Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)

The Irish Times has substantial coverage of the life and work of Seamus Heaney. You might begin here.

Many years ago in Boston, I heard Heaney give a great lecture about poetry and language. I remember it as drawing heavily on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I met Heaney once in the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge and thanked him for that lecture. He was checking on how his books were doing. Just a couple of years ago, I saw a man I thought was Heaney in the Harvard Square Peet’s. He had to be Heaney. I took the chance and said hello, but he wasn’t. The strange thing: whoever this man was, he knew Heaney, as he said, and was editing a Heaney manuscript. On his table, an envelope with Heaney’s return address.

One more thing about The Butler

The presidents are a mixed bag. Kennedy (James Marsden) and Johnson (Liev Schreiber) barely leave an impression. John Cusack is pretty plausible as Nixon in ruins. Alan Rickman is semi-plausible as Reagan. Robin Williams bears a greater resemblance to Truman than to Eisenhower, which made for some confusion in my viewing party.

My choice for Eisenhower: William H. Macy, with the right bald cap.

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Five things about The Butler
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Five things about The Butler

Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, and David Oyelowo are brilliant actors. I see three Oscar nominations right there.

I feared a Mr. Holland’s Opus: the backdrop-of-history syndrome. But I had nothing to fear. The man was, after all, working in the White House, and for a long time.

Clarence Williams III (Mod Squad, anyone?) now looks like his grandfather, the pianist and composer Clarence Williams.

The character of Louis Gaines (Oyelowo) owes something to John Lewis, just as Elaine intuited.

The film seems to carry a message for young African-Americans concerning a certain racial epithet. Knowing what Winfrey thinks about that word, I could be seeing things. But I don’t think so.

And one more: We watched the film in a nearly empty theater — two other pale people and us. When Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign became part of the storyline, our fellow moviegoers began to mutter and did not stop. They left right away. We stayed through the credits, as we almost always do.

Elaine has written a post with six more things about The Butler.

[The awkward full title: Lee Daniels’ The Butler.]

A yucky Wednesday on NPR

I winced a little when I heard a guest on the PBS NewsHour address Judy Woodruff and company as “you guys.” And I winced again this morning when I heard David Brancaccio on NPR’s Morning Edition report that air quality in China is better today after “a yucky Wednesday.” Do high levels of pollution count as “yucky”? Maybe in third grade.

Come on, you guys. It’s called diction.

A college exit-exam

More evidence that a degree in itself is not enough:

Next spring, seniors at about 200 U.S. colleges will take a new test that could prove more important to their future than final exams: an SAT-like assessment that aims to cut through grade-point averages and judge students’ real value to employers.

Are You Ready for the Post-College SAT? (Wall Street Journal)

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (the focus of the article and not an SAT-like multiple-choice test) plays an important part in the research that informs Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The link goes to my review.

*

3:25 p.m.: The link to the WSJ article doesn’t work. What works: search for the article via Google, and you can get to the article from the search results.

Thank you, Bryan Garner

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, on “thank you” and responses to it:

“Thank you” remains the best, most serviceable phrase, despite various attempts to embellish it or truncate it: “thanking you in advance” (presumptuous and possibly insulting), “thank you very much” (with a trailer of surplusage), “thanks” (useful on informal occasions), “many thanks” (informal but emphatic), *“much thanks” (archaic and increasingly unidiomatic), *“thanks much” (confusing the noun with the verb), and *“thanx” (unacceptably cutesy).

I prefer “thank you.” My favorite embellishment, for use on the telephone when appropriate: “Thank you, you’ve been really helpful.” More:

The traditional response to “Thank you” is “You’re welcome.” Somehow, though, in the 1980s, “You’re welcome” came to feel a little stiff and formal, perhaps even condescending (as if the speaker were saying, “Yes, I really did do you a favor, didn’t I?”). As a result, two other responses started displacing “You’re welcome”: (1) “No problem” (as if the speaker were saying, “Don’t worry, you didn’t inconvenience me too much”); and (2) “No, thank you” (as if the person doing the favor really considered the other person to have done the favor). The currency of “You’re welcome” seems to diminish little by little, but steadily. Old-fashioned speakers continue to use it, but its future doesn’t look bright.

Suddenly I am an old-fashioned speaker.

What do you say when someone says “thank you”?

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. The Garner asterisk marks an “invariably inferior form.”]

August 28, 1963

Disruptive, a pernicious cliché

In The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz suggests that the business buzzword disruptive (brainchild of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen) is “the most pernicious cliché of our time.”

The “unsavory habits of mind” that Shulevitz sees in those who celebrate “disruption”: “an almost utopian faith in technology,” an assumption that “all public or nonprofit institutions are sclerotic and unable to cope with change,” and a distaste for genuine democracy. This brand of disruption operates from the top down.

A spelling of the future

[As seen at a highway rest stop. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

My definition: “a misspelling so strange that it must be traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution.” Think of it as tomorrow’s spelling today.

You out there: have you seen off  for of?

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired : now

Russell Jacoby on Stanley Fish

Russell Jacoby writes about Stanley Fish and the fate of the humanities:

He closes one of his defenses of the humanities with a little vignette of an encounter with a university lobbyist. He offers to accompany the fellow to the next legislative committee investigating the university. But the lobbyist has doubts about Fish’s conduct and asks, “Will you behave?” Fish concludes his chapter, “Some people never learn.” The self-satisfaction is palpable — as is the self-mystification. The unexciting truth is that Stanley Fish has always behaved. He has always bravely defended self-interest. With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.

Stanley Fish Turned Careerism Into a Philosophy (The New Republic)

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Review of Fish’s How to Write a Sentence