Word of the day: eremite

Back in high-school chorus days, my daughter and son were singing Randall Thompson’s setting of Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star”:

And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.

Someone piped up: “What’s Eremite?” And the teacher explained that it was an element Keats had discovered.

It could be that this teacher was passing on misinformation that had come his way. Or he could have been winging it. From what my children have told me, the second possibility sounds more likely. The teacher might have been working from so-called context clues: the poem’s reference to chemical elements (“Tell us what elements you blend“), perhaps the strange capital E (though it’s chemical symbols, not the names of elements, that begin with capitals). Either way, the teacher was leading a chorus in a song whose words he had not taken the time to understand. He had not practiced what I like to call defensive reading: reading that requires a sure grasp of details, because somebody might ask you a question.

Eremite of course has nothing to do with chemistry. Frost’s poem makes reference to John Keats’s sonnet “Bright Star” (one of my favorite poems of eros). The poem’s speaker wants to be both like a star and not like a star— as “stedfast” as a star, but not a solitary contemplative:

    Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
    Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
    Of pure ablution round earth’s human
        shores

The speaker of “Bright Star” would prefer to be “still stedfast, still unchangeable” with his head resting on his beloved’s breast, where he can remain “Awake for ever in a sweet unrest” or swoon to death. What the speaker doesn’t want to be is alone. He doesn’t want to be an eremite. From Merriam-Webster:

noun er·e·mite \ˈer-ə-ˌmīt\
: hermit; especially : a religious recluse

The only good response when a student asks a question that the teacher cannot answer is something along these lines: “That’s a good question. We should know that, shouldn’t we? Let me see what I can find out.” Sending the question-asker in search of the answer teaches students that they’re better off not asking questions. Offering to find out is an appropriate combination of curiosity and humility. Nobody knows everything. But yes, the curiosity that might prompt a search for keats eremite should have been there to begin with.

I wish the question-asker in my children’s story had followed up the malarkey about a scientific discovery by asking, “Keats who?”

Related reading
Keats’s “Bright Star” : Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star” : Randall Thompson’s setting of Frost’s poem

Dylan on Letterman

Last night David Letterman introduced Bob Dylan as “the greatest songwriter of modern times.” And Dylan sang “The Night We Called It a Day.” The introduction must have left at least some viewers thinking that Dylan wrote this beautiful song, written in 1941 by Tom Adair (words) and Matt Dennis (music).

You don’t have to be Frank Sinatra to sing “The Night We Called It a Day” persuasively. But you need much more musicality than Dylan can muster. I can imagine Tom Waits doing a great version.

Gay Talese’s address book

I finally found four minutes and forty-six seconds to watch this film: Gay Talese’s Address Book. My favorite words: “I am a person who cares about the past as much as the future. I don’t think that it is ethical to erase the past.” I, too, don’t erase names from my address book.

Matt Thomas has also pointed his readers to a film about Gay Talese’s office. It requires three minutes and thirty-two seconds.

Opt out is not a transitive verb

Heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, in a story about parents opposed to state assessment-tests: “She opted her third-grade son out of the tests.”

Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009) glosses opt out of:

Opt out (of), meaning “to choose not to participate [in],” is a bit of legalese that has entrenched itself in the public consciousness through class-action lawsuits, contracts, and governmental regulations.

What GMAU didn’t need to point out is that opt out is an intransitive verb. It takes no object. You can opt out, but you cannot opt someone out. NPR’s reporter could have phrased the sentence in other ways: She chose to have her third-grade son not take the tests. She opted out of having her third-grade son take the tests. She refused permission for her third-grade son take the tests. She would not give permission for her third-grade son to take the tests. I like the last one best.

Some quick Google searching suggests that a transitive opt out is playing a bit part in discussions of testing.

[NPR, your transcript needs a hyphen for third-grade. I’ve added one here.]

What you mean “we,” Terry Gross?

Yesterday on NPR:

This is Fresh Air. I’m Terry Gross. Remember when you first saw a self-checkout aisle at a grocery store? We use them all the time now without giving much thought to the fact that they're doing work real people used to do.

Some people don’t use self-checkout, precisely because they do think about the jobs self-checkout eliminates. Some people choose people, even if it means waiting a little while in line.

Notice that Terry Gross’s “we” — “We use them all the time now” — is a “we” composed of non-cashiers. But people (“real people”) who cashier or have cashiered go shopping too, and they, too, might have reason to think about jobs lost to automation.

Related posts
Ceci n’est pas une caissière
Sad sight of the day

[Post title courtesy of an old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto: “It looks like we’re surrounded, Tonto.” “What you mean ‘we,’ white man?”]

Domestic comedy

“I have to figure out how to write it without using the word asshole.”

“Why don’t you leave the word out?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Context? See previous post.]

Spot story

I pulled into a choice spot in a parking lot — aah, shade. As soon as I opened the driver’s door and stepped out, the driver to our left rolled down her window: “I hope you’re not going to start banging my car. You’re parked so close to the line.”

“Believe me, I’m as careful with my car as I am with everyone else’s,” I said. (I know that I should have said it the other way around, but this story is true in every detail.) Up went her window. I closed my door and stepped back to check my parking. Our car was centered in the narrow space, as I more or less already knew. I don’t think a measuring tape would have added anything to what was obvious to the eye — my parking was, well, perfect.

As for our neighbor to the left: her SUV was parked within perhaps three inches of the white line between our cars. On her driver’s side, she had perhaps a foot and a half of space.

I wasn’t willing to let it go. I walked around to the other side of the SUV. “Would you like to look at how our cars are parked?” I inquired. She pulled out her phone and started her car. I worried for a moment that she was calling the cops. But she just backed out of her space, still talking on her phone. I stood at a distance and watched her leave.

This moment was my first experience of rudeness from a stranger in a long time. Elaine told me to let it go: was I going to let an idiot ruin my day? No. Not the idiot in the SUV next to us, and not the idiot in me who wanted to hang on to my indignation. I let it go long before writing this post.

[Yes, it felt like a moment from Curb Your Enthusiasm.]

George Bodmer at 1,000

George Bodmer’s daily cartoon Oscar’s Day has reached the one-thousand mark. Hurrah!

No to MFA

At the University of Southern California, seven MFA students in art and design have just said no:

We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large.

Julie Beaufils, Sid Duenas, George Egerton-Warburton, Edie Fake, Lauren Davis Fisher, Lee Relvas, and Ellen Schafer: a year’s worth of students saying no to what might be described as an academic bait-and-switch. It’s sad to say that these seven men and women seem to be the graduate students of the future, getting wise and walking away.

Thanks to Ian Bagger for pointing me to this story.

Related reading
MFA NO MFA

John Ashbery and Marcel Proust

From an interview with John Ashbery in The New York Times:

Q. Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

A. Proust.

And:

Q. If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

A. Again, Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, for better or worse. You finish it feeling sadder and wiser, so if you’re O.K. with the sadder part, you should take it on.

[Luanne, this post is for you.]