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.
