English Majors

English majors comprise a secret society devoted to the helpless love of books by dead people and an aversion to flummery, persiflage, gobbledygook, gibberish, and high-flown malarkey. And here from A Prairie Home Companion—the only live radio variety show in America today that is hosted by an English major—are the Six-Minute Hamlet, the Ten-Minute MacBeth, tributes to Hawthorne and Kerouac and Emily Dickenson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes the M.F.A. scam and the ballad of John Henry ("John Henry was an English major and poetry was his line. He sat by the window with his yellow legal pad and he wrote one sentence at a time"). With guest appearances by Billy Collins, Roy Blount Jr., Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Allen Ginsberg, and Calvin Trillin.