Could reader mentality be this simplistic? Both female and male writers run the gamut of subject matter and quality of writing. "Girlish and moody" might equate to badly written romance I suppose. "Boyish and moody" could relate to guns and breasts I guess.

Mr. Keillor:

Are you having a post-midlife crisis, and wishing once again to be 15 years old - with all that entails, including fantasizing about young nekked women?

Cuz I gotta say - your last two articles in Salon are tending along those lines, and I think it is rather creepy.

It was in college that we were required to read The Waste Land. Fortunately the book that it was in also contained The Love Song of J. Alfred P., and that's why I grew to love Eliot.

In high school English, instead of reading books with characters and plots we related to, we read Hawthorne and Orwell. Perhaps if someone had made me read David Sedaris, Tony Hillerman, Sherman Alexie, Raymond Chandler, or Carl Hiaasen I might have cared about fiction as a teenager.

Too many faces reflected in snow!

Thank you, Garrison. Now eat dust!

A writer and a fan,

Kim McLarin

I live on an island that embraces poetry and literature in every way...poetry festivals, poetry slams, poetry readings and writings and visiting poets and...and not only poetry. Fiction! Essays! Writing contests! Classes! Workshops! Confereces! Retreats! And not those tired old classes of which you speak, but workshops with titles like "Writing Outside the Box (and on the walls!)"

Surely, Mr. Keillor, you of the poetry broadcasts, you jest. It's not your best jest, but you couldn't possibly be serious. And Dana Gioia, just leaving the National Endowment for the Arts, is one of the best poets around. Take a look at his "Cruising with the Beach Boys."

When I was teaching several years ago at a college in Maine, one of my students in the Introduction to Literature class, a student who was determined not to like literature, slipped me a note one day after reading a beautiful poem by Li-Young Lee: "I think I'm starting to like poetry." I guess he knew he was cursed!

Depends on the teacher, the time, the world around us. And it ain't all peaches and Prufrock.

Garrison Keillor just discovered Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer. And is horrified. They don't allow books like that to be sold in Lake Woebegone's drugstores.

The problem with this piece is that Keillor has been out of the mainstream for decades. That was part of the charm of his writing and radio work. It's when he discovered, to his horror, that the rest of the world was going in a different direction, that he started writing what was, to him, horrifying social critiques.

Perhaps someone can send him all available kinescopes of Alan King's "grouchy old man" monologues from The Ed Sullivan Show so he can at least catch up to the social realities of the 1960's. Then maybe a collection of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Fantastic Four comics to let him understand genre fiction at its best. For God's sake don't let him read Alan Moore's Watchmen graphic novel; his heart will explode.

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain

That would hold you dear lady from going insane

That would ease you and cool you and cease the pain

Of your useless and pointless knowledge.

Given that somewhere in the early 60's it became illegal for writers who had something to say to have any sense of humor at all, we look back to the days when the author made it clear from page one the sort of book that will follow, allowing you to make your choice right there...

The peak of which may have been Max Shulman's absolute opening:

"Blam Blam Blam Blam! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life."

Ahhh, they don't write 'em like that any more...

But instead of Googling myself, I Facebook post GK Salon articles. Dastardly deeds in fiction forever!

wow, where'd you go to school that people would quote the Moody Blues? my CS cohorts, not to mention econ and bio, could barely recognize the Beatles. poetry? ha.

the dustball snickers, as one who has slapped a few poemious moebius amoebia-like line drives.

I don't know, if a guy uses "languid" in genre fiction, it's usually to emasculate another guy.

Readers really want

dastardly deeds done by dark

despicable men

Or saucy wenches

With pert breasts displayed like fresh

Friut on a platter

Pale reflections and

Languidly drifting words by

Garrison Keillor

For years I have been frustrated by the fact that all the books of suppoded literary merit are written by adjunct creative writing professors and mainly concern... the lives of adjunct creativw writing professors.

If you must write wht you know, you need to know something more interesting. Hemmingway screwed around in war zones and bullfighting rings. Jonathan Franzen... not so much.

I am taken aback when I stumble across such erudite musings by the master of woebegone who seems to best find his fettle in the darkest recesses of winters cold languish ... Which is all that much more lamentable when juxtaposed with the blithesomely light literature that is transferred to the big screen for mass consumption and awards mania such as we are currently in the season of.

We have taken a reading of your ‘Liberty’ with a grain of salt and are not inclined to reach for the nearest Winchester but rather to realize that common thread and sustaining beauty that “Runs through all and doth all Unite” is still good fodder for winters consumption.

Masterful pen/key strokes Mr. Keillor and also more than what was required for a weekly musing … have a good winter … Spring is not soon found at hand but we do have the words and promise of what ’Frost’ presents us with …

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfill.

‘ Robert Frost’