Archive for March, 2018
March 31, 2018
In between crucifixion and resurrection, a moment to consider the Sacred Harp song “Easter Anthem” (236 in the 1991 Denson revision of the Sacred Harp), tune by William Billings (1787). I posted the music on 4/20/14, along with a link to a video of the song at the Kalamazoo MI all-day singing on 7/20/09.
Now about the words, by Edward Young (1681-1765). The scriptural basis for the text:
But now is Christ risen from the dead,
and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
– I Corinthians 15:20 (KJV)
Now the SH text, and its source, in an intense, visionary poem by Young.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Music, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
March 30, 2018
A follow-up to my posting of the 28th, “Deviant Last Suppers”, about queer travesties of Leonardo’s Last Supper, a painting of the communal meal (celebrated on Maundy Thursday, yesterday this year) that Christians understand as the origin of the eucharist, or communion, ritual (take, eat, this is my body; take, drink, this is my blood). Now after sunset today, the Jewish ritual communal meal, the Passover seder, with its symbolic retelling of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. So, Bill Stewart wondered in a comment on this blog, what about a queer seder?
Well, sort of.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and religion, Language play, Libfixes, Playful morphology, Puns, Signs and symbols, Snowclonelet composites | 9 Comments »
March 30, 2018
(From June 2017. Underwear men, Catalonia, gay life, Barcelona beaches, art and architecture, and, eventually, food. First, underwear with my captions.)
The saints of Catalunya
Pretty in purple and pink
(#1)
Sant Jordi the savory in heat
Stretched out on rocks
Homage to Barceloneta
Between sail and fish
(#2)
Sant Joan the sweet
Celebrant of gay pride
Summer solstice confection
Of fruit and nuts
It’s all about Barcelona, the beach, and swim briefs.
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Posted in Art, Captions, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Geography, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language in advertising, Languages, Underwear | 1 Comment »
March 29, 2018
… and truncated expressions. From Sam Anderson’s “New Sentences” column in the NYT Magazine on the 20th (on-line) and 25th (in print), “From Morgan Parker’s ‘There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé’”, about ‘Summertime and the living is extraordinarily difficult’:
Every culture is a vast carpet of interwoven references: clichés, fables, jingles, lullabies, warnings, jokes, memes. To be a part of that culture means that it only takes a few words, the tiniest head fake, to set your mind racing along a familiar track. You can lead a horse to. There once was a man from. When the moon hits your eye. If you liked it then you shoulda.
One trick of art is to constantly invoke — and then manipulate and complicate — these familiar mental scripts. The artist sets your mind on a well-worn road, and then, just as you settle into that automatic groove, yanks you suddenly in another direction. It’s the same trick as a crossover dribble. Great art is always, if you will, breaking your mind’s ankles.
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Posted in Books, Context, Dialects, Formulaic language, Language and race, Poetry, Pragmatics, Truncation | 3 Comments »
March 28, 2018
What to drink with your picadillo (whether a Mexican-style taco filling or a Cuban-style stew)? A spicy red wine, like grenache, perhaps. Or a dark beer. Or maybe some brandy. Juan Gomez suggested pisco to me, and I realized I’d never had any. And that took me to the pisco sour.
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Posted in Language and food, Names | 1 Comment »
March 28, 2018
Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, commemorating the Last Supper (of Jesus and his apostles) in Christian tradition, most famously represented in a late 15th century mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci — a painting often parodied, in playful, pointed, and deliberately sacrilegious ways. Including many turning on gender and sexuality. For instance, this 2017 Italian gay male version:
(#1) The Salerno outrage
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Parody | 3 Comments »
March 27, 2018
I’ll start with the seasonally relevant compound verb to snow blow / snow-blow / snowblow and go on from there to an animus, in some quarters, against such V-headed compounds (on the grounds that they are unnecessary innovations, because the language already has syntactic means for expressing their meanings — in this case, to blow (the) snow away from).
(#1)
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Posted in Back formation, Compounds, Conversion, Idioms, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Morphology, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax, Synthetic compounds, Verbing | 1 Comment »
