World Series. (This post would’ve been up earlier, but it’s taking a while to recover from last night’s loss . . . Which, in all respects, was an INCREDIBLE game.)

Anyway, the first line of the podcast sums it all up and provides a perfect preview of what to expect.

The music this week is from Grouplove’s Never Trust a Happy Song. It reminds Nate of listening to “120 Minutes” in his youth, and feeling sort of nostalgically sad. I think it’s pretty catchy.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Here’s a bit from the announcement I received from PEN America:

Founded on October 9, 2011, by writer Jeff Sharlet after a tweet with Salman Rushdie, and organized by Sharlet and journalists Kiera Feldman and Nathan Schneider, Occupy Writers seeks to celebrate and chronicle the progress of the unfolding movement. “Within a day of sending out our invitation, we were almost overwhelmed by writers. The usual suspects, who I was glad to see, but also many, many writers you wouldn’t think of as political. And they’re not – this is bigger than politics.”

Utilizing their Occupy Writers intends to publish narratives of those writers who have visited Occupy sites throughout the globe. By gathering stories and personal accounts, Occupy Writers aims to harness the power of literary America to create a counter media where people can find documentation about the movement.

Writers’ work necessarily involves imagination, whether in the service of fictional worlds or of making stories about actual events. Occupy Writers acknowledges that the protesters of the growing Occupy movement are exercising a similar imagination in the pursuit of a more democratic culture. As writers whose livelihoods are enabled by the freedom of speech, they support the protesters who through peaceful means are raising their voices with creativity, wit, and passion, on Wall Street and beyond.

In terms of the stories and personal accounts, a couple worth checking out are the ones from and

From “Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance”:

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Aside from being totally behind this in every way (I’m sending a few Open Letter books down to the where I saw a copy of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory when I went down there over the weekend), I’m posting about it here because of their need for translators.

From Susan Bernofsky’s blog,

At the end of last week, the General Assembly issued its first official communiqué, the Declaration of the Occupation (which, as Brian Lehrer said by way of praise, reminded him of the Declaration of Independence). And now the first edition of the Occupation’s newspaper has been published, The Not surprisingly, the paper copies went like hotcakes. They’re expecting a new shipment in today, so if you want one, better get down there fast. Or, if you’re content to read it online, I’ve uploaded a copy for your reading pleasure.

And over the past several days I and the other members of the Translation Working Group of the General Assembly have assembled a stalwart crew of translators who are busy translating the Declaration into many different languages. But we still need more translators. We still have no one for Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Hindi. We could use more Russian translators. We could use more translators in all sorts of languages. (Note: we need translators who can translate out of English into other languages at this point, not the other way around.) If you’d like to join us, please e-mail me. (You can find her email on her website.)

Now go to it.