Prairie Home Keillor

I’ve been waiting to comment on A Prairie Home Companion, the Robert Altman film, until I saw it, but there have been a few interesting articles of late on Garrison Keillor. Slate’s Sam Anderson writes in The Mysterious Appeal of Garrison Keillor that

[t]hough Keillor is associated with the Midwest, his sensibility comes largely out of New York City. He began his career in the early ’70s writing short humorous essays for The New Yorker (he later became a staff writer then left, on a very high horse, when Tina Brown took over as editor in 1992). He is probably the purest living specimen of the magazine’s Golden Age aesthetic: sophisticated plainness, light sentimentality, significant trivia. … The “News From Lake Wobegon” is basically an old-style Talk of the Town piece about the Midwest.

There was also an interesting personal portrait of Keillor in the New York Times on June 1 entitled At Home With Garrison Keillor: Where all the rooms are above average. Unfortunately, that article has disappeared already in the NYTimes archive for which they’ll charge you $3.95 to read it. But for those with access, just look it up on Lexis-Nexis. It talks about Keillor’s rather grand house in St Paul and the apartment he keeps in Manhattan.

Brief write-up of Keillor at Wikipedia, which features some quotes of his, such as:

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.