With artwork by New Yorker cartoonist Brendan Loper, passed on by John McIntyre on Facebook, for the beginning of school (I laughed out loud):
(#1) The original seer-consulting cartoon, from the New Yorker of 12/5/22, had the caption: “The answers you seek shall be revealed to you by shutting up and paying attention to what happens in the movie.” The academic caption was created by someone, maybe even Loper, for Shutterstock
(Yes, about raw man-on-man sex, from gay porn, with photos of nekkid guys doing the deed, and with descriptions of it all in street language, so totally not for kids or the sexually modest)
The emotional attraction of the flying cowboy positions, plain and reverse, is the floating mid-air fuck itself — whee! — and the intimacy and trust that are needed if the participants are going to pull it off at all. And the couplings are, admittedly, a delight to watch. But they’re physically challenging, probably better left to the professionals, porn actors who train for this and have people to help with things.
In plain flying cowboy, the two men face each other, so facework and kissing can easily accompany the fucking, and the hole can wrap his arms and legs around his fucker, getting both support and intimacy.
Reverse flying cowboy, on the other hand, with the hole facing away from his fucker, is all about the asswork — no doubt deeply satisfying to both men, but it obliges the fucker to do a kind of balancing act with the guy suspended on his dick.
The result tends to merit judgments about how ingenious the actors’ performances are, about how clever they are in managing to make the fuck look like something a viewer could fantasize about. Because these fantasies are what the performances are for, what fags like me are paying for; the whole point is to get us fully immersed in the fantasy of taking it up the ass in mid-air and so to appreciatively shoot our loads. But for this, second-order aesthetic reflections on the marvels of the actors’ abilities are just a drag on our imaginative road to coming.
Worse, their efforts often come off as ridiculous; few things kill a hard-on faster than amazed laughter. Reverse cowboy is pretty easy to make convincingly hot. Flying cowboy has the facework going for it, and getting kissed by a fantasy guy during a mid-air fuck totally works for me. But reverse flying cowboy is a challenge; it so easily tips into absurdity. (There will be illustrations.)
A gay porn offer from 8/26, however, uses a shot that manages to communicate the intensity of reverse flying cowboy on both sides — with an orgasmic facial expression on the part of the fucker, and the body of the hole folded up so that the fucker can hold it in his arms, providing both support and intimacy, as well as that deeply desired big hard cock filling the hole’s ass. Amazingly hot (for the intended audience), so long as you’re not diverted by aesthetic analysis of the sort I just gave you.
Yes, the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall. And the idea behind this 2016 Savage Chickens cartoon (thanks to Chris Waigl for bringing it to my attention):
(#1)
Cognitively complex performances of all kinds — especially those that require creative fashioning for some audience or for the exigencies of the context — can be mastered only through long practice, the point of which is to automatize most aspects of the performance, which then do not require conscious attention, reflection, or decision-making in the moment, but leave room for that creative fashioning.
Although some simple skills can be acquired through mere repetition, all kinds of practice work better if they’re engaged — intense, focused, even enjoyable. Meanwhile, for complex performances it’s going to take a lot of practice: the more cognitively complex the performance, the longer it takes to get really competent at it. Ten to fifty thousand hours, seven to ten years. For playing basketball, discovering the organization of social practices, ballet dancing, analyzing philosophical issues, playing and composing music, analyzing genetic mechanisms, writing fiction, revealing the mechanisms of population movements, creating computer languages, reviewing movies, playing chess, understanding the structure of a (natural) language, and much else.
Most of my day today was taken up with the Palo Alto Sacred Harp all-day singing (shapenotes from 10 to 3!); I’m pleased to say I was not only able to participate in this event (via Zoom), but managed to last through the whole thing, sometimes singing quite powerfully. I wasn’t physically there, and people couldn’t hear me (I had to mute myself because of the way Zoom works), but I got to choose a couple of songs (Confidence SH270 and Bridgewater SH276), and managed a really big contact high — a tonic for my life of solitude these days.
Early in the singing someone chose a song that I found moving but didn’t recall ever having sung before: SH83t, Vale of Sorrow: brief and easy to sing, a haunting minor melody, and a text I found deeply moving: the words of an earnest Christian who hopes to have earned his place with Jesus in heaven, but is nevertheless saddened that his death will take him from those he loves. He is experiencing what he thinks of as the grief of love.
The music (from the 1991 Denson revision of The Sacred Harp (first compiled in 1844)):
A reminder: the melody is in the tenor line, the third from the top (the treble line, at the top, has either high harmony or a counter-melody); the different shapes of the notes locate them in a scale (sort of a visual DO-RE-MI)
The text comes on two parts: one stanza of background, one with the grief of love:
While in this vale of sorrow,
I travel on in pain;
My heart is fixed on Jesus,
I hope the prize to gain.But when I come to bid adieu
To those I dearly love,
My heart is often melted —
It is the grief of love.
The phrase comes at you out of the blue, after some conventional imagery and conventional expression (vale of sorrow, the heart being fixed on something, gaining a prize, bidding adieu, the heart melting with emotion).
As I recover from gall badder surgery, increasingly able to digest meat and fatty foods without mishap, I’ve developed a longing for challenging meat, especially beef, pork, and lamb. Not that I was a big meat-eater before the surgery, but being denied something makes you yearn for it all the more.
