Garrison Keillor
by Kerim
I can’t stand A Prairie Home Companion, but it wasn’t something I was going to blog about until Ish brought my attention to the fact that Garrison Keillor is suing some blogger for making a T-Shirt which reads: “A Prairie Ho Companion.” I think the blogger is right that it falls within fair use. I even think it was nice of him to warn Garrison’s lawyer that the whole thing was going to blow up in his face (as this post demonstrates).
All this gives me a chance to finally blog about this “thoroughly enjoyable assault on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac” which Language Hat blogged about last month. Here are some choice quotations:
Now, had Keillor not “strayed off the reservation” and kept to his Prairie Home Companion show with its Norwegian bachelor farmers and Lutheran bake sales (a sort of Spoon River Anthology as presented by the Hallmark Hall of Fame), comfort food for the philistines, a contemporary, bittersweet equivalent to the Lawrence Welk Show of years past, I’d have left him alone. But the indefatigable and determined purveyor of homespun wisdom has wandered into the realm of fire, and for his trespass must be burned.
… Everything that comes out of his mouth in that treacly baritone, which occasionally releases into a highpitched, breathless tremolo when he wants to convey emotion, is a sermon. … Everything Keillor does is about reassurance, containment, continuity. He makes no demands on his audiences, none whatsoever. To do so would only be bad manners. … Keillor is infatuated with the idea of poetry but knows and cares little or nothing about the art, what’s good, what’s bad, and how it’s made …
And so on.
OK. I got that out of my system now.
+++++++++++++++++ [IMG]SHORTS: Don’t miss Keywords on Garrison Keillor . Reminds me of critic Russell Lyne’s description of EB White as “the Eagle Scout of American letters” …’Mr. White has won all the merit badges, his heart is pure, he can tie and untie complicated knots, and he knows the names and habits of beast and
I can’t stand Keillor’s work either – but my understanding is that trademark law pretty much requires a trademark holder to send cease and desists in silly cases like this, as to do otherwise would weaken their defense in non-silly cases of trademark violations. This is all that Keillor has done, and sending a cease and desist is not “suing”.
Fair enough, although I it bugs me that even though I believe he is within his rights, such “cease and desists” my effectively deny those rights simply because he can’t afford a lawyer to defend them.
GK has his merits. His monologues on Lake Wobegone on his weekly radio show are absolutely spellbinding. He’s a man of many dimensions. And I think he has help from some hired elves. There is simply no way a human being can be involved in so many things, personally. Most recently I was shocked at his stance on denying a local Catholic High School the right to build a sports field. I had two kids that went there. And I was not about to allow this fruitcake to take pots shots at the school. Then the next day he announced he wouldn’t be involved in it. Then I realized I had been jerked around by his publicity machine. Brilliant! Following the old maxim that NO publicity is bad publicity, the sports field feud was a way to get into the media. It was another opportunity for name recognition. For at the same time, his new movie came out. It was much the same publicity ploy for the mediocre film Brokeback Mountain. It would have died at the box office, had not the media been manipulated. MY goodness! Queer cowboys! And the reviewers then brought every cowboy pal movie into suspicion. Twas just enough public awareness to make BM a cult film. And more importantly, it made money for the moviemakers.