Parvum Opus 318 ~ The Invisible Circus

PARVUM OPUS

Number 318

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The Invisible Circus

Where we live, movies on TV are rated 1-4 stars, and in between, like 2-1/2. After looking at these ratings for years, I realize that the ratings are not assigned by objective experts in cinematography, acting, scripting, and so on. Some of them are inexplicable, but some are very explicable. I will explicate. I watched a 2001 movie with Cameron Diaz called The Invisible Circus, rated only one star on TV. IMBD.com gives it about 5 out of 10, which is believe is an average of ratings by the web site readers. So it’s not a great movie, but it’s not bad. I’d never heard of it; it was produced in Spain and perhaps wasn’t released in the U.S. It’s a little slow, but has OK acting and good production values, and the San Francisco hippy scene seemed realistic to me (though it’s pretty impossible to simulate on film an LSD trip well with camera tricks, even with today’s computer graphics). It’s about a teenage girl whose hippy sister died in Europe in the 1970s, so the young girl goes to Europe to try to find out more about her sister’s death. It turns out that the hippy sister was enamored of underground terrorist revolutionary groups, and violence ensued. Guilt also ensued. The girl bombed an office building theoretically full of corporate devils, but in fact she just killed a young accountant who was a family man. I think the TV reviewer who gave it only one star may have disliked the anti-terrorism message, the disillusionment with the extreme left, and the few references to God in the movie. I’d wager that if those elements were removed (e.g., change the remorse to “We didn’t do enough” a la Bill Ayers, and erase all religious notes), the same reviewer would have given it at least 2-1/2 stars. There’s no other way to account for a one-star rating here for this fairly average movie.

Homeward Repair

Last week I wrote about the almost archaic use of repair to mean go. At first I couldn’t see the connection between that meaning and the more common meaning of mend or fix. But it occurred to me (right after I hit the Send button) that it makes sense that going back home can repair you, too.

New Pubs

I’ve just published three pieces of fiction on Amazon.com as digital books, which can be downloaded to a computer or a Kindle reader. You can search for Rhonda Keith, or for these titles, to read the plot summaries: The Wish Book; Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps With the Corn; and Still Ridge. The Wish Book, a novella, is a fantasy-suspense-romance involving the old Sears Roebuck catalogues. Carl Kriegbaum is a short story about a young gambler who finds himself upright in a cornfield in Kansas with his feet encased in a tub of concrete; how would you get out of a spot like that? Still Ridge is a short story about a young woman who moves from Boston to Appalachia and finds there are two kinds of moonshine, the good kind and the kind that can kill you.

CutePDF

Mike Sykes wrote about the Periodic Table of Typefaces:

I found it not too difficult to print the image of the Periodic Table of Typefaces to a pdf file to a disk file, using CutePDF, which fits to the (landscape) page size (and is free). I like it, but don't understand the arrangement - maybe I haven't though hard enough. Or maybe it's arbitrary?

If you read the fine print at the bottom of the page, it says that the fonts are sorted by popularity, some sort of polls. But there’s a preponderance of heavy old-style German fonts — 9 out of 100 seems excessive; I could find a lot of fonts I’d rank above those. And I don’t understand the numerical arrangement of the ranks. But it’s still the wallpaper on our computer.

Why Teachers Chew Nails, and I Don’t Mean Their Fingernails

Here’s an excerpt from The Vocabula Review:

by Carey Harrison

… I'm sitting in my English Department office, staring at an undergraduate composition class paper — a summary of the short story the class has been reading — and I read: She seek Connie Dad, he was the man who kill her boyfriend. This is not a freshman paper; not a paper by a recent immigrant but one American born and educated, if that’s the word I want; the student in question is about to graduate in a few months' time as a political science major. I can feel my head throbbing with rage. But who is there to kill, or even to berate? Not the student, who tells me in dignified but tearful outrage, when I point out her errors (all of the same sort as the sentence quoted), that none of her other professors have complained about her written English.

[Oops, should be “has complained”.] Not only can this student not write tolerable English, I’m certain she cannot read with much comprehension — she certainly hasn’t paid close attention to her reading — and she certainly hasn’t spent much of her free time chatting with literate people. What understanding can she have of her field of political science, which is about ideas, thus about words; and what can she contribute? But this college graduate will no doubt have her self-esteem, once she dries her tears.

