At least you dont have to put up with Stuart Maclean like we do up here in Canada…
The dog ate the turkey and Morley found herself realizing just how lucky she truly was
BARF…
I’ve got bad news: They’ve been promoing this shit here in Indy: “We may not be big, but we’re small.”
Hah hah–not! It’s stupid to analyze the retarded, but the idea of the “world’s smallest record store” is lame. The creator of the idea might say, “Sure it’s lame; it’s supposed to be lame; that’s why it’s funny.”
But here’s the thing: There are crappy little record stalls in New York, resale shops with just one stack of records, etc. So what is “world’s smallest” supposed to mean? They’ve only got one record? The idea is a non-starter.
NPR needs to quit the entertainment game. They are just wasting people’s money.
The really crappy thing is our TAX DOLLARS fund this guy…thats what bothers me the most…he’s got tenure!
Well, to be fair, Keillor brings in a lot of private dollars too; his fans tend to pony up at fundraising time.
I met my share of Keillor fans while living in Illinois. I can see why people become regular listeners - the show is understated and doesn’t really poke fun at anybody as fan as I can tell. It’s innocuous; same reason it’s musty and bland. Sometimes it seems “radio funny,” by which I mean it’s sort of funny, but I can’t imagine how it would make anybody laugh or why you’d keep listening.
And descendants of the Scandinavians that immigrated to the upper Midwest.
An acquantaince of mine in Public Radio – who loves his work – says bad stories about him are innumerable.
I liked him when I first read Wobegon and first listened to him, but I too have soured on him big time. For me, the thing is that he seems to no longer regard himself as a Wobegonian. His early work was gentle poking fun of the people he loved; as he’s aged, I get a lot more meanspirited “these people are hicks” vibe that really turns me off.
I will cop to being one of the people who keep him on the air. NPR member and always get an enjoyable time listening to PHC. I view it like SNL … sometimes they go on and on and have crappy musical guests, but most of the time it’s moderately enjoyable and sometimes it makes you laugh out loud. And I am never dissapointed by Guy Noir, Private Eye.
I don’t get your feeling of meanspiritedness at all. His characterizations of small town midwest life are spot on.
(Our local must not carry Writers Almanac, so I have no comment. “Wadda Ya Know” I wouldn’t mind going off the air.)
Ketchup. For the good times.
KQED (San Francisco) doesn’t air WA, so I’ve only heard it a few times on WCBU when visiting my folks in Peoria.
I mostly enjoy PHC, though I admit it was better in the 80s, when I would usually set up a timer to tape the show if I wasn’t going to be around at air time. Nowadays I’ll turn it on if I happen to think of it.
My paternal grandparents lived in a northwest Iowa town about the same size as Lake Wobegon, so I kind of get the small town dynamics that often show up in these stories. Guy Noir and Lives of the Cowboys are usually pretty amusing. I really like the musical guests – his taste in music is a lot like mine.
But my biggest gripe about him is his insistence with singing with the guest musicians all the damn time. His voice is almost passable, but I can hear it every week. This is where his egotism surfaces to really tick me off.
I’ve heard before that he’s a jerk IRL, so I’m not surprised by what others in this thread have said along this line.
I don’t recall every hearing a real writer credit on that show – just the standard joke names he uses every week. I’m surprised to learn he uses other writers, though I’ve wondered how he manages to write all that material himself every week.
As John Houseman once said: “Many years ago, I fell in love with the sound of my own voice. I’ve finally gotten over myself.” Or words to that effect.
Unlike Houseman, Keillor has never gotten over himself. If anything, he’s even more convinced that his voice is a melodic, irresistable instrument. He used to be self-effacing, and even refused to appear on TV because, well, he’s a friggin’ troll. Now he drones on and on and fucking on until you want to open a vein. I don’t find him folksy, but rather arrogant and self-absorbed.
Ok, I’ll step up and admit that I like Writer’s Almanac. Though honestly I don’t really care about the almanac parts. What I wait for is the poem at the end of the segment. I’ve heard poems by writers I never would have heard of otherwise, and some of them are really fantastic. And Keillor does a passable job of reading the poems – he does have a very nice voice.
For PHC, meh. I’ve gotten kinda tired of it, but I will still listen occasionally.