I had dreams about (pork) carnitas — something I adored but would have maybe twice in a year, as a kind of celebration of intense tastes. So I went to a well-reviewed source — Tacqueria El Grullo, 620 E Evelyn Ave in Sunnyvale — and ordered their (excellent) carnitas.
Their (minimal) description:
Carnitas: Chunks of braised pork. Served with a side of rice, refried beans and salad. [AZ: And, of course, soft (corn) tortillas, kept warm in aluminum foil. And, of course, containers of salsa verde and salsa roja.]
It then occurred to me that a side dish of some sort might be nice. On their appetizer menu, there was something new to me, though with a name that had a familiar part: asada fries. The El Grullo description:
Asada fries: French fries topped with melted cheese, beef, avocado & sour cream.
The beef would presumably be carne asada, chopped. I’ve been a fan of carne asada since I was introduced to it, in Chicago, back in the 1960s. Yes, go with the beef, marinated in lime juice and grilled and slightly charred, and finally chopped: GIVE ME MEAT. And then I thought: ah, asada fries must be the poutine of northern Mexico. And so (I discovered on further investigation) it was. Looks like a mess — it’s a lot of stuff jumbled together — but quite tasty. And undeniably meaty.
(This is very much a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting — coming after two days in which I was almost totally felled by the humid heat we’ve been experiencing (though I did get in a much-needed shower at 2 in the morning yesterday), and barely functioned. All this sadly in utter solitude: not a word with another human being between two exchanges with caregivers, on Saturday morning and yesterday afternoon.)
… with a note on Stanley Kubrick’s directorial techniques.
First, Don Boorleone.
Very briefly noted: this photo on Facebook today from Dan Edmonds (but not of him, and he doesn’t know where he got it):
A guy wielding a Karabiner 98k Mauser rifle
In its kitten release, a dangerously hair-trigger firearm. But famously effective at ridding barns of mice.
The One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed on 12/7/18 — the Ramona St. posting mill grinds slowly, very slowly — is all about pragmatics, in particular what we take to be the point of questions we’re asked. In the strip, Ruthie asks her father what you can do to stop hiccups. Her father doesn’t inquire into why she’s asking, but assumes that she’s not merely asking an information question (she might, after all, be researching the matter for a presentation at school), and it never occurs to him that she’s asking a quiz question (to which she already knows the answer, but is checking his paternal competence at everyday medical care, should the occasion arise). Instead, he assumes that she has a personal interest in the answer to the question — this turns out to be so — indeed, that she has the hiccups and wants to know how to stop them — that’s a good guess, and it’s close, but it’s wrong — so instead of answering Ruthie’s question, by describing an appropriate remedy, he leaps to supplying the remedy himself:
(#1) A well-intentioned action misfire that follows from the various (literal) meanings of questions; practical reasoning about which ones are likely to be relevant to the situation at hand; the calculation of meanings that can be indirectly conveyed given a literal meaning — most pressingly the calculation of Ruthie’s intentions in asking this particular question, so that her father can respond to those intentions; and then his short-circuiting his reaction to all of this by dispensing with a verbal reply and going right to the action it would recommend
Why is she asking? That’s the crucial point, where it would be easy to go wrong.
On jerk, jerky, and jerking (off), quoting (in full) two excellent surveys of this domain: from the Grammarphobia site in 2016; from The Ringer site last month — the second of these using research by lexicographer Ben Zimmer reported on his Wall Street Journal column (which is behind a paywall).
(It’s about vernacular masturbatory verbs, so it’s deemed not suitable for kids, and of course it’s not to the taste of the sexually modest.)
Why would anyone care whether a guy favors jack off or jerk off — or something else, like jag off or toss off or wank — as his masturbatory verb?
Street talk about sexual practices and unsavory bodily substances varies over time and place and context, differs from one speech community to another, just like all kinds of talk: wank and toss off are distinctly BrE, jag off distinctly AmE, and jack off and jerk off both seem to be originally AmE, though they’ve spread more widely; guys will have different preferences for vocabulary in this domain, mostly according to their personal experience with the verbs, and they’ll know that some guys use different verbs. Why doesn’t it stop at that?
Well, this is linguistic variation, and it pretty much never stops at that. There’s a general human inclination to believe that your own practices are the best ones, the right ones; and also a general human inclination to accept the practices of your community, which are likely to be supported by explicit teaching and advice, and even enforced with sanctions, as the best ones, the right ones.
So we find people deploring other people’s linguistic practices, often in extravagant terms (disgusting, ignorant, …), sometimes ascribing dubious or discreditable motives to other people’s choices (hypercorrection and varieties of avoidance are often cited, as are faddism, reflexive following of fashion, and misguided attempts to sound clever). Even for masturbatory verbs, where there’s no explicit teaching and no advice literature.
Now, one such example, in a recent Facebook exchange between Jeff Shaumeyer (a jerk-off user) and me (a jack-off user), which turns out to be surprisingly complex, because it involves a second-order effect, with responses to (first-order) critiques of the usage jerk off, that it’s too crude, too vivid (the imagery is of the jerking motion in masturbation, and in the jerking of the body in orgasm — jerk was used for ‘copulate with’ before it was extended to masturbation, and is still so used by some speakers). This critique has led to the idea that guys who use jack off do so (only) because they’re (fastidiously) avoiding the gutsy, authentically masculine jack off — a gratuitous attribution of motives that I stringently objected to.
