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.
From several Facebook sources recently, this Far Side cartoon, with a twist on the proverbial Curiosity killed the cat, conveying that curiosity is dangerous:
Lots of animals are curious, especially about new things in familiar places around them; cats are famous for it. But scientific curiosity is another thing entirely.
(Woven into the cartoon is the figure of the over-reaching scientist, the researcher who pursues things that, as they say, were better left alone.)
(About art and books, rather than language.)
More from the Godine press, this time Joe McKendry’s One Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World, a delightful history of Times Square for children (but entertaining for anyone). The text and illustrations are both by McKendry; there are maps, diagrams, and watercolors, but no photographs. One of the illustrations on the cover, as reproduced on the cover of the Godine catalog:
(I suffer badly from acrophobia, so this illustration makes me gasp.)
(About art and illustration rather than language.)
In a catalog for publisher David R. Godine that came today, an offer of a set of notecards from Mary Azarian’s Farmer’s Alphabet of 1981 (Apple, Dog, Farm, Jump, Neighbor, Underwear). The Z item in her Gardener’s Alphabet of 2000:
(On zinnias, see here.) Azarian’s chosen medium is the woodcut, which gives her work a deliberately old-fashioned appearance.
(Not explicitly about language.)
From Max Vasilatos yesterday, written on the occasion of the U.S. election returns earlier this week, a postcard with a sweet and sexy Howard Roffman photo, which I have amended with a headline and rainbow flag stickers in honor of the pro-gay-rights youth vote:
This followed on Kathryn Campbell-Kibler’s posting on Facebook about another of Obama’s constituencies:
Is it actually possible to get tired of saying “My president is Black”?
I know this is so 4 years/3 days ago,
but seriously, y’all, MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK.
Kcat is quoting from Young Jeezy’s rap anthem from the 2008 campaign, “My President”: