Ah, I miss the old days, those innocent Goodreads days of pretzels and beer, Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, and of course, Celebrity Death Matches. So I'm reviving one of my personal favourites. I call it...CELEBRITY DEATH MATCH No 83.BOY GEORGE : Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen! Guten abend, bon soir, good evening! Wie geht's? Comment ca va? Do you feel good? Ich bin euer confrencier, je suis votre compere, I am your host! Leave your troubles outside! So -life is disappointing? Forget it! In here life is beautiful - the girls are beautiful - even the orchestra is beautiful! Outside it is winter, but here it is so hot every night we have the battle to keep the girls from taking off all their clothing. So don't go away. Who knows? Tonight we may lose the battle! Ja!THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA : Taa-daaah!BOY GEORGE : So, you have come to see the fighting, ja? Okay, we get on with it. Yes, you do not have to throw fruit or panties at me, I know what you want. Tonight we have one of our much loved Celebrity Death matches - 0 yes, haha, you think maybe somebody famous will die tonight? Huh? You like that? Okay, ja, so do we! Ha ha! So, tonight's bout is …Drum roll…Between in the blue corner much loved genial American humourist Garrison Keillor(the 6 foot 9 Keillor stands up and sways like an oak. He wears a suit and large red boxing gloves.)And in the red corner, not one, not two, not three – okay, I'll tell you – five separate opponents all of whom believe for one reason or another that he should die a painful death! We have Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Brett Easton Ellis, Don (the Don) De Lillo and, making a surprise comeback, Carson McCullers!!(Mild applause)Chicago Symphony plays a quick burst of the theme tune from Circus Boy starring Mickey DolenzThe five authors strut about the ring, all dressed in evil looking leather outfits. DeLillo leans over the ropes and glares at someone he recognises. Easton rushes over and says "Leave it, Don, it's only one of those crappy goodreads idiots, We'll get them later."BOY GEORGE : Okay, Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, seconds away, Round One!Bell : Ting!GK : Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, the little town that time kind of forgot to remember to forget. Turned cold around Wednesday, I'd say, kind of… colder 'n' it was in the two or three days it was before that. Monday, I should say, Monday wasn't terribly cold...The red corner are working as a tag team one at a time against the towering midwesterner. First up, here comes Carson McCullers. She steps up to GK looking, may I say, very fetching in a kind of cut down Batgirl getup, I could bet that her friends of both genders are liking this a lot. (Prematch dialogue :Graham Greene : Miss Carson, I really don't know - you can see practically all the way to China!Carson : Why Mr Greene. For one night only no mannish tweeds. I'm gonna strut my stuff!)But alas, the mountainous Keillor, orating blindly, obliviously, flails his arm in a gesture to emphasise how felchingly cold it is in Lake Wobegon and he catches McCullers a glancing blow on the side of the head. It's Ali versus Liston 1965 all over again. The Southern gothic pinup girl hits the deck and is counted out. A disappointement for the feminists in the audience. But she was never in the best of health and I don't really think it was a wise idea to include her in the tag team.GK : ... not that record breaking cold that er gets you in uh National geographic and all of that and the tv comes out to interview you and see how you're taking it, just a kind of regular Minnesota cold, kind of a fact of life in the month of January, nothing to complain about, like the fact that it's flat out here, really kind of uh flat. Yeah. Don't complain about that. But gee I dunno maybe some people do they come into the house and they say Well it's kind of too flat out there, I never seen it so flat out there. As it is today. Too flat. Somebody else 'll say Yeah but I hear it's suppose to incline a bit on Wednesday.Next up, Jonathan Franzen – he squares up to GK who never stops talking and stares gloomily towards the audience, pretending not to notice any of his opponents, or actually not noticing them. Franzen winds up and socks Keillor as hard as he can in the solar plexus. Anything to shut this guy up. GK : Ooof! So by Wednesday there was a little more snow on the ground which kind of absorbs sound and since Wobegonians are kind of quiet and don't really roar so much it makes for well a sort of dull uh dreary kind of existence even though below zero temperatures are if I remember physics that I was once taught makes sound travel better uh faster and yet it's still kind of real quiet here because Franzen walks back disconsolately to the red corner. "This is not cool, you know," he says. "In fact this is even less cool than being on Oprah. I'm out of here." And he leaves in his Franzmobile.GK : there aren't so many people out and those who are aren't in the mood to make much of it. Sound that is. And also should they have been in the mood still they would have had trouble because they're kind of all bundled up, swaddled if you will, and pretty much unable to emit any kind of cry. Light synthetic fabric such as Goretex has not yet found its way to Minnesota. People up there still believe in layers, a great many layers. Don "The Don" DeLillo steps into the ring. He hurls a copy of Underworld at GK's enormous droning head but like that scene in Awakenings Keillor expertly catches the heavy volume with one huge mitt. Without breaking from his tedious Lake Wobegon yarn, he reaches down and cuffs DeLillo like a great grizzly bear and DeLillo's head flies off somewhere into the far corner of the room. The doctor climbs into the ring and checks his pulse. Yes, he's dead.Michael Chabon is taken ill at the sight of DeLillo's head hurtling past him, so this means that Brett Easton Ellis is the last author of any literary merit still standing now. As he enters the ring he throws off his leather cape to reveal a flame thrower strapped on his back. He unhooks the hose and fires it up. Great gouts of flame shoot out.GK : Of course something which can keep even a cold person alive and even warm em up a little bit, fend off death if you will, is a whole basketful of ancient creaking sentimental parlour ballads such as Love's Old sweet song. (sings in beautiful clear baritone)Once in the dear dead days beyond recall,When on the world the mists began to fall,Out of the dreams that rose in happy throngLow to our hearts Love sang an old sweet song;And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,Softly it wove itself into our dream.By now GK's right leg is completely on fire, Ellis is cackling madly and fighting off the ringside officials who are clambering into the ring. Referee : Ellis, you're disqual---urgh…I can't tell you what Ellis does to the referee.BOY GEORGE : Well well well meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, it is my humble duty to declare that Garrison Keillor's unique ability to keep on talking in the face of considerable naughtiness means that tonight, he is our champion!GK : Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,comes Love's old sweet song.
