To the mom and dad of the young man who wants to major in English. I was an English major. The English majors I knew were versatile and smart. They made careers in an array of fields. I went from community organization, to mid-level management of a survey (where I said, hire English majors, for the temporary work of organizing and writing up the data. and we did, and they were the best) , to mid-level administration and development of a state aging program, to law school. I practiced law for 40+ years. Happy with my English major.
Yes! I am happy to hear of another successful English major! :)
I have a BA in English as well. I'd hoped to go on to teaching, but child care and the need to earn an income got in the the way of further education. My little BA has served me very well, though: My husband and I have run a number of home-based businesses over the years (which allowed us to keep the kiddies at home instead of sending them off to daycare). I found that an ability to arrange words is a very good skill to have when writing ad copy, writing and editing product manuals, and translating tech speak to plain English, among other things. After my children were grown, I decided to go back to school to become a nurse. Though it ultimately didn't work out (I was far too high strung to survive hospital clinicals), the school's dean very enthusiastically accepted me into the program, based on my humble 25+ year old BA in English. He was quite intrigued by the idea of a nurse who could understand Shakespeare. :)
Mr. & Mrs. Paulson, if you are reading this, please rest assured, a degree in English does not necessarily condemn a student to a life of penury. I agree with Mr. Keillor, the important thing is that your son should study hard and learn as much as he possibly can during his college years. There are a lot of practical things he can do with a BA once he graduates! Good luck to all three of you.
I was an English major. Tried engineering of several kinds and then decided, if I was going to stay in college and play football (that’s the real reason I went to college, to play football, become a pro, and get rich), I’d better find something else to study besides math and science, because my brain was getting tired of keeping track of the multitudes of formulas needed to take tests intelligently, my interest was waning, and my GPA was looking grim.
So I changed, but not to English. I changed to journalism. But the type of writing one does in journalism is formulaic also, and the precision required in that field is a universe away from admiration for Dickens and love of Twain. But I hung in there until I had to take philosophy classes, and my plans for a financially secure future were dashed upon the shores of DesCartes. The man’s ruminations and cogitations forced me to ask, “If I am, and if I am to continue being, must I think?”
Well! I would think so, but I was not going to be a teacher! Are you kidding? Teach school to naughty children? But I had to settle on plans for a degree. And that was BS, specifically, a B.S. in English, a teaching degree. Football wasn’t going to take me very far; that was becoming obvious. So maybe I could just get my degree and then I could drive trucks or do something else when I’d finished college. That became the plan.
I did so enjoy being an English major, much more than I intended. I even liked writing research papers. And the creative writing classes lifted me out of myself. Several of my classmates became writers of some fame! It was an honor to hear the young authors themselves read out loud, the music of their voices singing their poems, oh, my! I also read out loud, and some of these angelic voices even gave me support. So I continued writing my drivel, to this very day. The literature I read laboriously slowly, but with joy, even the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare. Three o’clock in the morning and trapped in a play, imagining the stage, the actors, the emotions, the spectacle, then I’d be up at seven and off to class!
Cut to the chase: One of my professors was an incredible teacher who performed his classroom duties with joy and opened my eyes in much the same way DesCartes had done. I decided, what the heck? I wonder if I could do that? I’ll try teaching, if I get a chance. I can always get out pretty easily.
So I tried, and I was destroyed by the naughty children in a matter of several weeks. I pushed on, finished that contract, and started looking for something else to do, but then another opportunity to teach got laid at my feet. Imagine that, getting laid at my feet! That one went two years.
“No more!” I cried. Finished those two years, then I applied at many places for various jobs, and “got laid” again with another opportunity to teach. What was happening?
So, reluctantly, I married teaching. The extra marital affair with the profession hadn’t been working, so I married her. I found advice and help in my new job. Some fine professional educators showed me a few things. And at last, English teaching embraced me, and she never let me go.
And in that way, I am so, so fortunate. I taught for over thirty years, retired, and then found a job driving trucks until I couldn’t do that anymore. It was also kind of fun.