Aeschines writes:
> Nope, can’t do it. I not only reject his hostmanship, or leadership, or whatever,
> but also the whole concept behind the program. My studies of poetry have led
> me to believe that we are missing and underappreciating vast swathes of good
> literature of the past, while “brands” like Twain, Dickens, Shakespeare (good as
> they are) get highly disproportionate attention. This is an undesirable part of
> human nature (attend to one thing 100% and forget the rest) that we need to
> fight. Meanwhile, Keillor aggrandizes himself via the brand names
> just as chick mags aggrandize themselves by harping on the same clothing
> brands and Jen, Jen, Jen. Fuck that. (The opposite phenomenon at work on
> Writer’s Almanac and similar things is the larding of the material with enough
> obscurities to prove the creator’s erudition, but the brand-harping is the main
> thrust.
I see what you mean, but Keillor hardly invented the trend of worshipping a small set of great literature and leaving the rest to be underappreciated. This happens in every art form that’s been around for at least a few decades. I call it the “canon” fallacy, and it’s as irritating as the “bestseller” fallacy (that the only books, movies, etc. worth reading are those that made a lot of money) which is the other common fallacy about finding examples of great art. It strikes me as a pretty petty objection to Keillor to say that his view of great literature is rather narrow.
I can’t understand these “I hate NPR” threads that occasionally happen. Yeah, NPR is far from perfect, but it’s all we’ve got. All the other talk radio around is just plain stupid. So you want a better version of NPR, do you? O.K., start your own radio channel, one that’s hipper, less full of blowhards, one that’s cleverer and more interesting. I don’t think there’s any market for it, but go ahead and try. Or go to work for NPR and create some new, better shows. Face it, there’s a very small market for literate, intelligent talk radio, and it’s barely large enough to support NPR. It’s probably going to be all we have for a long time.
Hey, at least none of you live in Minnesota, or you’re not identifying yourself as from there in your location tags. I’ve never actually listened to PHC, but I can’t stand Keillor’s voice. What I’ve heard of the show seems really trite and “gee shucks”. Of course, it seems that you’re required to like Keillor if you live here. So if you don’t like him, it could be worse–you could be here.
I spend a good chunk of practically every weekend listening A Prairie Home Companion, Wha’d’ya Know? Car Talk, and other shows like Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, This American Life, and On The Media. So I disagree with most of the Garrison bashers here.
Of course, Aeschines, no one’s forcing you to listen. The reason he’s on the radio is that he is popular. “Public” radio is essentially driven by market forces, just like commercial broadcasting. He’s not on the air just because someone in the head office (and no one else) likes him. He doesn’t have a sinecure. More public radio listeners like PHC than any other public radio show.
Frankly, the charge of egotism puzzles me, since I don’t have that reaction to Keillor’s on-air persona at all. I’ve been listening to PHC for more than 20 years, and have seen the show live in person at least twice. I’ve also met him at a book signing. He may be a pompous egotist, and an asshole to work with, but that’s not the vibe I get. (I seem to recall hearing that for the first several years the show ran 52 weeks a year, and that after a while, staffers had to insist that they needed vacation time.) If true, IMHO that’s only a problem for the people who choose to work with him. Many of them have been there for decades, so it can’t be all that bad.
I was never a big fan of Writer’s Almanac, but mainly because I just don’t have much use for poetry in general. Sometimes I found it a little precious, but occasionally interesting, too. (I don’t commute to work anymore, so I never hear it now.) So I won’t go out of my way to defend it here.
Whether you like him or not, consider the magnitude of the creative work represented by the weekly Lake Woebegone monologues (leaving aside everything else that goes into the broadcasts). I would argue that they are an artistic accomplishment unique in literary history.
For more than 25 years, Keillor has been presenting a 15-20-minute monologue featuring an expanding set of continuing characters in the mythical town. That’s more than 1,250 chapters, each of which is probably between 2,000 and 4,000 words. (BTW, if you haven’t seen the show live, he delivers the monologue entirely from memory, without a script or even notes. I’m stunned by that accomplishment!)
So he’s written between 2.5 and 5 million words just about Lake Woebegone–the equivalent of 50 novels–to say nothing of Guy Noir, and all the other stuff he does for the show. Or his books and other works. I can’t think of any other writer who has written so much about the same basic cast of characters.
If this guy’s an egotist, he has more justification for it than most people I can think of. And in a country where you can’t tune in to any form of media without being confronted with the likes of Howard Stern, Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, and Karl Rove, I, for one, wouldn’t mind having a whole lot more “self-aggrandizing egomaniacs” like Garrison Keillor.
Yeah, he’s just one part of the problem.
Sounds like we’re on the same page here.
Perhaps you’re in the wrong thread. I’ve pointed out lots of NPR shows that I like and have said I listen daily on weekdays.
Uh uh. Weekdays are pretty damn good, while weekends are pretty unlistenable. So, maybe a better version of weekend NPR, which to my sensabilities is fairly close to complete failure.