Further notes on my ESL teaching fiasco last fall: The Moroccan Berber student I mentioned before whose Facebook self-photos were first of a black African child with a big gun, and then of an adolescent black African boy with a big gun, now features a young black African man with a big gun. Is this a not so subtle message?

Another anecdote: One day the Saudi princess (she was a real Saudi anyway) argued with me about an assignment to write a brief thank-you to a professional woman who had volunteered her valuable time to talk to the group about her specialty. I wanted everyone to say thanks as an English writing exercise. I have no idea why this girl was arguing about it (“Why do we have to do this?”), but I actually tried to explain why one should say thanks, and be thankful, explained the philosophical concept of gratitude, and quoted William Blake, just to try to turn this into an intellectual exercise; but for her it was an exercise of will. Finally she said, “Why are you so rude?” I had descended into sarcasm at last, but not actual rudeness. So I had no choice but to say she was being rude. I think she was one of the students who thought I was “insensitive”. Another time, when we were talking about unusual foods and culture, she also said she’d eaten horse. I said, “Oh really?” She said, “Yes, horse, camel, dog, ass…” I asked her to tell us more about that and she smirked and said it was just a joke. But, though she was Saudi, she’d lived here a while and attended high school here, so her English wasn’t bad. Disingenuous is too polite a word for her.

I continued to be polite to her and all the students, but I found increasingly hard to be cheerful, because the (tenured) program director supported the complaining students (re my insensitivity) and not me. So I gave up the job and the paycheck. The point is that when I started teaching many years ago, my university department was more supportive of the teachers. This began to change not long after I left, and now it seems that many schools are pimping education. Anything to keep the students in the seats. See Carey Harrison above.

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Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

Or click on underlined book links.

T-SHIRTS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop:

NEW: Star O’ The Bar

AND Black on Black Heart

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

If you build it they won't come (border fence)

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

I am here

Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

I eat dead things (doggy shirt and BBQ apron)

Plus kids’ things, mouse pad, teddy bear, coffee mugs, beer stein, and more!

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

Parvum Opus 317 ~ Person-Caused Weaseling

Dave, Daily Writing Tips, and Fowler

Dave DaBee turned me on to Daily Writing Tips, which I added to my home page RSS feeds. Modernizing Liturgical English was interesting to me for a couple of reasons, especially this quote from:

Richard Hodges’s A Special Help to Orthographie (1643) in which the writer notes the disconnect between how verbs are written and how they are pronounced in ordinary speech:

“Howsoever wee use to Write thus, leadeth it, maketh it, noteth it, raketh it, perfumeth it, etc. Yet in our ordinary speech (which is best to bee understood) wee say, leads it, makes it, notes it, rakes it, perfumes it.”

I don’t know a lot about early orthographie or why one spelling was chosen over another, let alone why people switched from makes to maketh before the ink was dry. But Richard Hodges was a man after my own heart.

Dave is also interested in the difference between toward and towards as discussed on DWT with the very fine explanations from Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

And as if he hadn’t done enough, Dave also sent an article by Fred Shapiro in The New York Times about the attribution of a definition of success that’s circled the globe a million times and has been wrongly attributed to Emerson. I’ve written before about false attributions in e-mails. Sometimes they are just mistakes that get repeated. Sometimes the attributions are forced, as in those various bits of advice supposedly from the Dalai Lama that sound like they issued forth from a man wearing a ponytail and clogs (e.g., “Cooking and lovemaking should be approached with abandon”). Why drag the poor old Dalai Lama into it? He has enough problems.

More from Fowler, illustrating the importance of punctuation:

!!! The teacher beat the scholar with a whip. A simple description.
!!! The teacher beat the scholar, with a whip. For emphasis, as an expression of outrage; or to clarify that the teacher whipped the scholar, rather than the teacher beat a scholar who had a whip.

Note: No scholars were hurt in the exposition of this grammatical principle.

