Small worlds

July 23, 2026

In recent news: the publication (on 7/6) of John D’Emilio’s latest book, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press). From Jonathan Ned Katz’s blurb:

a report from the trenches, a history of the struggle to create a history of sexuality, a personal history of political activism, the story of a [AZ: devoutly Catholic] smart boy from the Bronx who made himself into a pioneering, left, feminist, anti-racist gay, public intellectual.

Which prompts me to tell an anecdote about my man Jacques and me — and John D’Emilio. So my tale will of course begin with Larry Kramer, the author of the controversial novel Faggots, but more important to my tale, the founder of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which means that through his ceaseless abrasive hectoring, he changed the world for the better and helped to save untold numbers of lives.

(There are brief accounts of Kramer and D’Emilio in my 7/21 posting “Two celebrated gays”)

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Two celebrated gays

July 21, 2026

For reference in an upcoming posting about small worlds: brief accounts of Larry Kramer and John D’Emilio, two (justly) celebrated and very public gay men, of extraordinarily different natures, who I happened, once, to get linked with as a member of that category. (Blame it on my man Jacques, who knew the complexities of my nature but still managed, in his love, to think of me as genuinely heroic.)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Identities, My life | Leave a Comment »

Second Sunday

July 19, 2026

My second Sunday at Avant, beginning to refine old routines and create new ones. Did not celebrate with gay porn, but instead with an old favorite movie, the frivolous Astaire-Rogers delight The Gay Divorcee (from 1934). Your wife is safe with Tonetti / He prefer spaghetti. No Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing this Sunday, so I sang for two hours on my own, to Irish YouTube videos, eventually reaching peak loudness and passion. My tongue broke out in unknown strains / And sung surprising grace.

Accumulated the beginnings of way too many postings to come. And did the Sunday thing of restarting the computer and doing a save of its contents.

Ordered more household items, got some delivered, mostly things with instructions that are incomplete or completely incomprehensible, at least to me. On the first, I have a new atomic clock for the bathroom, the 40-year-old veteran being on its last legs; the new one has homed in on the right 12-hour Pacific Daylight Time, but has provided no way — that I can fathom — to set the date and day of the week. On the second,  I have the mounting tape but completely fail to understand how to adhesive-mount my collages (merely printed on stiff paper, not framed or heavy) on my walls. And on and on.

This will all get worse tomorrow, when even more stuff gets delivered. So I can wander fretfully from one puzzle to another.

 

Posted in Furnishings and tools, Movies and tv, My life | 3 Comments »

Walking through a door

July 18, 2026

I am reduced to reporting on the minutiae of daily life; everything else is overwhelming. (Half an hour this morning finding out where something I was absolutely sure had been moved had been stashed in my new place. At least I did actually find it. View this as a cautionary tale. I’m getting very little done, very slowly, and not very well, but it’s the best I can do, so I plug away.)

It’s taken me a whole week to figure out how to walk through doors here. Well, the extremely heavy (because astoundingly sound-proofed) front door to my place — negotiated from a walker, so that mere strength is not sufficient for the task.

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Posted in Language and the body, My life | 2 Comments »

Alpine flora color plates

July 17, 2026

From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago): 

guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.

Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations.

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Posted in Art, Books, German, Language and plants, My life, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »

nostalgie du ciel

July 17, 2026

Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me:

— HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me nostalgic and sad.

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Posted in Etymology, Language and culture, Language and plants, My life | Leave a Comment »

Merest note

July 16, 2026

Managed a shower, with improvised adjustments so I could sit down (though the shower is designed for a standing person) and also cope with a — surprise! — low-flow shower stream. All very edgy.

Then began some attack on the books, which are all mixed up, arranged on shelves in totally new ways in new places. As with pruning my library way down for the move, this requires handling large numbers of heavy books, so that my hands now barely work, cramp up, and hurt like hell. Constantly having to reinvent some new schemes for locating the books so that they’d be most useful and then rework them to fit the spaces I have. Utterly exhausted, barely able to speak. This is going to take many difficult days. Meanwhile, books are piled on the floor, on tables, and so on, while I sort things out. It’s a zoo.

Meanwhile, I’ve accumulated a huge number of fresh posting topics. Life lurches on.

 

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Notes: Sacred Harp

July 15, 2026

Notes from my new life at the Avant independent living community. Still coping with piles of stuff moved from my old house and distributed more or less randomly over a completely different arrangement of rooms and built-in furnishings (or, in a startling number of cases, a lack of those built-in furnishings — or defective installations requiring repair and reworking). It’s been a long hard slog, still painfully unfolding.

With some triumphs on Opal Armstrong Zwicky’s part; I was stunned and delighted to discover that changing my address with the DMV, for my senior ID card, allows automatic transfer of my voter registration — this is the way things should work, but oh so rarely do they. But also was reminded of how truly awful Merrill Lynch’s website is.

Gradually re-instituting daily routines. Applying healing coconut oil to my legs, feet, arms, and hands. And Sacred Harp singing, which I’m supposed to do (using some wonderful YouTube videos of SH conventions in Ireland) every day as lung therapy and also do, via Zoom, with the Palo Alto singers twice a month, for two hours each session.  I have in fact been free of DOE — shortness of breath on exertion — for months now, which is indescribably pleasurable. Meanwhile, the experiences are often so moving they bring me to weeping in delight.

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Posted in Music, My life | 5 Comments »

Raunch dressing

July 14, 2026

(time for some bad-taste Headline News for Penises, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

It starts with the at least superficially modest advertising slogan (underlined below), in a Facebook pitch for Creed Fragrance that came by me on 7/12:

Aventus by Creed. Bright fruits and smoky woods, crafted into an unmistakable signature.

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Posted in Logos, Signs and symbols, Smell, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Notes: vertigo

July 13, 2026

In the face of impossibly large numbers of things to post about, rising by the minute, I will just pick little bits of stuff, so I will at least be telling you something.

Now, about where I live now, on the third (top) floor of the Avant independent living community. On the side of #3003 facing the street (El Camino Real, a major city street — also California highway 82 — and the smaller El Camino Way running parallel to it) there’s the living room (a big space in the middle now housing my worktable, huge desk, and accompanying office furniture and equipment) and on either side of it, two bedrooms: on the left, what I’m using as my actual bedroom; on the right, what is now serving as a little living room (currently with my recliner chair, a coffee table, and three ordinary chairs for visitors — very much a work in progress).

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the street wall in the middle room is one gigantic window, left to right, floor to ceiling, which I keep entirely open to the light (beside the street view, it has the foothills in the background, and My Tree right outside the window) because it’s more or less endlessly pleasurable.

Except when I get up to get something from, or off, the street end of the big desk and inadvertently look down at the tree and the ground below it. And am seized with churning vertigo and the certainty that I am about to crash through the window and fall three stories to my death. Oh jesus fucking christ!

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Posted in Language and medicine, My life, Psychology | 5 Comments »

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