I awoke this morning to an overwhelming swell of orchestra and chorus, in what I recognized immediately as the very ending (in the 5th movement) of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the Resurrection Symphony (performed by Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Symphony and Chorus). Time to arise!
You can watch, here, a performance by Leonard Bernstein and the London Philharmonic of the last bit of the 5th movement. A still of Lenny’s berserker conducting:
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A notification from Pinterest this morning of this pin by someone with the name “nelly zwicky”:
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Yes, a toy tank, German WW II vintage, I think — a seriously phallic replica, a butch plaything (one among many) on nz’s board “pat”; nz’s other board is Endroits à visiter (‘Places to visit’). All of which conjures up, for me anyway, the image of a flamboyant, or even downright swishy, francophone Kiwi queer. But maybe nz’s a woman with a dykey bent to military personnel and heavy armaments. (I learn nothing on the net about who nz is, so I’m free to speculate wildly.)
This led me to an undoubtedly real Nelly Zwicky, a writer from — extravagant astonished gestures here! — the town of Mollis, canton Glarus, Switzerland. Where the Zwickys come from.
And it all made me wonder whether it was too late in life to take up a career as Swish Zwicky, the Divine Miss Z.
… the recent movie. Which I saw on Monday and am still in the grip of. A stunning film, tracking its central character from a small, weak boy (in black Miami) to a big, hard man (in black Atlanta), as he struggles to carve out a place for himself in the world and to come to terms with his sexuality.
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Last week, the California: The Art of Water exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, a fascinating show in an assortment of media (painting, drawing, photography, maps, video), of a just-right size (enough stuff to be engaging, not so much it was overwhelming).
Yesterday, a visit to the Cactus Garden. The winter rains started a while back, turning the golden grasses of the dry season to bright new green and also sending cactuses into abandoned blooming. Some had already bloomed, some were in bloom right now, some were in bud, about to bloom.
(About men’s bodies and man-man sex, in very plain talk, with only a little bit of linguistic interest — so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
What is this man so earnestly fixed on?:
A penis, which he’s about to fellate avidly. (The full picture, and some details, in #6 in the AZBlogX posting linked to below.)
The One Big Happy in today’s comics feed:
The assigned story was “The Princess and the Pea”, but Joe had heard only the title (and a bit of the plot), so /pi/ could have been the letter P, or (bizarrely) the vegetable pea, or (given the mention of mattresses) urine, pee. Joe goes with what he knows, and, having not actually read the story, confabulates a tale of enuresis.
Message from Ned Deily back on August 20th, with this photo (“As seen near the Reading Public Museum this afternoon”):
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W. D. Zwicky is my uncle Walter, the son is my cousin David. And we’re all proud of what David has done with the company.
Being heavily advertised on cable television: Blue-Emu spray for pain relief (a relatively recent addition to the company’s line of ointments). You can watch baseball great Johnny Bench flogging both the spray and the original emu oil creme in the video here. The spray:
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Originally I thought this must be a joke: emu oil? blue emu oil? But no.
Today’s Doonesbury, with Helmet GrabPussy (GP) consulting with the Gröpenführer (GF) about their mutual female-assault travails:
Back to the 1940s. Ben Zimmer writes to report that going through back issues of American Speech, he came across a couple of articles discussing what we would now call “libfixes”; Harold Wentworth called them “neo-pseudo-suffixes”:
Harold Wentworth, “The Neo-Pseudo-Suffix ‘-eroo'”, American Speech, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb., 1942), pp. 10-15 (link)
Dwight L. Bolinger, “Among the New Words”, American Speech, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1943), pp. 301-305 (link):
Long lists have been compiled of words formed out of what Harold Wentworth calls neo-pseudo-suffixes. ANW has commented on a number of these, including –cast, -burger, -legger, -aroo, and others. How deeply the habit of dissecting words in American English may be seen perhaps better, however, in those suffixes of which there are but a few scattered examples and which have yet to become popular. Herewith are listed a number of them, which also meet the condition of not being independent words used in some nonce-combination (such as busting or fest).
Only two items on the list have survived: from icicle, Popsicle; from photogenic, telegenic.