Daily Writing Tips also has a long discussion of the difference between toward and towards, both of which are in common use. Somewhere along the way I learned that toward is correct but I don’t know why and have no particular rationale or feeling about it. I would think that towards is analogous to the construction backwards, while toward resembles forward. Fowler says this regarding pronounciation with one or two syllables: “The prepositions are best pronounced [tord(z)], but in recent use the influence of spelling is forcing [toowor'd(z)] on the half educated.” He cuts deep and sharp.

Experiment

I learned how to embed type fonts, so I’m trying it with this edition of Parvum Opus, hoping that it will work with special characters. It makes for a heftier file weight, but let me know if you notice anything different. Or untoward.

If you want to try it, so as to keep the fonts you choose in the documents you send even if the recipients do not have the same fonts in their computers, do this:

In Word 2007:

Click the multi-colored icon in the upper left corner.

Go to Word Options, then Save, then click Embed Fonts.

Other versions of Word:

Go to Tools, then Options, then Embed fonts.

You should choose to embed all, not just those in use, which means that if the recipient downloads the file and corrects a typo, for instance, the original font will be there.

Would you buy a used car from Satan?

I learned that someone we know occasionally calls his son, now a middle-aged adult, Satan, apparently an old nickname. I'd be curious to meet a grown-up who stuck with such a nickname — it might work at the age of two and maybe, oh, sixteen, but not at fortyish. And no, I probably wouldn't buy a used (or new) car from him.

Person-Caused Weaseling

Here (the U.S.) and there (England) government ’crats are anxious to avoid using the word “Muslim” and “terror” in the same sentence. In the UK, it’s now “anti-Muslim activity” which is correct as far as it goes. Mark Steyn as usual is both entertaining and instructive on the subject.

The Big O’s new Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, introduced the phrase “man-caused disasters” to replace you know what. Sweet. Of course you can make the case that she’s being sexist. What about females of a not-to-be-named persuasion who hide bombs under their, uh, frocks?

I think we could totally switch to the passive tense to solve this problem. As Anita Loos wrote in the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “Suddenly he became shot!” Suddenly the buildings fell down! Suddenly they became exploded! Stuff happens!

Frank Davis of the Mercury News wrote about the current campaign to come up with words to put a more friendly spin on the disasters around us. For example:

bailout > rescue

pullout > drawdown

nationalization > receivership

pork > earmark > congressionally directed spending items

Try it at home with your family! With a little effort, you can turn that frown upside down by converting plain English to weasel words!

Read the Book

I watched Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil again last week. It’s been a while since I read the book but I read it at least three times, once recording it for the blind. I enjoyed the movie but the book was better, and the movie threw in something that I’m not sure was in the book, at least not the same way. Kevin Spacey plays the man in Savannah arrested for the murder of his young lover (true story), who was providing his services to everyone in town, male and female. The case was tried three times, making it a most unusual crime story. The movie added what felt like a Greek chorus pointing out the moral to the audience: the Spacey character was on trial for being gay. No, they tried him because he shot a man and they were trying to decide whether it was murder or self-defense. Since the victim was also gay or rather bi-sexual, the moral could not have been about anti-gayness. The man who shot him was to my mind more anti-gay than the jury, who shot no one.

I went to see the author, John Berendt, in Boston some years ago, talking about his book. Someone in the audience asked if he liked the movie, and he just said that it paid for his townhouse.

I’ve heard other authors comment on movie-ized versions of their books. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone mystery series was ground up and shoved into a movie casing with Kathleen Turner as the detective running around the city chasing bad guys — while wearing high heels. Another writer whose name I forget wrote a book about the transport of Jewish refugee children during WWII; in a script meeting, some young thing asked “Why all the Jewish stuff?” Take the money and run. In high heels if necessary.

PO Aweigh

A bit of doggerel I wrote, though I don’t really mean it:

Away with words

if you don’t

weigh your words

or have

a way with words.

With Our Ship Bumper Full We Will Homeward Repair

Repair, meaning return, has become an archaism, almost never used now except as an affectation. It comes from the Latin for repatriate, to go back to one’s country. For an example of 19th century usage, here’s a beautiful song called “Farewell to Tarwathie” by George Scroggie, about whalers going to sea, setting out from the northeast coast of Scotland. Judy Collins did a wonderful version of it, complete with whale voices, but this version sounds more like a sailor.

