English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion)
by Garrison Keillor
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Book Summary Information
Author: Garrison KeillorPerformer: Garrison Keillor
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Published: 2008-03-04
ISBN: 1598875884
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Book Reviews of English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion)
Book Review: Funny, when it's not boring and pretentious
Summary: 3 Stars
There is some wonderful material here -- excerpts from Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" that relate to literature and poetry. "Six Minute Hamlet" was a raucous and off-kilter condensation of The Danish Play, while "For Whom?" featured an English major working at a fast food joint taking grammar to its logical and brutal extreme. There's a great Guy Noir piece as well as a couple of Keillor's extended stories about Lake Wobegon, including a wonderful story about the new English teacher in a pink halter top who lives in the ghost-ridden Hochstetter house. Some of the musical interludes were terrific, including an updated folk tune about a writerly John Henry in a writing duel with a laptop computer. Some decent poetry too, especially a piece called "The Lanyard" by Billy Collins and a funny story about southern eating habits.
There was also plenty of pretention along the way. Allen Ginsburg reading a long passage from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, semi-accompanied by folk instruments was long and dull and included mostly I guess for the star power. A piece about a family car trip "a la" Kerouac was neither funny nor respectful to the great Beat writer. "The Family Shakespeare" was basically a retread of "Six Minute Hamlet", and "Ten Minute Macbeth" ("voiced" by Henry Kissinger, Fred Rogers and Jack Nicolson) was just not funny. The live audience backs me up on that. And playing Hester Prynne as an airheaded valley girl was more predictable than funny.
At $25 or 2-1/2 hours of material, or $10 an hour, this 2-CD set might make a nice graduation gift for the English major in your life. But given the uneven quality of the material, I'd opt for picking up a copy at the local library.
More English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion) reviews:
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Summary of English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion)
Skits and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of men and women who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills.ENGLISH MAJORS. You know who you are and here is a double-CD celebrating the secret society of those who, though they may be chauffeuring kids to swim lessons or writing Unix programs or frying cheeseburgers, still could, if need be, write a term paper on the water imagery in The Waste Land.
Includes the Six-Minute Hamlet, the Ten-Minute MacBeth,tributes to Hawthorne and Kerouac and Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an M.F.A. scam, the Ballad of John Henry ('John Henry was an English major and poetry was his line. He sat by the window with his yellow legal pad and he wrote one sentence at a time.'), and more.
With guest appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Billy Collins, Roy Blount Jr., Robert Bly, Donald Hall, and Calvin Trillin.
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