Idle Rambling About Keillor

"It's a heroic challenge to write a comic essay of 800 words every week for a newspaper, and I take that very seriously. Editors may disagree with me, but I don't think that I, as a newspaper reader, really need someone else to weigh in on Social Security reform. I have read both sides and will continue to do so, but I don't think I need a new voice there. I do think, however, that it's a lovely thing for a newspaper to carry a column somewhere that people turn to in the expectation that it will make them smile, and maybe laugh."
- Garrison Keillor. "Q & A with Garrison Keillor." 28 June 2005.

I clipped that quote from an article I read on the Prairie Home Companion website, which not only contains an archive of past radio shows, but also an archive of Garrison Keillor's writings.

Keillor has a very informal, stream-of-consciousness style that is soothing in its imagery, yet biting in its commentary. Most of his sentences look similar to mine, except they're funnier (which is probably true of most writers' sentences, but let's stay on topic).

Some of his sentences, though, the ones I find most satisfying, are those that don't stop. They aren't sprinters racing for the period, but long distance runners with the endurance (and punctuation) to go for lines without tiring. One of my favorites comes from a recent article, "The Cranky Man's Guide to Contentment"...

"It's a beautiful descent in a 737, into the Bitterroot Valley, following the Clark Fork River, along the Bison Range, on a perfect golden autumn day, under a high blue sky, and I hiked around town, the air sweet and dry, and was sort of overwhelmed by the perfection of it -- the old courthouse, the train depot, Mount Jubilee and Mount Sentinel rising up, the neon bars, the funky festivity of a college town -- and I imagined living there and finding contentment and writing a book about trout fishing and becoming a wise old beloved figure who is found in a booth at the Oxford Cafe at 6:15 every morning offering Western bon mots over the bran flakes instead of a cantankerous old man which is what I am."

It's a 130-word beauty and a timely source of NaNoWriMo inspiration. It also makes me laugh and this has been a week when I could use a little laughter. Thankfully, Guy Noir skits, news from Lake Wobegon and paragraph-length sentences by Keillor have fulfilled that need (unlike postseason baseball and news about North Korean and Iranian nuclear crises).

Reading Keillor got me wondering, too, if I could do what he does or what Dave Barry does or what S.J. Perelman did: write a comic essay every week. Maybe, to begin with and in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I wouldn't worry if it was funny or not, but focus on making it 800 words long. After I succeeded in writing such an essay several weeks in a row, I would concern myself with infusing it with humor, or something that passes for humor, like the stuff on Saturday Night Live.

Obviously, this is only idle rambling, thinking out loud, something to temporarily distract me from the stresses of life that seem unusually heavy this week. It's a way to keep me from obsessing or complaining because when it comes right down to it, it really isn't that bad and, as Keillor says, it could be worse. So, instead, I'm just going to handle my stress with a healthy dose of humor.