Sign my petition to establish a Scottish-American History Month. You don’t have to be Scottish to sign!

New interview with bluesman Sonny Robertson.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Parvum Opus 316 ~ An Education Carol

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Son Jude found this very nifty Periodic Table of Typefaces. I haven’t been able to print out the entire page yet; I may need to print it on four pages and tape them together. Meanwhile it’s now the computer desktop background.

An Education Carol

Stave 1, Education Past: I promised (myself, anyway) that I’d write something about the classes I taught in the fall and why I chose not to return this spring. There were quite a few little incidents, but here’s one example of my “insensitivity”. A young Muslim student from Morocco, who had a law degree (though their requirements are less stringent than ours) wrote this little story as an assignment to write a scary folk tale from home (it was around Halloween): A Christian somehow did something wrong ~ I can’t remember the details now ~ and ended up dying because he got water in his ears, because as everyone knows, donkeys die from getting water in their ears and Allah wanted this man to die like a donkey. I questioned the student in class about the story: I’ve read, of course, that the Koran teaches that Jews are dogs and pigs, but hadn’t heard the donkey bit yet. After a consultation with another Muslim student in their language, he said he’d translated a word that can mean Christian, Muslim, or Jew. I don’t buy that. Anyway, this fellow is still in that language program, which has a Facebook entry, where instead of a photo of himself, he used a photo of a black African (he is Arab, not black) child holding a large automatic or semi-automatic weapon. I noticed, though, that he changed the photo the other day ~ to one of a different black African boy holding a very large gun. Some of the students thought I was insensitive ~ though there were a couple of very sweet Muslim girls and black African Muslims who were quite friendly ~ but in fact I think I was getting to be pretty sensitive, not to say raw.

Stave 2, Education Present: I thought I might want to take some courses in a field new to me that would be useful, so I last week I went to talk to an admissions counselor at a small school. After explaining my education and professional background, he said that I’d have to get an associate’s degree and take an entire year of basic courses, including English composition. Couldn’t test out of them, because after all, my degrees were taken long ago and how did they know about me. I thought I seemed literate enough. When he asked what I was reading now, I named four books on the top of the pile: the autobiography of Whittaker Chambers, Chinese poetry, Kingley Amis on drink, and a Sharyn McCrumb mystery. So, I’m not going to take the courses I wanted.

Stave 3, Education Future: $100 billion is to be force-fed into U.S. education to stimulate learning. Do you think students will actually learn more, no matter what they do with the money? Jay Leno’s quiz of voting-age people turns up lack of knowledge of things like what was the Iron Curtain, and what century (let alone what year) Columbus discovered America (don’t bother objecting to the word “discover” ~ it was new to Columbus, just like when you discover a great new restaurant). Maybe Leno’s people had teachers who didn’t “teach to the test” and they were taught to think instead of memorizing irrelevant facts. Right. The Onion says that budget cuts are forcing schools to give up teaching the past tense, but $100 billion should prevent that. Of course journalism has been paving the way for eliminating the past tense for years: “Man Dies Yesterday”.

Brows

I keep running into the word snob defined as highbrow (usually in crosswords). Perhaps snobs raise their eyebrows, but highbrow has always meant someone with a high forehead, i.e. someone with a big brain. A lowbrow is someone who resembles a Neanderthal intellectually, with a small brain pan. A middlebrow is the average moderately educated person who reads best sellers. Crossword editors aren’t what they used to be; they too have had cutbacks.

NUBO

Somewhere I heard that NUBO is a new acronym for “new black overclass”. What happened to buppies (black urban professionals)? And why overclass instead of upperclass? Overclass reminds one too much of Nietsche’s ubermensch (overman or superman). Best not to go there.

Improbable Name

Having a peculiar name doesn’t necessarily guarantee social ignominy and failure. Kyndra Rotunda is a former JAG office in the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve, Chapman University School of Law Visiting Assistant Professor, and the author of Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials (Dennis Miller Radio, February 27, 2009). I first heard the theory about the danger of unusual names from a man named David, who came to a sad end.