You could be mistaken about your hometown audience. I attended your reading in St Paul last April when Boom Town came out. I recall more than 20 in attendance. The small church seemed pretty full. There was very little publicity, so it’s hard to know if you could have filled a larger space. Could you sell enough tickets to cover the nut of a full cast production? I’d say yes, but you might have a better hand on the local market. Al Franken is back doing standup and selling out locally. Get him as a guest and you two would fill the hall.
Thanks for tickling my memories from a generation of delight in hearing "A Prairie Home Companion," "The news from Lake Woebegone," and the nostalgic music of the Shoe Band, et al. You have been doing God's work for a good long time, and now it continues. Stay healthy, and as my father Ben Brantley used to say, "Be careful on the road."
To "Sharon" who thinks the prison system is just fine, just like it is, and everybody in there got there as a result of their own life decisions and are all "monsters", I'd like to remind her of the 19 year old man who was taken Riker's Island in the late '90s because a snooty sales person in an overpriced boutique falsely accused him of shoplifting an expensive hand bag. After three years waiting for a trial, during which time he was repeatedly beaten and raped, it was found that he was accused simply because the woman didn't want one of his "class", or, let's face it - color, sullying up the joint, and needed a reason to have him removed.
Within his first year out, he took his own life.
When someone "Sharon" knows, respects or loves ends up in one of those places, we'll see how her view of the prison system is affected.
Moorhead, MN! WOW! Seeing that sign brings back to me once again one of the most joyous trips I ever took to the Midwest! Prairie-Homers from all over the world (no Kidding- Scotland, Australia?) - responded to an invitation to a special Prairie Homers' get together! We spent a marvelous week together, Getting To Know YOU!, the cast and each other . To top it off, I decided to end the western leg of my trip by checking out Moorhead, MN .I wanted to see if there really was such a thing as a Prairie Home Cemetery! YES! YES! YES!
Guy Noir would have been elated, as a detective, to find that this isn't a piece of creative fiction at all! The whole feel of the place is like "Little House On the Prairie" - that these people came from somewhere else, but they had made their lives here so permanently, that this is where they wanted to take their rest!
I'm reading Mitchener's Alaska right now, and I'm impressed with the efforts he went to to authenticate his work. Finding the Prairie Home Cemetery, for me, was just another indication that as another premier writer, you also take care to authenticate the backbones of your stories!
And for any of you who are in the area and thinking about a "Sunday Drive," the Prairie Home Cemetery is a truly peaceful, contented place to spend an hour or two in, thinking about all the immigrants in our family trees - those who first found their earthly homes in places like this one!
I liked your answer to the father who was worried about his son's plans to become an English major. For the 17 years before I retired, I managed the professional organization that your UM Latin teacher, Margaret Forbes, once belonged to. Thanks to Chris Brunelle, you lent your name to a successful capital campaign carried out on my watch. As you can imagine, Greek and Latin teachers get the "what good is that?" question at least as often as English teachers do. My response is: The fact that "information age" and "knowledge worker" are clichés doesn't mean they're untrue, and people trained to understand and then write about different kinds of information are, in the end, better employees than people taught a specific skill. This is the point where your advice that the father demand application in return for support complements mine: If the English major doesn't do the hard work of understanding and then explaining worlds as different as, say, a whaler, medieval Denmark, and Regency society, then the training (and it is training as much as it is inspiring) is useless.
A well-trained English (and Classics) major can learn specific skills on the job, solve a variety of problems, leave a lucid explanation of the solution for others to follow, and move on to the next situation. Of course, getting to that level of competence takes time, and the easy route for human resources people is to hire for the immediate need. College career offices can help the liberal arts major to present him- or herself to a skeptical audience, and dad can insist that son apply himself in that direction as well. See also, among other sources of advice, Leaving Academia by Christopher L. Caterine (yes, a Classicist), Princeton, 2020.
Done right, being an English (or Classics) major can be a 21st century win-win (or, to us older people, a case of having and eating cake at the same time): Spend four years of college expanding the mind and maybe even the soul and then graduate ready to make a living.
Adam Blistein
P.S. I'm not too young to remember Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Speaking of college, I played that song on college radio back then and play it on community radio now.
I to attend the Met. It was a long evening which started at seven and ended around eleven forty-five. It was the season’s first performance of “Der Rosenkavalier” which apparently is staged each year. This was the one hundredth anniversary of the first U.S. performance of this “bittersweet comic masterpiece”. I’d never heard the music before and other than reading the program was unfamiliar with the story. I generally do this alone…. It’s not for everybody….
After living in New York off and on over the past ten years I decided that I should take a stab at watching Opera at the Met. While not an avid opera fan, I do appreciate the overall collaboration of stage, voice, orchestra and story. One needs to have an easily aroused emotional temperament to “get it” I guess. It takes a couple hours to place myself into the story….not unlike when I get immersed in a good book.
I remember some lines from a movie (The Never Ending Story) where the keeper of a book shop is telling one of the young characters that the book he is looking at is too dangerous to read citing the feelings he experiences when the giant squid is attacking the submarine “Nautilus” in Jules Vern’s, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea”. And once you’ve been taken in, that’s when the enjoyment and escape begins. In “Der Rosenkavalier” this was about midway through the second act (of three).
While there seems to be a very broad swath of humanity who attends these performances, I’m finding the intermissions are great for people watching. Not all the drama takes place on stage; some at the bar, some on the balcony or in the main lobby. To those in jeans and tee shirts to the formal folk of means, it has all the diversity of New York and the world. There must be a common thread but it’s hard to put a finger on it. I have three more performances to try.
During the second intermission (around ten) it was clear that a good number of folks were bailing out. This was a Monday night and I’m sure many probably had an early start the next day. I was in the foyer on the “Grand Tier” level just watching when I heard someone calling “Mary!” in what I considered a very angry tone. I looked in the direction of the voice and observed an elderly man standing between two elevators.
He was clearly agitated. I speculated his wife had entered a very crowded elevator and he had lost track of her. The second call moments later was a little less angry and more worried, perhaps sounding somewhat as if he had been abandoned…..the third call was of panic and you could see his look had gone from anger to almost fear……I felt at least some empathy for him…others perhaps not so much as he was violating the formality of that space.
People in the elevators were holding open the doors, trying to avoid leaving this man in a lurch so to speak, and as much as Mary was apparently trying to get out others were trying to get in for the short ride, but a few seconds later, out of the furthest elevator “popped” Mary…..and reunited, she took him by the hand and very slowly lead the way down a long stairway, out the front entrance and they disappeared into the night. The lights dimmed a chime sounded and the remaining patrons returned to their seats for act three.
In the midst of the next act, my mind wandered into the emotions of that brief encounter, relating them to ones I had recently felt when Ellen (my wife) was away and for a few hours, I had “lost” communication with her when I had expected that we would talk. I could readily relate to the emotional rollercoaster ride that had been taken….which now paralleled those being played out on stage.
In the last act…. the young Octavia, overcomes adversity to get the girl, and together they too walk away into the night…. Curtain closes.
I left into a cold windy night and briskly walked back to our apartment. And upon arriving, I sent a short message to say I was back safe and a few moments later l receive a loving response from the one I love. I too, got the girl!
Each day, I find and read your "companion" piece first and, unfailingly, I began to feel sorry for ME that I "missed" those particular items OR don't know where to find the others - I'm using an old brain I found around here this morning and it doesn't have everything in it that I need to "find you" - usually find enough to take-up TWO hours of soulful reading, however, AND NOW I REALLY DO HAVE TO GET ON WITH MY CHORES! I LOVE YOU LOTS......Rita in Texas
This has nothing to do with your latest column although I did read it. I wanted to share with you a strange dream that I had about you. You performed in our city (Lincoln, Nebraska) and after the show you asked us to drive you around the city in your car. You instructed my husband to drive fast and you opened the moonroof and stood up. You were waving to the people walking on the sidewalk although few of them seemed to know who you were.
I have no idea where this dream came from. I did snack on some yogurt covered raisins before going to bed.
Delightful. Thank you.
To the mom and dad of the young man who wants to major in English. I was an English major. The English majors I knew were versatile and smart. They made careers in an array of fields. I went from community organization, to mid-level management of a survey (where I said, hire English majors, for the temporary work of organizing and writing up the data. and we did, and they were the best) , to mid-level administration and development of a state aging program, to law school. I practiced law for 40+ years. Happy with my English major.
