Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor (born Gary Edward Keillor on August 7, 1942) is an American author, humorist, musician, and radio personality.

He is best known as founder and host of the American Public Media show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on BBC 7 and in Ireland). Keillor's trademark storyline is the weekly News from Lake Wobegon, a monologue about a fictional town (based on Anoka, Minnesota, Garrison's hometown), "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

Keillor has also written many articles for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Keillor is the host of The Writer's Almanac, a five-minute program which is broadcast daily on some public radio stations in the United States.

Mr. Keillor's works from The New Yorker and other magazines have been gathered into two collections: Happy to Be Here, published in 1981 (and later acquired, and republished with 5 additional pieces, by UK outlet Penguin Books) and We are Still Married, which features newer articles, literary outtakes, poems and additional Lake Wobegon tales which were all written by him in the 1980's. When Penguin acquired WASM for republishing it also added new pieces from around that period to the collection; 6 in this case.

Garrison Keillor did the voiceover for the 2003 Honda Accord commercial entitled "Cog". The two minute television ad features a complex system of car parts that react with each other to create a chain reaction similar to a Rube Goldberg cartoon. The commercial ends with Keillor asking, "Isn't it nice when things just work?" See the link below to watch the ad. Keillor also sang the voiceover in the 2004 Honda Diesel commercial entitled "Grrr".

His laid back style is often the subject of criticism and parody. The Simpsons parodies Keillor in an episode where Keillor is shown reading his monologue and the studio audience laughing wildly, with Homer wondering, "What the hell's so funny?" [1] In practice, Keillor rarely reads his monologue directly from the script, but the monotonous intonation and style of dress caricature Keillor successfully. One Boston radio critic likens Keillor and his "down comforter voice" to "a hypnotist intoning, 'You are getting sleepy now', while noting that Keillor does play to listeners' intelligence. [2]

In the UK, his commercials have been parodied especially his song (for Honda): "Hate something, Change something, Make something better" (clip available below)

During the summer of 2005, production began on a film version of A Prairie Home Companion written by Mr. Keillor and directed by Robert Altman.

Mr. Blue

File:Keillor.jpg

Garrison Keillor on the cover of Time Magazine.

He also authored an advice column on Salon.com, titled "Mr. Blue". Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001 in an article entitled "Every dog has his day":

Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon.

Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying.

So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.

As of August 2005, Mr. Keillor is again writing for Salon.com, though in a different format.

Personal information

Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota. Raised in the Plymouth Brethren, which he has since left. He is six feet, four inches tall and is of Norwegian and Scottish ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is a Lutheran and often uses his religious roots in his material. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station, known today as Radio K.

Keillor is married to violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson; they have a daughter, Maia. His first wife was Mary Guntzel, with whom he had a son, Jason. His second wife was Ulla Skaerved.

Bibliography

Keillor's work includes:

Good Poems for Hard Times (2005), ISBN 0670034363
Homegrown Democrat (2004), ISBN 0670033650
Love Me (2003), ISBN 0670032468
Good Poems (2002), ISBN 0670031267
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001), ISBN 0571210147
Me, by Jimmy Big Boy Valente (1999), ISBN 067088796X
Wobegon Boy (1997), ISBN 0670878073
The Sandy Bottom Orchestra (1996), ISBN 0786812508
The Book of Guys (1993), ISBN 067084943X
WLT: A Radio Romance, (1991), ISBN 0670818577
We Are Still Married (1989), ISBN 0670826472
Leaving Home (1987), ISBN 067081976X
Lake Wobegon Days (1985), ISBN 0140131612; a recorded version of this won a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Non-musical Album in 1988
Happy to be Here (1982), ISBN 0068112017

Quotations

That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.

Beauty isn't worth thinking about; what's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

I want to resume the life of a shy person.

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.

Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth-breather there is.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.

One day Donald Trump will discover that he is owned by Lutheran Brotherhood and must re negotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who don't understand why anyone would pay more than $120.00 for a suit.

People will miss that it once meant something to be Southern or Midwestern. It doesn't mean much now, except for the climate. The question, 'Where are you from?' doesn't lead to anything odd or interesting. They live somewhere near a Gap store, and what else do you need to know?

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.

The funniest line in English is "Get it?" When you say that, everyone chortles.

Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, 30 cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being-much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. - "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore", In These Times, August 26 2004 [3]

To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it – they never felt such an urge, and therefore it must not exist. - Homegrown Democrat, p. 78

References

Keillor, Garrison. In search of Lake Wobegon. National Geographic. Dec. 2000.
"Lights! Camera! Retake!". Telegraph (2003). Retrieved Jun. 7, 2005.

External links

Minnesota Zen Master - a detailed profile of Garrison Keillor, published in The Guardian, March 6, 2004.
Cog - Honda Accord commercial
Grr Grr Advert - Honda - "Hate Something, Change Something, Make Something Better"
Audio Interviews with Garrison Keillor by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio
The MNspeak t-shirt case