Up

David Rogerson forwarded an amusing piece on the uses of the word “up” which is online in numerous places. You can look it up.

Uprising

Kathy Taylor of Beason News wrote about the bone-jarring late-winter “holier than thou roads”. I encountered a road that really rises up to meet you, as in the old Irish blessing. In a brick crosswalk, a brick had been knocked loose and was standing up in its bed in the middle of the street. I thought Someone Should Be Notified, but before I could do anything about it, a driver who was stopped at the traffic light jumped out of his car and put it back in place. And here is the Irish blessing for you, in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, though perhaps the road really shouldn’t rise up:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Whitman

Bob O. was moved by the Whitman poem Jan G-K sent last week, and sent another one he likes, from which I will quote briefly:

And thou America ,
For the scheme's culmination, its thought and its reality,
For these (not for thyself) thou hast arrived.

Thou too surroundest all,
Embracing carrying welcoming all, thou too by pathways broad and new,
To the ideal tendest.

FLASH! BAD LINK NOW GOOD FOR THE WISH BOOK:

TELL ME A STORY!

Read The Wish Book, a novella by Rhonda Keith, free to read online or download as a Word file.

New interview with bluesman Sonny Robertson.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

Link here to look for books on Amazon.com!

Or click on underlined book links.

T-SHIRTS, DENIM SHIRTS, MUGS, AND MUCH MORE AT Parvum Opus CafePress shop:

NEW: Star O’ The Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

If you build it they won't come (border fence)

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

I am here

Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

I eat dead things (doggy shirt and BBQ apron)

Plus kids’ things, mouse pad, teddy bear, coffee mugs, beer stein, and more!

ALSO Scot Tartans T-shirts and more (custom orders available).

Parvum Opus 315 ~ Serial Killer Examples

Vocals

For some reason the vowel question (W and Y) seemed to elicit the most interest in last week’s PO. Can’t imagine why, but for those of you who can really get into this sort of minutiae, you’re in luck. Mike Sykes wrote:

What my dictionary says of W is:
The sound normally represented by the letter is the bilabial semivowel /w/, closely resembling the value of Roman consonantal U or V. The sound was at first represented by uu, but in OE and early ME the runic character wynn was widely used, this in turn being replaced in ME by the ligature w. Consonantal w is now silent initially and medially before r and may be silent before h (see WH) and (in some words as answer, sword, two) after s and t. It may also be elided in the unstressed 2nd elem. of a compound, as in place-names (Norwich) and in certain nautical terms (forward, gunwale). Vocalic w results from the ME mutation of g and y (cf. YOGH) and medially and terminally forms a digraph with the preceding stressed vowel (as in bow); also from ME w was freq. used instead of u as 2nd elem. of other digraphs (as in paw, yew). Pl. W’s, Ws.

I assume his dictionary is the Oxford. Bilabial semivowel, you say. Almost two lips? And what would a Roman consonantal U or V sound like?

Herb H. wrote:

I see immediately that you are going to improve my pronunciation right now, by making me remember that y is a dipthong. I've heard the proper pronunciations many times, but just didn't realize they were right and I was wrong.

For example: synonym

see-yen-o-nee-yem

I've been saying "sin - o- nim"
Where there's only one y-vowel in a word, it's easier and of course gonna be faster.

example: symbal

see-yem-bul instead of "sim-bul"

I can do it, but people have got to be patient as it's gonna take me longer to do correctly.

Herb was just funning me. But I want to emphasize what I may not have made clear (to Herb) last week, that I was referring to the W or Y at the beginning of a word or syllable, not trailing as in “day” or “now”.

Herb continued:

Richie D. once told me when we were roommates at the Big Farm that the long i sound was always slurred into an e sound one way or another. Before falling asleep that same night, I yelled at him that in the term "Third Reich" the only vowel in the second word was a pure long i. He had to accept that so I turned off my thinker and it was much later before I realized I could have used the word "bike" just as well, in English. I used to just think and marvel how much we could learn if we had the ability to just clear out crap like that from our memories and make the space available. But then when we all had to learn about computers, that new learnin' cast a lot of doubt. Probably we can't make any space in our memories. Probably it's just like in a computer memory the space is there and it makes no difference whether it's occupied by knowledge that may be valuable or by complete trash.