Yes! I am happy to hear of another successful English major! :)
I have a BA in English as well. I'd hoped to go on to teaching, but child care and the need to earn an income got in the the way of further education. My little BA has served me very well, though: My husband and I have run a number of home-based businesses over the years (which allowed us to keep the kiddies at home instead of sending them off to daycare). I found that an ability to arrange words is a very good skill to have when writing ad copy, writing and editing product manuals, and translating tech speak to plain English, among other things. After my children were grown, I decided to go back to school to become a nurse. Though it ultimately didn't work out (I was far too high strung to survive hospital clinicals), the school's dean very enthusiastically accepted me into the program, based on my humble 25+ year old BA in English. He was quite intrigued by the idea of a nurse who could understand Shakespeare. :)
Mr. & Mrs. Paulson, if you are reading this, please rest assured, a degree in English does not necessarily condemn a student to a life of penury. I agree with Mr. Keillor, the important thing is that your son should study hard and learn as much as he possibly can during his college years. There are a lot of practical things he can do with a BA once he graduates! Good luck to all three of you.
Well said, Catherine.
I can still recall
The wheat fields of St. Paul
And the morning we got caught
Robbing from an old hen.
Old McDonald , he made us work
then he paid us for what it was worth .
Another tank of gas
And back on the road again
Lobo
I was an English major. Tried engineering of several kinds and then decided, if I was going to stay in college and play football (that’s the real reason I went to college, to play football, become a pro, and get rich), I’d better find something else to study besides math and science, because my brain was getting tired of keeping track of the multitudes of formulas needed to take tests intelligently, my interest was waning, and my GPA was looking grim.
So I changed, but not to English. I changed to journalism. But the type of writing one does in journalism is formulaic also, and the precision required in that field is a universe away from admiration for Dickens and love of Twain. But I hung in there until I had to take philosophy classes, and my plans for a financially secure future were dashed upon the shores of DesCartes. The man’s ruminations and cogitations forced me to ask, “If I am, and if I am to continue being, must I think?”
Well! I would think so, but I was not going to be a teacher! Are you kidding? Teach school to naughty children? But I had to settle on plans for a degree. And that was BS, specifically, a B.S. in English, a teaching degree. Football wasn’t going to take me very far; that was becoming obvious. So maybe I could just get my degree and then I could drive trucks or do something else when I’d finished college. That became the plan.
I did so enjoy being an English major, much more than I intended. I even liked writing research papers. And the creative writing classes lifted me out of myself. Several of my classmates became writers of some fame! It was an honor to hear the young authors themselves read out loud, the music of their voices singing their poems, oh, my! I also read out loud, and some of these angelic voices even gave me support. So I continued writing my drivel, to this very day. The literature I read laboriously slowly, but with joy, even the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare. Three o’clock in the morning and trapped in a play, imagining the stage, the actors, the emotions, the spectacle, then I’d be up at seven and off to class!
Cut to the chase: One of my professors was an incredible teacher who performed his classroom duties with joy and opened my eyes in much the same way DesCartes had done. I decided, what the heck? I wonder if I could do that? I’ll try teaching, if I get a chance. I can always get out pretty easily.
So I tried, and I was destroyed by the naughty children in a matter of several weeks. I pushed on, finished that contract, and started looking for something else to do, but then another opportunity to teach got laid at my feet. Imagine that, getting laid at my feet! That one went two years.
“No more!” I cried. Finished those two years, then I applied at many places for various jobs, and “got laid” again with another opportunity to teach. What was happening?
So, reluctantly, I married teaching. The extra marital affair with the profession hadn’t been working, so I married her. I found advice and help in my new job. Some fine professional educators showed me a few things. And at last, English teaching embraced me, and she never let me go.
And in that way, I am so, so fortunate. I taught for over thirty years, retired, and then found a job driving trucks until I couldn’t do that anymore. It was also kind of fun.
Thank you ❤️.
