Two notes on the pronunciation of proper names: on the city of Bangor ME and on the actor Ryan Phillippe.
Archive for February, 2015
Local pronunciations
February 28, 2015Books: cartoon/comic classics
February 28, 2015Published late in 2014, two books on classic cartoons and comics, with non-overlapping subjects:
Richard Gehr. 2014. I Only Read it for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists. Houghton Mifflin. (With a foreword by Matt Groening.)
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Monte Beauchamp. 2014. Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World. Simon & Schuster. (16 graphic biographies.)
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Poets in Their Youth
February 28, 2015Recently reissued: Eileen Simpson’s 1982 Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir (Random House), a wonderful recollection of poets John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz and others in their circle (R. P. Blackmur, Jean Stafford, and more).
(On the cover: a young Berryman, Stafford, and Lowell in Damariscotta Mills ME.)
Briefly noted: a misreading
February 27, 2015I was startled to read on the front page of this morning’s NYT, the headline:
Move to Ban
A Ballet Adds
To Its Appeal
A closer reading revealed that it wasn’t Ballet, but Bullet: the armor-piercing 5.56 millimeter “M855 green tip” rifle bullet, used in AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.
As before, I wondered what disposed me towards the misreading. Well, at least, banning artistic performances is not an uncommon event in many parts of the world.
(Also on that page, the doubly appalling story headed:
ISIS Onslaught Overrums
Assyrians and Wrecks Art
in which militants were taking hammers to ancient Assyrian artifacts. More extreme art criticism, reminding us of the Taliban’s destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan.)
Color and advertising your preferences
February 27, 2015In my e-mail, a flagrantly gay ad for the men’s underwear site Daily Jocks, offering (among other things) wildly colorful Andrew Christian items and the Identity line from Curbwear, which allows the wearer to advertise (via waistbands and shirts) his preferences in sexual acts. Underwear mostly goes to my X blog, but these items have a linguistic angle, so I’m posting here. No actual genitals, but plenty of cock-teasing and sexual language, so this posting might not be for everyone.
Antisocial
February 27, 2015Today’s Zippy:
Resistance to modern communications technology, both hardware and software, is a recurrent theme in Zippy. This time it’s social media under fire from our Pinhead.
Shipping and the Johnlock files
February 27, 2015From the NYT Magazine on Sunday (the 22nd), “My Dear, Dear, Dear Watson” by Jenna Wortham, beginning:
Part of the Internet’s beauty is the space it affords people to take an idea and run with it . . . and run with it and run with it, until they end up miles away from where they started. Among a subset of online superfans of the BBC show “Sherlock,” solving mysteries is mere window dressing for the real story: one about unrequited love between Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman).
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(Sherlock (Cumberbatch) and John (Freeman) in situ in Sherlock.)
Comic conventions
February 26, 2015Two cartoons today touching on conventions of the comics: A Calvin and Hobbes on conventional characters in the comics and a Zippy on the conventions of surrealistic cartooning:
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The thieving sap spitter
February 26, 2015Today’s Bizarro, which is, well, bizarre:
Not only do we have a thieving bird that carries off letters of the alphabet, we have one that takes them from the cartoon itself. Bizarre indeed.
Return of the word avalanche
February 26, 2015Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine, with a word avalanche:
As before in Pearls, the strip goes meta when the cartoonist is taken to task for his word play.