And Dave DaBee wrote:

My opinion, which I *just* now realized just for you, is that one criterion for being a vowel is that it must be pronounceable on its own.

That's not sufficient (l m n are serial killer examples) but it's necessary. The w is a conmooshication of vowel sounds, as you say, but not on its own.

I guess you can’t say any consonant without some sort of vowel, even the mush-mouthed schwa as in “duh”. (“Serial killer” examples: good one, Dave!)

Mike Sykes, by the way, had quite a bit to say about quite a bit, but I’ll just include this remark on “almost often”:

…reminds me of the "fast speed" problem. Why does "old age" sound OK, while "young age" grates a bit. There's no consistency.
I’ve heard (and used) “at a young age” but we wouldn’t say anything like “the problems of young age”. There’s no consistency, but there is custom.

Poetry

Thanks to Jan for reminding me….

Recently I re-discovered Walt Whitman and realized how much I love his poetry. Today I was thinking about the simple pleasures in life, this says it perfectly.

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet
and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

We agreed that Whitman and Emily Dickinson, though unlike each other, were both surprisingly modern-sounding poets for the nineteenth century.

As for actual modern poetry, Tom Bethel wrote (March 2009 American Spectator) about the tin-eared poetrix Elizabeth Alexander’s offering for the inauguration, which I discussed elsewhere (“built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of”). Bethel said that university creative writing programs are cranking out poets by the hundreds, and quoted Joseph Epstein who quoted Kingsley Amis: “Everything that has gone wrong with the world since World War II can be summed up in the word ‘workshop’.” The creative writing students fill the glittering campuses they then teach workshops inside of.

Top o’ the Stack

On the top of the bedside pile o’ books:

I happen to be reading another book by Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking. Amis was a notorious drinker and put together this entertaining book about drinks. I was surprised when he used the word eats as a noun meaning food. I used to see this usage occasionally in the deep South when I lived there as a child, usually on a faded sign for a faded café. And I think I had a little girlfriend who used the word. I thought it was a regional illiteracy, but could it have been a carryover from old England, much like “drinks”? Why not?

I have also undertaken an 800-page autobiography, which ordinarily I wouldn’t, but so far I’ve gotten about one-third through Whittaker Chambers’ engrossing Witness.

Enormity

You know I hate to be picky, but I read that Obama uses the word “enormity” incorrectly, as do many of his fellow Americans. He uses it to mean something extremely big instead of extremely bad. He went to Harvard, after all, and edited the Harvard Law Review. Don’t tell me Shakespeare used that word that way. Even though the sense of outrageousness or going out of bounds is an old one, the meaning of evil is now so much attached to this word that it’s a bad idea to use the noun for anything that is not evil.

Facebook Freedom

Facebook has not only individual pages but pages for groups, causes, etc. Is it likely that there would be so many citizen groups springing up spontaneously to support non-secret ballots, per the “Employee Freedom of Choice Act”? I think not.

Sign my petition to establish a Scottish-American History Month. You don’t have to be Scottish to sign!

FLASH! BAD LINK NOW GOOD FOR THE WISH BOOK:

TELL ME A STORY!

Read The Wish Book, a novella by Rhonda Keith, free to read online or download as a Word file.

New interview with bluesman Sonny Robertson.

______________________________________________

Trivium pursuit ~ rhetoric, grammar, and logic, or reading, writing, and reckoning: Parvum Opus discusses language, education, journalism, culture, and more. Parvum Opus by Rhonda Keith is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Editorial input provided by Fred Stephens. Rhonda Keith is a long-time writer, editor, and English teacher. Back issues from December 2002 may be found at http://www.geocities.com/keithops/. Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please e-mail, and I'll take you off the mailing list. Copyright Rhonda Keith 2009. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.

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NEW: Star O’ The Bar

Veritas Vincit (Truth Conquers) with Keith clan Catti insignia

Flash in the Pants

If you're so smart why aren't you me?

If you build it they won't come (border fence)

Akron U. Alma Mater: The Lost Verse

PWE (Protestant Work Ethic) tote bag

I am here

Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

I eat dead things (doggy shirt and BBQ apron)

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