You could be mistaken about your hometown audience. I attended your reading in St Paul last April when Boom Town came out. I recall more than 20 in attendance. The small church seemed pretty full. There was very little publicity, so it’s hard to know if you could have filled a larger space. Could you sell enough tickets to cover the nut of a full cast production? I’d say yes, but you might have a better hand on the local market. Al Franken is back doing standup and selling out locally. Get him as a guest and you two would fill the hall.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dan-hicks-hot-licks-singer-dead-at-74-72395/
Thanks for tickling my memories from a generation of delight in hearing "A Prairie Home Companion," "The news from Lake Woebegone," and the nostalgic music of the Shoe Band, et al. You have been doing God's work for a good long time, and now it continues. Stay healthy, and as my father Ben Brantley used to say, "Be careful on the road."
To "Sharon" who thinks the prison system is just fine, just like it is, and everybody in there got there as a result of their own life decisions and are all "monsters", I'd like to remind her of the 19 year old man who was taken Riker's Island in the late '90s because a snooty sales person in an overpriced boutique falsely accused him of shoplifting an expensive hand bag. After three years waiting for a trial, during which time he was repeatedly beaten and raped, it was found that he was accused simply because the woman didn't want one of his "class", or, let's face it - color, sullying up the joint, and needed a reason to have him removed.
Within his first year out, he took his own life.
When someone "Sharon" knows, respects or loves ends up in one of those places, we'll see how her view of the prison system is affected.
Moorhead, MN! WOW! Seeing that sign brings back to me once again one of the most joyous trips I ever took to the Midwest! Prairie-Homers from all over the world (no Kidding- Scotland, Australia?) - responded to an invitation to a special Prairie Homers' get together! We spent a marvelous week together, Getting To Know YOU!, the cast and each other . To top it off, I decided to end the western leg of my trip by checking out Moorhead, MN .I wanted to see if there really was such a thing as a Prairie Home Cemetery! YES! YES! YES!
Guy Noir would have been elated, as a detective, to find that this isn't a piece of creative fiction at all! The whole feel of the place is like "Little House On the Prairie" - that these people came from somewhere else, but they had made their lives here so permanently, that this is where they wanted to take their rest!
I'm reading Mitchener's Alaska right now, and I'm impressed with the efforts he went to to authenticate his work. Finding the Prairie Home Cemetery, for me, was just another indication that as another premier writer, you also take care to authenticate the backbones of your stories!
And for any of you who are in the area and thinking about a "Sunday Drive," the Prairie Home Cemetery is a truly peaceful, contented place to spend an hour or two in, thinking about all the immigrants in our family trees - those who first found their earthly homes in places like this one!
You are so good, wholesome and humorous. I miss the PHC radio shows. On their way to parity women have created havoc. I'm sorry you were a victim.
Best wishes, Mary Anne Hoadley
I liked your answer to the father who was worried about his son's plans to become an English major. For the 17 years before I retired, I managed the professional organization that your UM Latin teacher, Margaret Forbes, once belonged to. Thanks to Chris Brunelle, you lent your name to a successful capital campaign carried out on my watch. As you can imagine, Greek and Latin teachers get the "what good is that?" question at least as often as English teachers do. My response is: The fact that "information age" and "knowledge worker" are clichés doesn't mean they're untrue, and people trained to understand and then write about different kinds of information are, in the end, better employees than people taught a specific skill. This is the point where your advice that the father demand application in return for support complements mine: If the English major doesn't do the hard work of understanding and then explaining worlds as different as, say, a whaler, medieval Denmark, and Regency society, then the training (and it is training as much as it is inspiring) is useless.
A well-trained English (and Classics) major can learn specific skills on the job, solve a variety of problems, leave a lucid explanation of the solution for others to follow, and move on to the next situation. Of course, getting to that level of competence takes time, and the easy route for human resources people is to hire for the immediate need. College career offices can help the liberal arts major to present him- or herself to a skeptical audience, and dad can insist that son apply himself in that direction as well. See also, among other sources of advice, Leaving Academia by Christopher L. Caterine (yes, a Classicist), Princeton, 2020.
Done right, being an English (or Classics) major can be a 21st century win-win (or, to us older people, a case of having and eating cake at the same time): Spend four years of college expanding the mind and maybe even the soul and then graduate ready to make a living.
Adam Blistein
P.S. I'm not too young to remember Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Speaking of college, I played that song on college radio back then and play it on community radio now.
