Garrison Keillor is one of my favorite actors, thank you for sending this.
On 2/22/07, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> In the current salon.com G Keillor jokes about who not to have lunch
> with...
>
> '.... Conviviality is no small achievement. Back when I was young, most
> major
> American writers seemed to be alcoholic or suicidal or both, and we
> students
> absorbed the notion that the true sign of brilliance is to be seriously
> screwed
> up. The true poet is haunted by livid demons, brave, doomed, terribly
> wounded,
> and if one was (as I was) relatively unscratched, you concealed this and
> tried
> to impersonate doom.
>
> The prime minister of high culture was T.S. Eliot, who suffered from a
> lousy
> marriage and hated his job and so wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred
> Prufrock," a
> small, dark mopefest of a poem in which old Pru worries about whether to
> eat a
> peach or roll up his trousers. This poem pretty much killed off the
> pleasure of
> poetry for millions of people who got dragged through it in high school.
> The
> first line of "Prufrock," as you may recall, was "S'io credesse che mia
> risposta
> fosse" -- he opened with six lines of a language 99 percent of his readers
> do
> not understand! How better to identify yourself as a serious poet than to
> be
> incomprehensible?
>
> So the best minds of my generation skipped poetry and became historians or
> went
> into business or took up farming. Who would make a career out of
> pretending to
> be crippled? And they sensed that, in the poetry biz, there is not much
> conviviality. (They were right.)
>
> The problem with liberals in our time, even though we'd like to think
> we're
> riding high at the moment, is that we're not so much fun to eat lunch
> with. We
> carry an air of self-righteous sorrow about hunger, global warming,
> homelessness, tax inequity, the heartlessness of big corporations, and a
> list of
> crises as long as your arm. You eat lunch with a liberal and you are
> ashamed to
> order dessert.'
>
> etc, etc. I love the word mopefest. (I think Prufrock predates TSE's
> marriage.)
> M
>
>
>
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