(Paintings of men, viewed sexually, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
On my Pinterest feed this morning, this painting, a modern-impressionist portrait of a male couple, by an artist unfamiliar to me:
Archive for October, 2024
van Burgst’s world of men
October 24, 2024Goodbye, Jim
October 23, 2024Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.
I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.
CAR WASH HOT DOG
October 23, 2024Today’s Zippy strip displays our Pinhead’s onomatomania, as he chants CAR WASH HOT DOG over and over, to his evident pleasure. I was entertained by the notion of a car wash hot dog, which struck me as ludicrous, conjuring up the image of sodden, sudsy frankfurters in buns:
(#1) But then I remembered that Zippy’s obsessively reiterated chants are never sheer inventions on his part, but are always found mantras, so car wash hot dogs must be a real thing — and so they are, on the understanding ‘hot dogs at a car wash, hot dogs with a car wash, hot dogs and a car wash’, or, as they are sometimes advertised, car wash / hot dog sales
This was all news to me; I didn’t recall ever having heard of selling a car wash along with hot dogs and didn’t think the two things were a natural pairing. But there they were, lots of them, car wash / hot dog sales for very local causes.
Why had I never heard of them? Because they are not just an American thing (unknown in the UK, Australia, and so on, even in Canada), but a very specific regional American thing, apparently confined to a narrow band of the southeastern US, from Florida to West Virginia. (Zippy’s Dingburg is in Maryland, which is, with West Virginia, at the very northern edge of this band). I have lived in the middle Atlantic, New England, mid-America, and California, but not in the southeast, and so I missed out on C. W. H. D. (as Bill Griffith’s title for #1 has it).
The peach in 1904
October 22, 2024This remarkable image — In Love’s Garden: “The Peach Blossom” (from 1904) — appeared on my Pinterest feed this morning:
(#1) A peach blossom, with a bit of stem attached, and a female face, adored by a young man (the word sentimental comes to mind); to very modern eyes. just the combination of the word peach and the image of the flower will probably instead evoke buttocks (as the object of sexual desire), in the peach emoji 🍑 used in sexting — though this was obviously far from the artist’s intention 120 years ago
A bit of clicking from the Pinterest image led to the Prints with a Past site (“antique prints dating from the late 1700s through early 1900s”), where color prints of #1 are offered for sale. There the artist was identified as John Cecil Day (US). A search on this name got me nothing; well, illustrators are generally under-appreciated, and Day might have been a niche artist, of little note even in his own time.
But searches will turn up lots of things that aren’t what you asked for but have names similar to your search terms. And so my search for John Cecil Day brought me to an illustrator named John Cecil Clay, who looked an awful lot like my guy. I pulled up my copy of #1, got out my big magnifier, and looked at the signature. Yes, for sure, John Cecil Clay, famous enough to have a Wikipedia page. And the creator of a series of In Love’s Garden illustrations, of flowers that were also women. The Prints with a Past staff had misread the signature.
With the right name on hand, I could find more flowers from Clay’s garden. Two more of these, and then on to the fascinating story of Clay’s life; and a final note on sexting with emoji.
Misplaced geminates
October 21, 2024A new low-water mark in my erroneous ways: my 10/19/24 posting “striking language” actually appeared on this blog with a, um, striking typo in its third word, the surname of my old friend and colleague Ellen Kaisse (as I type it now, letter by letter, very slowly, so as to get it right on the first try; my rough drafts are veritable forests of typos, the product of seriously disabled fingers working at the speed of my thoughts). What my readers saw when this posting first appeared:
From Ellen Kaiise in e-mail to me
One of my typo specialties, the misplaced geminate (more on misplaced gemination below). What’s new about this example is that I failed to notice it through at least five passes of editing. And just now, when I looked at the stretch of text above, I had a moment when I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Presumably because the spelling wouldn’t affect the pronunciation in English: Kaise, Kaisse, Kaiise, Kaiisse, they’d all be pronounced /kes/. Compare this to the examples gogling, goggling, googling, googgling; in real life, again from my hand, the second of these occurred as a typo for the third, and the first two would be pronounced differently from the last two, so the error leaps out from the page.
The AMZ Serengeti mailbox
October 21, 2024This morning’s query from Benita Bendon Campbell:
Have you “done” Flanders and Swann’s “I’m a gnu”? (León Hernández Alvarez’s I have a new brought it to mind.)