Of love and Opera
I to attend the Met. It was a long evening which started at seven and ended around eleven forty-five. It was the season’s first performance of “Der Rosenkavalier” which apparently is staged each year. This was the one hundredth anniversary of the first U.S. performance of this “bittersweet comic masterpiece”. I’d never heard the music before and other than reading the program was unfamiliar with the story. I generally do this alone…. It’s not for everybody….
After living in New York off and on over the past ten years I decided that I should take a stab at watching Opera at the Met. While not an avid opera fan, I do appreciate the overall collaboration of stage, voice, orchestra and story. One needs to have an easily aroused emotional temperament to “get it” I guess. It takes a couple hours to place myself into the story….not unlike when I get immersed in a good book.
I remember some lines from a movie (The Never Ending Story) where the keeper of a book shop is telling one of the young characters that the book he is looking at is too dangerous to read citing the feelings he experiences when the giant squid is attacking the submarine “Nautilus” in Jules Vern’s, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea”. And once you’ve been taken in, that’s when the enjoyment and escape begins. In “Der Rosenkavalier” this was about midway through the second act (of three).
While there seems to be a very broad swath of humanity who attends these performances, I’m finding the intermissions are great for people watching. Not all the drama takes place on stage; some at the bar, some on the balcony or in the main lobby. To those in jeans and tee shirts to the formal folk of means, it has all the diversity of New York and the world. There must be a common thread but it’s hard to put a finger on it. I have three more performances to try.
During the second intermission (around ten) it was clear that a good number of folks were bailing out. This was a Monday night and I’m sure many probably had an early start the next day. I was in the foyer on the “Grand Tier” level just watching when I heard someone calling “Mary!” in what I considered a very angry tone. I looked in the direction of the voice and observed an elderly man standing between two elevators.
He was clearly agitated. I speculated his wife had entered a very crowded elevator and he had lost track of her. The second call moments later was a little less angry and more worried, perhaps sounding somewhat as if he had been abandoned…..the third call was of panic and you could see his look had gone from anger to almost fear……I felt at least some empathy for him…others perhaps not so much as he was violating the formality of that space.
People in the elevators were holding open the doors, trying to avoid leaving this man in a lurch so to speak, and as much as Mary was apparently trying to get out others were trying to get in for the short ride, but a few seconds later, out of the furthest elevator “popped” Mary…..and reunited, she took him by the hand and very slowly lead the way down a long stairway, out the front entrance and they disappeared into the night. The lights dimmed a chime sounded and the remaining patrons returned to their seats for act three.
In the midst of the next act, my mind wandered into the emotions of that brief encounter, relating them to ones I had recently felt when Ellen (my wife) was away and for a few hours, I had “lost” communication with her when I had expected that we would talk. I could readily relate to the emotional rollercoaster ride that had been taken….which now paralleled those being played out on stage.
In the last act…. the young Octavia, overcomes adversity to get the girl, and together they too walk away into the night…. Curtain closes.
I left into a cold windy night and briskly walked back to our apartment. And upon arriving, I sent a short message to say I was back safe and a few moments later l receive a loving response from the one I love. I too, got the girl!
I think you did too
Each day, I find and read your "companion" piece first and, unfailingly, I began to feel sorry for ME that I "missed" those particular items OR don't know where to find the others - I'm using an old brain I found around here this morning and it doesn't have everything in it that I need to "find you" - usually find enough to take-up TWO hours of soulful reading, however, AND NOW I REALLY DO HAVE TO GET ON WITH MY CHORES! I LOVE YOU LOTS......Rita in Texas
subscribe me
I started listening to your show when I was in middle school, I’m middle thirties now. I really miss PHC on the radio.
Dear Garrison,
This has nothing to do with your latest column although I did read it. I wanted to share with you a strange dream that I had about you. You performed in our city (Lincoln, Nebraska) and after the show you asked us to drive you around the city in your car. You instructed my husband to drive fast and you opened the moonroof and stood up. You were waving to the people walking on the sidewalk although few of them seemed to know who you were.
I have no idea where this dream came from. I did snack on some yogurt covered raisins before going to bed.
Robin