Jack Gilbert’s “Convalescing” (Collected Poems, New York: Knopf, 2012, p. 384), which Elizabeth Traugott passed on to me after reading a fascinating obit for Gilbert in the NYT:
I spend the days deciding
On a commemorative poem.
Not, luckily, an epitaph.
A quiet poem
to establish the fact of me.
As one of the incidental faces
in those stone processions.
Carefully done.
Not claiming that I was
at any of the great victories.
But that I volunteered.
Back from Stanford Hospital since Saturday morning. Things move very slowly on weekends. so nothing much has happened. I sleep most of the day, attended by Ned and Elizabeth. Not yet able to move around much, nor have I mastered the intricacies of the walker, which are considerable, and the effects of the pain medication (lots of oxy), which are complex, sometimes overwhelming.
But on more pleasant fronts, there’s the PBS Nature show I saw on tv (on Friday? my time perceptions are unsteady indeed), about ducks. A “duckumentary”; I suppose that was inevitable. Full of wonderful shots of ducks of many kinds — alone, in families, in flocks.
We were taught that every species of duck is either a dabbler duck or a diver duck. Or, as Gilbert & Sullivan would have it:
Every duck and every drake
Is either a little dabbler
Or else a little diver.
Hey, I’m coming back to life very very gradually.
Following the Foden cartoon Chris Waigl offered for my Surgery Time (here), Tim Evanson has unearthed this surgical Calvin and Hobbes:
Brain surgery in the snow!
Lots of people have been wishing me luck on my surgery tomorrow — which has now been set up for 7:15 a.m., with a check-in time of 5:15 (so house-leaving time ca. 4:30).
Chris Waigl has produced a cartoon for the occasion:
Cartoon by Glenn Foden of Woolly Mammoth Media (homepage here).
Trust I’ll get a standard hip replacement, not something outsized.
A rerun of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit went past a little while ago, featuring BD Wong as forensic psychiatrist George Huang. That gives us Wong and Huang so far, but then on to Wong in his breakout role as Song Liling in David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly on Broadway.
Then D. H. Hwang turned up in the NYT Magazine on Sunday, in Alex Witchel’s profile, “The Man Who Can Make Bruce Lee Talk: For his next feat, the playwright David Henry Hwang reimagines an icon”.
More adventures on the comics pages, this time in Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia, from the 2010 retrospective on 30 years of the strip, The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (with pointed commentary by Hollander on the already pointed cartoons).
From Jules Feiffer’s foreward:
For thirty years, long before Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, my friend Nicole Hollander has been one of our nations’s leading satirists. Than mean that she is in the business of telling the truth and making it funny. She is right about almost anything. And because she is right, and she is funny, she has no power whatsoever.
Yesterday’s Scenes From a Multiverse (viewable here), in which a medical scientist announces a breakthrough in cancer research:
What she offers is a bit of verbal magic — a charm against cancer. Charms, like curses, blessings, prayers, and invocations of spirits, turn on the belief that saying can make it so (if you say it in just the right way).
I wish. My mother died of lung cancer, my father of complications attendant on leukemia, my wife of metastatic breast cancer, and my husband-equivalent survived brain cancer, only to die of afflections caused by the radiation that had saved his life. And on and on. I could use a really powerful charm.
In the last slutwear (for hustlers and lovers) episodes, we saw a P.O.V. toga line on this blog and an Andres Velasco sheer fishnet line on AZBlogX. Now Undergear offers more black sheerness from Velasco, in a Marrakesh line of sheer black lace underwear that’s a bit too revealing to be WordPressable. You can view the Andres Velasco® Marrakesh thong and bikini on my XBlog, along with the metrically interesting ad slogan:
Racy, lacy wrappings
For private celebrations
and some delicious ad copy.
Notes on my Friday and Saturday, doing things, with the help of Elizabeth Traugott, to get ready for surgery on Wednesday. Friday afternoon at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (family practice and physical therapy), Saturday morning at the Stanford University Medical Center and the Footwear Etc. store in Palo Alto. (Otherwise, a lot of exhausted sleep.) With some linguistic observations along the way.
On Mae Sanders’s food blog yesterday, a piece on decidedly quirky forks made by Alexander Calder:
Mae writes:
In the Los Angeles Times Today: “Alexander Calder’s fanciful kitchen utensils” — he’d make them for his wife when she needed something. I’m a big fan of his fanciful wire and metal objects, such as portraits and his circus. I wonder if I can find the book, Calder at Home, that these images are from.
You probably find that some of these objects come close to something you’d call a whisk rather than straightforwardly a fork. Ordinary, as opposed to scientific, catergorization is often not entirely crisp; in particular, prototypical members of a category are clear, but the divisions between categories can be fuzzy. The famous empirical study of prototypes and borders, and how categorization can depend on context, and on how function can play at least as significant a role as form is:
Labov, William. 1972. The boundaries of words and their meanings. In Charles-James N. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy (Eds.), New ways of analyzing variation in English, 340-73. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
It’s a topic I return to often on this blog.