Archive for September, 2016

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jackhole

September 28, 2016

Television report. From The Mysteries of Laura, S1 E20 (5/7/15), “The Mystery of the Crooked Clubber”:

So, he’s not our killer, he’s not on the getaway squad, he’s just some jackhole throwing himself off skyscrapers in midtown.

The item jackhole was new to me, but instantly recognizable as derogatory slang, doubtless a portmanteau involving derogatory (and strongly taboo) asshole and either derogatory (and mildly taboo) jackoff or merely derogatory jackass. Neither jackhole nor the alternative avoidance term jerkhole is in either of the compendious slang dictionaries (Lighter and Green), but in this case, Urban Dictionary provides real gold for jackhole:

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Posted in Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

Hipsters, beats, and raconteurs

September 26, 2016

Zippy has recently run through a series of five strips on these characters, with capsule biographies: Harry “The Hipster” Gibson (9/19), proto-beatnik Lord Buckley (9/20), jazz dj Symphony Sid (9/21), radio monologuist Gene Shepherd (9/22), and beatniks in general (9/23). The series:

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Slang | 1 Comment »

The Antichrist

September 26, 2016

At a Palo Alto Sacred Harp singing last month, someone called #548, Ainslie, a contemplation on death, with the first two verses:

1 The time is swiftly rolling on
When I must faint and die;
My body to the dust return,
And there forgotten lie.

2 Let persecution rage around,
And Antichrist appear;
My silent dust beneath the ground;
There’s no disturbance there.

Several singers were startled to see Antichrist in the text. Now, there is a vein of Sacred Harp songs with hallucinatory text from the book of Revelation, but this text is nothing like that, so it was something of a puzzle.

But… there is a resource, the excellent Sacred Harp Concordance (1992, keyed to the 1991 edition of the book). There, we discovered not one, but three, songs with Antichrist in them. Well, three settings of the very same text (with the first two verses above), in which nothing whatsoever, not even the appearance of the Antichrist at the End of Times, will disturb the silence of the singer’s remains.

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Posted in Music | Leave a Comment »

Muffled

September 25, 2016

Today’s Zippy, providing an extreme example of what it can take to make sense of a cartoon or comic strip:

Muffled? Why muffled? No helpful title, but two clues: the reference to the P.C. police and the strangely stiff figure of Zippy in the strip.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Figurative language to the rescue

September 24, 2016

The One Big Happy in my comics feed this morning (apparently from August 23rd):

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Here, Ruthie doesn’t know (or has forgotten) the precise lexical item turban, so she uses figurative language to get a descriptive term. To understand this, you need to know about Jiffy Pop, of course.

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Posted in Figurative language, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Typography | 1 Comment »

Countdown to diamond days

September 24, 2016

… with gusto, always gusto.

In three days, my friend Steven Levine will be 60. On to his diamond years! A homoerotic scruff collage for the occasion:

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(Assemblage by Robert Cumming for my own 60th birthday, at the turn of this century.)

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, My life | 1 Comment »

News for penises and their simulacra

September 23, 2016

(Racy content — consider the title — so not suitable for everyone.)

Two new annoyances with the Penis Ban on WordPress, Facebook, and Google+. In two recent postings on AZBlogX: “Bear poets in 1963” on the 20th, with a Richard Avedon photo of poets (and lovers) Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, in which Orlovsky’s (flaccid) penis is not at all the focus of the piece, but is important to its interpretation; and “Voluntary cuckoldry” on the 21st, with a striking graphic illustrating the roles of the three characters in such a relationship, a graphic with two stylized penises in it, one flaccid and one erect. (I will soon get around to posting on voluntary cuckoldry on this blog, but without the graphic.)

In both cases, the penises are central to the composition, and not as objects of veneration or erotic triggers; my fondness for cocks in these functions is well-known, and though in principle I think that that more open carnal sexuality would be a good thing, I’m willing to keep such images in a protected place. But in these two cases, I bridle at the Penis Ban.

Nevertheless, this blog is extremely important to me, so I don’t want to do anything that would threaten it. But I can still complain.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Phallicity | Leave a Comment »

Bare bear poets in their youth

September 22, 2016

In a full-page ad (p. 11) in the 9/26/16 New York Review of Books (for a photography exhibition at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco), celebrated fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon’s photo of poets Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, naked and in a hairy phase, in New York on December 30, 1963. The ad is reproduced in AZBlogX rather than here, because Avedon chose to include Orlovsky’s (flaccid) penis in the photo. (Ok in a gigantic ad in an intellectual magazine, not ok in WordPress, Facebook, or Google+, where a minor might come across it.)

The photo is often reproduced with Orlovsky’s dick cropped out (ouch), but I won’t do that here, because I think that misrepresents Avedon’s intentions, which were to portray a pair of lovers. Without the dick, what we’ve got is two bearded hippie buddies hangin’ out together. The dick is a sign of sexual connection — by no means the two men’s only connection (they were together for over 40 years, until Ginsberg died), but still an important point.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Horns

September 19, 2016

As one of the rewards of making it through eight days of a super-lowfiber diet preparing for a colonoscopy last week, Kim Darnell brought me a box of Almond Horns, looking much like this:

(#1)

Massively fibrous, and delicious. Also unfamiliar to me. Though I instantly recognized the taste – like Mandelbrot, but in a different form. Kim added, in recognition of my sexual tastes, also distinctly phallic. Well, that’s not quite right: the almond horns, viewed not as crescents, but (turned the other way around) as horns (true to their name), are certainly masculinity symbols, representing stag horns. But then they are also (doubly-headedly) phallic.

Almond horns are very often presented with the horn tips dipped in chocolate, making the phallic imagery more intense, with the symbolic (engorged) cockheads standing out.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and religion, Masculinity, Names, Phallicity | 1 Comment »

Another curiosity shelf

September 18, 2016

A while back, a photo of some shelves of small oddities, treasures, and art works. And now, thanks to Kim Darnell, another photo, of some other shelves:

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An ivory carving; four lovely boxes, of different types; each housing little treasures; a beanbag playpus with Jacques’s Columbus Park of Roses badge; and the centerpiece, the printing plate for #99 (Gospel Trumpet) in the 1991 Sacred Harp, a gift to me from my fellow shapenote singers years ago (thank you especially, Chris Thorman), when printing moved from hot lead to photographic reproduction on computers — one of the most moving presents I’ve ever gotten, a recognition that this fugung tune was one of “my songs” (sometimes sung in my honor when I couldn’t make it to a singing).

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Posted in Music, My life | Leave a Comment »

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