#2 in a set of 4, the first having been my 7/30/17 posting “The queer quilt”. To come: the linguistics quilt and the images quilt. Each one, a 12-panel composition (roughly 6 x 3 ft) made of old t-shirts of mine, assembled into a quilt by Janet Salsman, with the collaboration of Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and Kim Darnell.
#1 re-used old queer t-shirts, some political, some playful, some artistic. #2 is university t-shirts (from roughly 20 to 40 years ago), from institutions where I’ve talked, either teaching a class there, speaking at a conference there, or giving an invited talk there.
(#1) names, abbreviated names, nicknames, logos, and seals: Northwestern Univ., Univ. of New Mexico, Brigham Young Univ.; Georgetown Univ., Univ. of Kentucky, American Univ.; Harvard Univ., banana slugs (the mascot of the Univ. of Calif. at Santa Cruz (UCSC)), Univ. of Pennsylvania; Univ. of Calif. at Davis, UCSC, Univ. of North Dakota
Still to come: a linguistics quilt, with lx-related t-shirts; and an image quilt, with amusing or arresting images of several kinds.
Except for the banana slugs, the university quilt isn’t nearly as entertaining as the items in the queer quilt:
(#2) (Details in my earlier posting)
A note of grave dismay. My original posting, completed around 10 this morning, after 6 hours of preparatory work, went on to catalogue the inventory of (about 50) North American institutions from which the 11 in #1 were drawn (I’ve also given talks at universities in the UK, Austria, the Netherlands, and China). Plus a list of a few of the many schools I’ve visited but not talked at. And a list of cities in which I’ve given talks at conferences, without visiting any schools there: St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Anaheim, Oakland, and (remarkably) San Francisco.
I ended with a note on the American University logo above (row 2, column 3). Well, I was pretty sure that green, purple, and blue item was an antique logo from AU, but I couldn’t find it anywhere (nor could I attach it to Auburn, Antioch, or any other A.U.). AU’s current logo is this striking red, white, and blue item:
(#3)
(But I checked with Bill Leap, who started teaching at AU in 1970, and he confirmed that the logo in #1 was indeed an old AU logo — “from way back”. Sigh, Memory.)
Unfortunately, at that point I tried to post my work, only to discover that everything except the first paragraph and the image in #1 (including the caption for #1) had vanished, apparently irrevocably, from WordPress. I’ve reconstructed most of it, but I haven’t the heart to re-create that list of about 50 institutions.
And now the gnashing of teeth.
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