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.
Kinda funny but esoteric I enjoyed this compilation of English Major inside humor from Garison Keillor, and I did laugh out loud a few times, but the previous reviewer is right in that the humor is very “inside” and esoteric. If you didn’t just spend like four years as an undergrad and two years in grad school studying English, you probably won’t find these jokes funny, or even get them. But for the nerdy bookworm English major out there, slaving over Tolstoy and rewriting that term paper, this is for you.
a major review I am not an English Major but I “got it”. If you haven’t read The Scarlet Letter, On the Road, seen Hamlet in the theatre or any of the other pieces of literature recently or ever at all, it is time you read them. The reason they are classics is that they are good stories. The way Garrison Keillor explains it, you get a lot more out of it, than when you took American Lit. in high school or college from someone who was tired of trying to impress morality on someone not particularly interested in…
For English Majors or the higly literate!! I am a huge Garrison Keillor fan – I buy everything I can get my hands on (on audio CD) and it makes my drive time so enjoyable. I stopped listening to this one only because it has so much inside humour that my little non English major brain didn’t understand or didn’t find humourous. I intend to give in to my brother who lives in Minnesota and has a PHD in English, loved Shakespeare and I know he’ll enjoy it better than this music major did.