Bright lights and moral purposes

August 30, 2026

(all the way at the end, we get to some sexual street talk, which I think has exactly the right shock value for its context; but if s*cking c*ck offends you, skip the next-to-last sentence)

It starts with Steven Levine — a sparkling vehicle of joy, enthusiasm, and congeniality — roused to anger and protest, as I reported in the 8/3 posting “Two notes on gay moral purpose”:

SL breaks out in a combination of, on the one hand, genuine pride in occasions of humane concern and (to put it grandly) moral purpose in the gay world and, on the other, righteous anger at a long-standing tradition in psychology, sociology, and medicine of blanketly treating homosexuality as dysfunction and disease. With, as sideshow, celebration of the raw sexuality in homosexuality — recognizing the physical and emotional pleasures of the associated sexual practices — in the wonderful BIG FAG t-shirts created by Steven (which he’d been distributing with abandon at Amsterdam Pride).

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Loci of gay desire

August 30, 2026

(images that aren’t actually XXX-rated, but get as close to the line as possible while serving WordPress modesty — so some readers may choose to avert their eyes)

Briefly noted. For charging up the senses — big jolts for someone of my inclinations — on a quiet Sunday, Daily Jocks has sent out a mailer ad for thongs this morning (8/30) celebrating the male body as sexual object, close up, fore and aft:

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Till I see my Peter walking away

August 29, 2026

Swimming pool. Callipygian young man climbing out of it. David Hockney’s California dream. The painting:


(#1) Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool

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A pun of impossibility

August 29, 2026

Also elegantly minimal. Yesterday’s (8/25) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon:


An Etch A Sketch drawing of an Escher drawing; /ɛšǝ(r)/ Escher (rhotic for me, not for most BrE speakers) vs. /ɛčǝ/ Etch A, so primarily, fricative vs. affricate at same point of articulation (as in sheep vs. cheap or wish vs. witch) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2  — see this Page)

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Intertwingularity

August 27, 2026

Now, there’s a mouthful.

From Mike Pope, mail on 7/24/26 about how I sorted the books in my new apartment (described in my posting that day on “Sorting”):

— MP > AZ: Would you describe your system as intertwingular?

— AZ > MP: The short answer is yes, but I didn’t have the concept or the label for it until you asked the question. So, thank you.

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beclowning ourselves

August 27, 2026

Journalist Alex Wagner on MS NOW a little while ago:

We are so beclowning ourselves

(The intensive Gen-X so is just a bonus; AW was born in 1977, and Gen-X is roughly 1965 through 1980)

That’s beclown ‘make a fool of’ (perhaps clumsily). With a modest number of cites to be found, but uncommon enough to strike many hearers as a colorful coinage.

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Fresh beginnings, rebirth, resurrection

August 27, 2026

Some weeks back, in midsummer, I sat at my worktable as night drew to an end, when sunrise broke out magnificently in my window wall (see photo #1 in my 8/25 posting “Where I live”) and filled me with joy at the gift of a new day. Also triggering an avalanche of musical associations — conveying fresh beginnings (as here), or rebirth (both of them in Schubert lieder, to come below), or (as in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, also to come below), resurrection. (There’s more, lots more; I’ll list only a tiny sampling, from the odd trio of Haydn, Grieg, and Grofé — ok, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, they’re not))

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Dogbookman

August 26, 2026

The promised note on Albert Payson Terhune — with a name like that, he’d have to have been at least upper middle class, and he was, he was — and his dog books.

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Why we teach

August 26, 2026

A brief exchange on Facebook a while back (5/27/26) that I think is worth bringing to a wider audience. From Lynne Murphy (University of Brighton, in the UK), testily:

Hey, students who thought they could skip seminars after they “knew” what they were going to write their essay about.

You were wrong, and I’m taking some pleasure in pointing out all the connections you missed between different aspects of our module.

A pleasure I would have been happy to forego if you’d only come to class …

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A musical interlude

August 26, 2026

About my daily life, because I’m so backed up in things to do that I’m just picking little stuff out of a hat. (The incidental good news is that my lab tests were very pleasingly improved, and I’m now starting, eek, a very slow withdrawal from prednisone; think good thoughts about woolly mammoths for me.)

Meanwhile, I took an early break in my sleep last night, to search, I don’t really know why, for material on the dog books of my childhood.

I did indeed speed-read (and barely comprehend, though I got Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear for life) all of Shakespeare at the age if 9, of my own volition, but I also adored imaginative fiction for kids. Dr. Doolittle, Freddy the Pig, every Oz book there was. And books about noble dogs. My West Lawn PA companion for several years was a sweet mutt dog (part terrier, the rest mystery). Spot / Spotty (not an imaginative name, but fitting).

Out of this I will produce soon a posting on what we all called at the time LadADog (three syllables rushed into a ball). And Albert Payson Terhune. But that’s not what this posting is about. This posting is about the music that Apple was playing for me when I went on my computer dog search around 9:15 pm last night.

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