(that is, L’s report in my 10/20 posting “I have a ##”)
But of course. Among my gnu postings there’s my 3/14/12 “The news for gnus”, where I wrote:
Today’s Rhymes With Orange:
I can’t think of gnus without being reminded of Flanders and Swann’s delightful Gnu Song — which you can hear here, along with photos of real-life gnus. The lyrics: [in full in the 2012 posting]
An elaborate play on silent letters in English spelling: “restoring” the G of GNU and GNASH, the K of KNOW, and the W of WHO, with the initial /g/ of /gǝnú/ spilling over onto /n/-initial nicest, nature, neither, not, even know, and, most marvelously, the climactic (a)nother. (Plus “Cockney” initial /h/ in elk and ain’t.)
favoris
October 21, 2024A fallout from my 10/17 posting “An underwater Psychiatrist cartoon” (“all about the noun favorite: an implicit superlative, denoting a top-ranking element in some comparison set”), this e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell this morning:
the word favoris in French, as you probably know, means ‘sideburns’ and I can’t imagine why
Bonnie, who’s had a long career as a teacher of French, tends to assume that my command of that language is vastly greater than it actually is — a kindly person would say that my knowledge of French is spotty — but in this case, yes, I had a dim recollection of this odd fact, mostly because favoris ‘sideburns’ got borrowed into (British) English, where it enjoyed a brief fashion in the 19th century. Summarized from OED (1972) under the noun favourite, with a colorful cite from Benjamin Disraeli (the British novelist and Prime Minister):
noun favori ‘sideburn’ (usually in plural); 3 19th-century British examples (Disraeli from 1831: His beard, his mustachios, his whiskers, his favoris.) Etymology: a borrowing from French.
So it’s into French that we must go.
A Swiss philological moment
October 20, 2024Wayles Browne writes from Cornell:
you might spare a posting for Jacob Wackernagel, the Swiss philologist, who was the first to make sense of second-position clitics (https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/270), born 11 December 1852; and for Jost Winteler, the other Swiss philologist and author of Die Kerenzer Mundart des Kantons Glarus in ihren Grundzügen dargestellt (1876), who may or may not have been a predecessor of phonemic theory, but who definitely was a mentor to young Albert Einstein after the latter moved to Switzerland. Winteler was born 21 November 1846.
This is that posting, First, I have added Wackernagel (12/11/1852) and Winteler (11/21/1846) to my e-calendar.
Then, from my reply to WB:
I used to be an authority on second-position clitics, even have a t-shirt that says PUT YOUR CLITICS IN SECOND POSITION.
As for Winteler, Canton Glarus is where the Zwickys come from — mostly from Mollis.
Meanwhile, I happen to be wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts. Hail, Helvetica! and all that.
“I have a ##”
October 20, 2024So my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez said to me last Tuesday; ## represents a word I totally failed to recognize, at the most elemental level; I didn’t recognize any of the sounds in the word, though I thought it was probably of the form CV. L then came closer to me and said it again, more slowly: “I have a n#”. Ah, an initial n — a Spanish n (distinct from an English n), but clearly something in the [n] zone, and followed by a vowel. On the third repetition, I was able to identify the vowel: u — a Spanish u (distinct from an English u), but clearly something in the [u] zone. Apparently, L was telling me that he had a [nu].
I recognized the word phonetically, but still totally failed to recognize the lexical item he was talking about. Surely he didn’t have a GNU. Is there such a thing as a NOO? Ah, finally it dawned on me: L was telling me he had a NEW. Hmm, a new what? And then, finally, the realization that he was telling me that he had a piece of news, that he had reconstructed a singular NEW ‘report of a recent event’ from the word NEWS ‘report of recent events’. This is clever, but alas mistaken.
Eugene Daniels
October 19, 2024A panel discussion about the elections on MSNBC. Among the panelists, the regular contributor Eugene Daniels, the White House correspondent for Politico: amiable, funny, sharp, passionate — a smart, impressive black guy, with an Afro that’s clearly meant as a political statement but is, somehow, actually adorable. (He is, in appearance and demeanor and attitude, one of my “types” — though I’ve come to understand that that just means he resembles, physically and in his projection of himself, someone I once had a satisfying sexual and affectional encounter with; it’s a kind of imprinting, it’s entirely in my head and not my actions, there are no real-world consequences, but it gives me a moment of pleasure, like visiting an old friend.)
Over time I’ve listened to his reporting and opinions a lot — tv goes on while I work — and occasionally I’ve glanced at him while he was speaking, but for the first time I focused on him full-bore. Ten seconds in, I said to myself, “Wow, this guy is gay!”, and then realized I hadn’t the slightest clue why I thought this. I watched him for some time then, without catching anything I could identify as a tell. I still don’t know what I was reading, but it turns out that in addition to his other sterling qualities listed above, and in addition to his being literally a great team player (including on an NCAA Division I football team), a leader of groups, and a conspicuous role model for young black guys, he is also way gay, wonderfully, flamboyantly gay — a presentation achieved by his clothing and adornment (so it can easily be adjusted for the context; he moves through a lot of worlds).