Archive for 2023

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A Biblical moment at the therapist’s

September 16, 2023

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Psychiatrist cartoon with a Biblical theme:


(#1) Wayno’s title:”Revised Translation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

Note the concessions to the ancient setting in the furnishings of the therapist’s office. (Do not write me about the impossibility of writing with a quill pen on parchment in the fashion shown in the cartoon; this is, after all, a kind of imaginative fiction, combining features of some fictional world and the modern real world. Get a grip on things: there were no psychoanalysts in Flood Times.)

However, a Biblical theme is appropriate for the day, since it’s Rosh Hashanah, Jewish new year.

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Posted in Comic conventions, Holidays, Language and food, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The Long Hello

September 15, 2023

(Warning: after the McPhail, there will be some tasteless jokes, including two sexual ones)

By Will McPhail, a delightful Ascent of Man (in this case, a self-possessed young woman) cartoon in the latest (9/18/23) issue of the New Yorker:


(This blog has a Page on comic conventions, including cartoon memes (like Ascent of Man); and also a Page on Will McPhail cartoons)

So: the cartoon meme, plus a joke meme that plays on liking long walks on the beach as a stock sentiment in American personals ad (I don’t know the history of the formulaic expression).

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Posted in Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Memes, Music, Stock expressions | Leave a Comment »

An ideal male body

September 15, 2023

(16th-century public heroic statuary of male nudes, so there will be (small) penises, if that sort of thing worries you)

An ideal male body — or so Kenji Matsuoka pronounced it this morning:


(#1) Side view of [Italian] Oceano / [Latin] Oceanus by Giambologna (1576) at the Bargello National Museum, Florence: a simultaneous imagined depiction of Neptune, the Roman god of waters and oceans (whose Greek counterpart is Poseidon); and flattering tribute to the sculptor’s Medici patron — in a single beautiful male body

Giambologna’s largest marble; it once crowned a fountain in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, but in 1911 it was moved to the Bargello Museum.

KM no doubt chose this particular view of the statue because it shows Oceano’s / Neptune’s penis — a routine feature of public heroic statuary of male nudes (at some times in some places). This is the standard small penis of classical statuary, modestly situated in this work.

I’m assuming that the other elements of the sculpture (like Neptune’s signature creature, the dolphin) are assembled for their individual symbolic values, rather than (as in Michelangelo’s David) illustrating a larger story.

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Posted in Art, Language and the body, Masculinity, Myths | 1 Comment »

How an Australian film-maker evokes tennis

September 14, 2023

Or: the marvels of associative memory.

Previously on this blog, in my 9/12 posting “Two tennis-playing Zwickys”:

My old friend Ellen Sulkis James, musing on my name, e-mailed today:

I just read about someone else whose last name is Zwicky —  think it was someone involved with tennis.

Memories are often fugitive and hazy. Perhaps that’s what’s going on here. My searches for people named Zwicky with a tennis connection pulled up only two, both of them most unlikely to have come to ESJ’s attention

Ah, it turns out that the Zwicky in question is not tennis-related but — whoa! — film-related. This isn’t as bizarre an error as would first appear; we can in fact chalk it down to the nature of memory (in which personal associations between things play a big role).

I will explain.

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Posted in Memory, Movies and tv, My life, Processing, Psycholinguistics | 2 Comments »

Aura Lee in the morning

September 13, 2023

Today’s morning music, playing (on the Apple Music that’s beamed into my bedroom during the night) when I arose at 3:40 am: from Anonymous 4’s 1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War, “Aura Lee” (sung by Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, with harmony and instrumental accompaniment by Bruce Molsky). An achingly lovely song — you can listen to the performance here — with a chorus that’s three lines of sentimental love song, topped by the transcendent line “And swallows in the air”, with its breath-taking image of the birds swooping in flight.


(#1) Photo by Keith Gough, as cover art for the demo video for “Swallows in Air”, from John Newell’s A Timbered Choir, settings (for voices and piano) of poems by Wendell Berry

The program: about the Civil War song song “Aura Lea / Lee”; about the 2015 Anonymous 4 album; and (briefly) about the Newell / Berry “Swallows in Air”.

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Posted in Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetry, Pop culture | 2 Comments »

Two tennis-playing Zwickys

September 12, 2023

My old friend Ellen Sulkis James, musing on my name, e-mailed today:

I just read about someone else whose last name is Zwicky —  think it was someone involved with tennis.