I loved it. Although it made me smile a lot, sometimes laughing out loud, it also had a almost neurotic undertone, but it never gets the better of the reader. The community of Lake Wobegone is described in so much detail, it is amazing. I skipped most of the footnotes in the end, since it became annoying to remember where I was in the book after having to read yet another footnote that was a chapter in itself. The characters are so all-American, yet it could have been our own neighborhood in South Africa. We played the same games, did the same silly teenage stuff and made the same stupid mistakes, debated the same religious and political divisions. I just realized how very American we actually are! lolol.Of course we do not experience the deep, dark, hibernating winters and I had a good belly-laugh for many of the descriptions in the book, like this one: "Out on the country road, you can see Norwegian bachelor farmers have hung out their sheets. "When a bachelor farmer begins to smell himself, you know winter is over," says Clarence."And this one: "One day it dawned on her (Mrs. Magendanz) that he must have an outhouse in the garage. The Dahls had moved off the farm into town only two years before. He had found that his bowels wouldn't budge on a flush toilet, so he dug a pit in the garage and was using it twice day."And there was Bud who found digging his grandmother's grave too tough a job, so he used one stick of dynamite to get it over and done with. And Margaret who worried that her soon-to-be husband might be a little too dull since he was way too quiet. Then she decided to kiss him in the neck during their visit to the movies in 1957, at the exact moment that Dracula bend over a young girl. She "found out that he had deep reserves of nervous energy. In one second, he distributed the box of popcorn over six rows of seats."The book is about a community of about 800 people living in Lake Wobegone, a non-existent town, describing their history, hardships, humor, religions, traditions, thoughts, idiosyncrasies, everything in a lot of detail. It probably is one of the best books to read for immigrants to the country. It depicts the very heart of the people of America and it was done splendidly! I loved the down-to-earthiness of the characters, their honest stories, unpretentiousness. It really feels like meeting the core of real people who makes up the great nation at last!I really really loved it!Listen to this Podcast with the author about this book
What do You think about Lake Wobegon Days (1985)?
(4/8/08): Toilsome. That's a good word to describe this book, if it even is a word. (It ought to be, if it's not.) Four hundred plus pages and not much to it. Yes, I understand there's not really a plot to it. In fact, I'd bet there's a particular term to describe the type of writing Mr. Keillor endeavors. I don't know it and I just don't care for it. Yeah, there are some interesting parts about how town life affects so many of its residents (one of the problems - too many characters to really keep track of), but they are few and far between, at least for me. A few zingers, for you though, because if nothing else, Mr. Keillor can do a bang up job at making a point clear or making something mundane, funny (and hey, this way, you don't have to read the book):- " . . . buck up, be strong, believe in God, and be about your business."- "Faced with the lonely alternative, we'd marry a Lutheran, and then, dazzled by the splendid music and vestments and stained glass, we'd forsake the truth for that carnival down the street."- "I could always cross my fingers and prevent a real conversion. God would know I didn't mean it."- " . . . unconsciously, out of habit, she spat a little ptui in the hanky and rubbed my forehead. Mother spit. Our holy water, the world's most powerful cleansing agent.(4/3/08): It's not all that light. I'm tempted to agree with Jess that Lake Woebegon might be best on the radio. I *struggled* through the first hundred pages - really, I didn't need to know what a fictional town was like in the 1600s! Heck, I'm really not even all that concerned about what the US was like in the 1600s! But, now I'm up to the almost-modern day and the book's now in first person, so it's better. But 100 pages?! People, please.(3/24/08): It's Garrison Keillor. I need something light, after "The Liar's Club." This should do it.
—Liz
Garrison Keillor is a rambling kind of person/writer who just keeps spewing details and weaving threads in a fabric of Lake Wobegon. His somewhat satirical take on a small town, his own hometown - possibly, I still can't figure out if this is a work of fiction or not, and frankly I don't mind - reminds me of stephen leacock's sunshine sketches of a small town, nostalgia and humour, pride in one's hometown, made up or real. A book to be savoured, read in the right place."“Humankind knows no finer amenity than the screened porch. It is the temple of family life, and the sacred preserve of the luxurious custom known as “visiting.” Compare it to the barbarity of the “business lunch,” the hideous conversational burden of the cocktail party, and the prison that is the formal dinner, the porch visit shines with civility."
—Leslie
I'm going to have to take a break on this. I'm only on page 148 & I'm totally bored with it. It's taken me 2 days to read that much. That's really unlike me. So. I'm going to start another book & read this one little-by-little I guess. Alright. Well. I finished it. Finally. This book really did nothing for me. I pretty much had to force my way though it. I admit, there were funny parts, but getting to them was pretty painful. I kept reading because it came to me so highly recommended by my mom & we usually have fairly similar tastes. All I can figure is that she is from a different time than me, and so she "got" more of it. I don't know. It really bored me.
—Jacki
