English Majors: A Comedy Collection for the Highly Literate (Prairie Home Companion)
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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.
DESCRIPTION:
Binding: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 817
EAN: 9781598875881
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 1598875884
Label: HighBridge Company
Manufacturer: HighBridge Company
Number Of Items: 2
Publication Date: 2008-03-04
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Studio: HighBridge Company
SIMILAR ITEMS:
• Never Better (Prairie Home Companion)
• Songs Of The Cat
• New and Not Bad Pretty Good Jokes (Prairie Home Companion)
• Humor: Stories from the Collection More News from Lake Wobegon
• Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon (Lake Wobegon Novels)
CUSTOMER REVIEWS:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Funny, when it's not boring and pretentious
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: English majors CD
Comment: Bought this as a gift for my English major daughter, so I can't speak to the quality. It arrived promptly and looked to be in good condition. I love the English major spots on Prairie Home Companion and hope that my daughter will enjoy the CD!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Garrison Keillor at his best
Comment: The best of Garrison Keillor and his group. If you enjoy Prarie Home Companion, you'll love this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a major review
Comment: 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 that subject. Keillor's interpretation plus thirty years' distance will do wonders for you sometimes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Kinda funny but esoteric
Comment: 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.
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