Memories are often fugitive and hazy. Perhaps that’s what’s going on here. My searches for people named Zwicky with a tennis connection pulled up only two, both of them most unlikely to have come to ESJ’s attention: the investment banker Daniel Zwicky, who’s billed as an avid tennis player now and, when young in Switzerland, competed at a national level; and the Molson Coors IT specialist Michelle Zwicky, who was a notable tennis player in college two decades ago.

Brief notes on the two of them, for the Page on this blog on my postings about Zwickys of note.

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Posted in Language and sports, Zwickys | 1 Comment »

going down there

September 12, 2023

(some explorations in sexual slang, with some street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “down there”, on male-genital down there, with a section on locational down there in Christopher Isherwood’s title Down There on a Visit (which comes with a strongly sexual tinge) — effectively ‘being down there’. An e-mail comment from Victor Steinbok:

oddly enough, going down there  doesn’t have the [AZ: oral sexual] meaning of going down

To which I replied:

Well, it can, with enough context — I can certainly construct the examples, which have going down as a constituent (with an oblique object marked with on), rather than down there as a constituent — but without such context, yes.

Of course, I’ve now gone on to supply an example, with some context supplied. And some comments on ambiguity.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Constituency, Idioms, Language of sex, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

down there

September 11, 2023

That’s down there ‘male genitals, junk’, in this Facebook ad (hat tip to Victor Steinbok) for the Dollar Shave Club’s razor starter set — the razor handle, razor blades, and three accompanying products, called the scrub (prep wash), the butter (shaving cream), and the dew (soothing lotion):


(#1) The Dollar Shave Club offer; in a small space, the ad manages to proclaim the $3 offer three times

Now, I’m not really interested in collecting further terms for the male genitals — my 9/4/23 posting “From the genital junkyard” covers the territory, and I have no enthusiasm for foolish completism — but male-genital down there evoked two strong associations for me that I want to explore here: it’s routinely used as a polite reference to the vulva (so, female-genital down there); and an allusion to Christopher Isherwood’s 1962 novel Down There on a Visit, whose title combines locational down there with actually sexual (not merely male-genital) down there.

Before I take up female-genital down there and the Isherwood book, though, a digression to slag off the $3 offer from the Dollar Shave Club, as an example of deliberately impenetrable (and therefore misleading) sales pitches. The product would have to be truly fabulous — but how fabulous can a shaving-supplies kit get? — before I would engage with a company that advertises this way.

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Posted in Books, Euphemism, Language and the body, Music | Leave a Comment »

The intrepid explorer of language and image

September 11, 2023

Aka the deadpan laureate of American art. By Jason Farago in the NYT: 9/7 on-line: “The Deadpan Laureate of American Art: Ed Ruscha, intrepid explorer of language and image, prefigured a digital culture of words on the move. A retrospective at MoMA shines new light on his groundbreaking career: the books, the paintings, the room made of chocolate” | 9/8 in print: “Art’s Deadpan Laureate: Ed Rusch, intrepid explorer of language and image, prefigured a digital culture of words on the move. A show at MoMA explores his career”.

A huge show of Ruscha’s career, with a long and penetrating review by Farago in the Times. A review with an enormous number of images of the exhibition and Ruscha’s works, 7 of which I will reproduce for you here (some edited to fit this space).

So: the beginning of Farago’s review; the 7 images (the published images all credited: “by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times”); and an inventory of some of my earlier postings about his works.

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Posted in Art, Events, Language and art | Leave a Comment »

Two pleasantries for 9/10

September 10, 2023

My Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting for 9/10, lying uneasily between the silliness of Negation Day on 9/9 (nein nein) and the wrenching anniversary of the horrors of 9/11/2001, and serving as something to show you after the postings I’d been laboring on expanded unmanageably in their scope and after my two-fingered typing hand, already seriously disabled, became barely functional because the middle finger is swollen, inflamed, and effing painful. (Today’s good news is that I got in two hours of Sacred Harp singing via Zoom with the Palo Alto singers — an activity that asks very little of that middle finger.) So, two pleasantries that have came to me on-line:

— in a Pinterest mailing today, an unidentified painting I pegged as surely an attractive Yannis Tsarouchis work (see my 8/12/23 posting “Yannis Tsarouchis”) — indeed, it turned out to be the artist’s Sailor at a table from 1950

— in a Facebook posting by Chris Ambidge on 9/7, from the Green Midget cafe in Bromley, a board offering the items from the Monty Python “Spam” sketch (set in that fictional eatery), which I noted was one of the great pieces of cumulative humor

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Humor, Male art, Movies and tv, My life | Leave a Comment »

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