Limiting the point to weekend NPR, are you conceding that it’s unhip, full of blowhards, and dull? Well then, we agree. Would there be a market for something better? If we agree that there is currently a market for weekend NPR (old ladies, perhaps?), then isn’t it logical to assume that there is a market for something at least marginally better?
Conceded.
That’s a lot of suckage to take in over a two day period.
Ah, but there are several different kinds of “popular,” my friend. Keillor has become a kind of brand, a safe commodity–so he has a kind of inertial popularity. If someone his age were to approach NPR with the same product for the first time today, would he succeed? Of course not. Just as Madonna would not be able to sell her ass today without all her previous “accomplishments” kicking it forward.
I a word, I deny that Keillor’s PHC really has strong, fundamental demand behind it. It is like a worn-out pair of shoes that people keep putting on because they’ve done so before and it’s safe and comforting.
Heck, NPR is commercial broadcasting in every sense of the word.
You are half right. I agree that he’s a saleable commodity in the form of PHC. The rest of his “successes” are inexplicable and genuinely sinecure-esque. The existence of “Writer’s Almanac” does indeed stink of a doting head office-er, and for the life of me I can’t explain why Salon publishes and promotes this fool.
That really, really isn’t saying much.
Because of their volume? Listen, I’ve taken huge dumps, but I don’t call them literature.
And Sominex has been on the market since… when? How many units sold?
The trouble with egotism of the Keillor variety is that it’s highly unpleasant despite any justifications that may exist.
No, I would like to have more genuine talent, rather than the trash you’ve listed.
He wouldn’t be 1/2 as annoying if he blew his nose occasionally. It whistles, a lot. Or back up from the mike. Jesus.
In Seattle, we have PHC on Saturdays and Sundays. I’d probably listen to NPR all weekend if it wasn’t for the repeat.
Aeschines writes:
> Perhaps you’re in the wrong thread. I’ve pointed out lots of NPR shows that I
> like and have said I listen daily on weekdays.
It sounds to me like you dislike about half of the shows. You like the weekday stuff and dislike the weekend stuff. That doesn’t sound to me like a big NPR fan.
> Limiting the point to weekend NPR, are you conceding that it’s unhip, full of
> blowhards, and dull?
No, I was saying that it appears to me that that’s what you were saying. I can see your point, but I have my doubts that it’s possible to create literate, intelligent talk radio without it coming across as being a little bit unhip, full of blowhards, and dull. It’s like the problem with 60 Minutes. You find yourself wondering, “Isn’t it possible to do this without having a producer and a set of hosts who are over 70 on average?”. I think that the answer is, “No, it’s probably not possible.”
Shows like 60 Minutes skew so strongly toward older viewers that it may be impossible to recreate its attitude with younger producers and hosts. The sorts of documentaries that the networks did regularly well into the 1960’s just don’t exist anymore on commercial TV. PBS does similar things occasionally, but it doesn’t get very good ratings there either.
For that matter, Nightline, which is more lightweight, may still be too heavyweight to continue now. They’ve replace Ted Koppel now that he’s retired with frothier hosts and somewhat trivialized subjects, and it may still be hopeless to save the show. I’m 53 years old and I may be among the youngest of the expected viewers and listeners for intelligent, literate TV and radio.
In some sense, what Garrison Keillor did was amazing. Twenty-five years ago, when everyone else was convinced that fiction shows on radio were long dead, he created a long-running miniseries for radio. Whether anyone else could do it better is irrelevant. He’s the only one even trying to do this on American radio. Heck, is anyone else in the world in any language doing the same thing?
I am what I say I am: Someone who thinks NPR does well when it comes to news, and shitty when it comes to entertainment. I’m a big fan of NPR as a news broadcaster. It really isn’t such a subtle point.
First of all, I hardly would call “Whaddya Know” and PHC “literate and intelligent.” So, as far as I’m concerned, they haven’t even tried yet.
Why? The news on NPR involves people of all ages. I hear young people making good documentaries.
Creating a long-running, shitty show is amazing? I’d call it “cultural pollution.”
PHC is a odd bird. It’s not like SNL where people argue about what season was great, what wasn’t, etc. It’s not even like Northern Exposure (an analagous show about a small town) where people have a fondness for certain characters, etc. I’ve never heard a specific character or moment in PHC come up in popular culture. It’s as if it goes in one ear of the senior citizen set, out the other, and that’s that.
Minnesotan here. I hate that smarmy bastard. Always have.
Now I’ll probably have to forfeit my fishing license.