Letter, stranger

In the mail today, a letter. I like letters. But this one was a bit strange, or stranger. I know the writer by name, but I’ve never met her. How she knows me, I can’t imagine. But there we are, on the page — or pages, four of them — on a first-name basis. She’s telling me about how much we have in common, about her summer travel plans, about her grandchild. She says it’s “our moment.” And she’s asking me for money, and including an envelope in which I can send her some. Yipes.

Later, stranger.

VDP’s next-to-last

Here is Paul Zollo’s review of Van Dyke Parks’s next-to-last piano-vocal performance. A choice bit:

His friend Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame, introduced him to the packed house. “Van Dyke Parks,” he said, “is not just a genius. He is a fucking genius.”

It’s true.

Related reading
All OCA VDP posts (Pinboard)

[Penultimate seems to be everywhere these days, what with Letterman and Mad Men. Thus next-to-last.]

Free writing advice

What most students don’t recognize about writing is that improvement can come only from within. As with playing a musical instrument: no one can make you play in tune if you’re not interested. If you are interested, a good teacher can show you what you’re doing right and point you toward ways to improve.

The most useful habit a writer can develop is practice — regularly writing something . The most useful ability is a good ear, being able to hear what’s right and what has to be made right.

The more I write, the more I revise.

[Found on a piece of paper. Perhaps the idea was to offer advice in three sentences, two, one.]

The age of spinach

[Family Circus, May 21, 2015.]

No, Billy, they do not. But there is “teen spinach”:


[It’s no joke. An explanation of the name may be found here.]

I’ve seen shelf labels for “teen spinach,” but I’ve never seen the name on a package. Too creepy, I suspect.

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.]