Letters to the Editor
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A walk on the ice
Is it just me or is Keillor a sanctimonious assclown? I've read a coupla his pieces and listened to Prarie, but I'm just not getting it. I don't even want to think about how much Salon paid him to come back.
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Letters Editor:
Please spare us all the anonymous drivebys, the drivel and potshots (see above by "Anonymous"). Locate your Exclusive Master of the Blog Delete Key and use it - civilization may be at stake. Please reference your policy below, specifically the excessive use of rudeness and violation of common decency clauses:
"Salon reserves the right to delete any letter at its discretion; for example we may remove letters that are far off-topic or excessively rude, or that violate the law or common decency."
Thanks in advance.
PS - Mr Keillor - enjoyed your work.
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Sanctimonious Assclown?
Interestingly, P. J. O'Rourke used the same term, 'sanctimonious,' to describe Mark Twain. (He did refrain from calling Twain an 'assclown,' IIRC.)
What's the beef here? Well, sanctimonious means feigning piety or righteousness. But who would see Twain or Garrison Keillor as feigning piety or righteousness? Answer: whiny people.
P.J. O'Rouke's humor is all about whining: whining about liberals and burdensome taxes and European ways and whatever. But Twain is always about trying to do the right thing, even if doing the right thing means you could go to hell. And even if you fall short of doing the right thing.
Since P.J. O'Rouke begins with the presumption that he is always right, and that America is always right, and that Republicans are almost always right, and that anyone who doesn't agree with him is not just wrong but a misbegotten being, no wonder he finds Twain 'sanctimonious.' Any shill would.
Garrison Keillor is less morally pointed than Twain and is more about escaping the burdens of being whiny. Because what in the world can you do about other people's failings? Where is the end to counting the failings of your father? As Keillor suggests, sometimes you need to just drop the burdens and step outside of yourself and get out onto the ice.
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Women don't need courage and grandeur?
I usually like Keillor, but at times what he writes seems sexist. Is ice walking reserved only for men? Are the women of Minnesota doomed to an iceless whiny existence? :-(
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Redemption on the Ice
"Is it just me or is Keillor a sanctimonious assclown?"
It's just you.
I grew up in rural Minnesota in a house situated next to a big marshy sort of lake. My brother and I had a tradition of hiking out onto the ice in the middle of the lake late on Christmas Eve every year. It was so beautiful out there. Quiet -- and if the sky was clear you could see so many stars!
There was about a half mile of thickly-growing cattails before you even reached the area where the open ice was, so getting out to the middle of the lake was a trek.
When you make that kind of trip out onto the ice in the dark and cold, you feel like a survivor when you get back home. After an hour or so, we'd head back through the cattails, back up the snowy hill, and into the house. Once our boots and snowy mittens were off, we'd warm up in front of the fireplace with mugs of hot chocolate.
It was the best thing.
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Keillor Rocks
The timing of this article was perfect for me personally, which reminds me that the personal is also universal. Like radio frequencies, grand themes and ideas are out there for those who are tuned in to them. Great artists and communicators "lasso" these themes, and make sense of them in ways that penetrate the fog of the masses. You can't reach everybody, but some you will. And if you keep at it, slowly, surely, you will inspire enough to influence the collective consciousness. That is writing as a heroic quest, and it takes more courage than most will ever realize is available to them.
Clearly our cowardly "Annonymous Ass-Clown" below (see bottom letter), is tuned in to a different bandwidth, and that's fine. I suspect his/her motivation for writing is more about the thrill of seeing himself say "sanctimonious ass-clown" in print. Whatever.
Thanks Mr. Keillor, your articles always seem to find me when I most need them.
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wow
Just when I think Garrison has gotten too gummy and self referential, he goes and writes something beautiful like this. Wow.
The noise I escape isn't necessarily gendered, though. It is all those voices that stop, hers and his and yours.
Thanks. Loved this.
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Oh Dear...
I one thought that Mr. Keillor was an annoying and prolix writer. I changed my mind. He is plainly clueless.
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Damn you, Mr. Keillor!
Here I am, a Wisconsin-expatriate in Arkansas, and you have me dreaming of frozen ponds and the sound of packed snow under boots.
I miss snow... :|
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Don't take Garrison K. so literally
We can't all access grandeur or beauty in nature. That specific transcendence isn't available to many of us. But entering wonder-mind & leaving whine-mind, that does seem a choice anyone can make.
Whether near great lakes as in MN or in the midst of a filthy, lively city, we can take pleasure in the mysterious happenings around and outside of us: The quasi-fictional characters we see, or a painting-- in the deliberate spirit of not whining.
Allen Ginsberg once gave a lecture about the moment when he became a writer. He was sitting at his desk on 110th Street in NYC, writing yet another broken-hearted poem, feeling futile, with all those tortured feelings, when da tum...he looked up and out his window.
There, ten hard hats were doing something that puzzled him. He worked that scene of construction into a poem, his first, so he claimed. Men on a roof saved him from his oppressive narcissism, a state of mind I believe is esp in USA, all too available.
It's not the literal man on the radio talking or whining. It's that this is how our minds work, worrying over ourselves until something ELSE eradicates that isolated self and, with luck, transforms us.
That is how I read Garrison Keillor: Not inside, but outside. Not navel-gazing but life writ large, however small, focusing on something around, not in us. Dwelling not on our mere miseries, but waking up to something ELSE.
In this little essay, Garrison K has given us yet another gift for the holidays. A tip on how to move from misery to magic. Works for me.
Thanks Garrison. Spot on.