An object unearthed in my household investigations for dispossession: a woven wool rectangle, two-sided, showing a stylized blooming plant, and relatively small (10×19″, not counting its fringes) —
(#1) What I think of as the recto side
Author Archive
Words and things in the dining room
August 23, 2025
Speech act for the day: happy you keep having birthdays
August 22, 2025To the author of “Read at your own risk: Syntactic and semantic horrors you can find in your medicine chest” (1974), a speech act for 8/22. Jerry, if you’re now 83, that means that in two weeks I’ll be 85, and how did this happen to us, but, hey, we’re still standing. I am happy you keep having birthdays.
To other readers: Jerry is Jerrold M. Sadock, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics and the Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago. A friend for 60 years now and one of three sustained collaborators of mine. Also a really good guy.
Walking on water
August 22, 2025In the New Yorker issue of 8/25/25, a typically goofy-clever cartoon by Sam Gross, offering SG’s proposal for how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee:
(#1) No miracle! But, wait! SG’s account relies on a different kind of miracle — the Octopus of God, gliding supportively underwater, foot to foot, carrying Christ across the sea; that’s the goofy part, God’s really mysterious ways, as the fish have it
(I especially admire SG’s depiction of Jesus as a magical Jew, deep in thought as he navigates.)
Now, for background, the account of Jesus’s aquambulation in the Christian Bible, a collection of texts Christians think of as the New Testament. (I note that SG, a Jew, assumed his readers would be familiar with the story, as part of the common culture of our society; for this, no one involved here has to believe anything.)
Skyparty
August 21, 2025In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.
All That Jazz
August 21, 2025The song, from the 1975 musical Chicago, which has been in my head constantly the past couple of days, thanks to my coming across a vein of brief retro-choreography performances of it by the dance pair Twinsauce. Just delightful, even more so when you see them doing their shtick (infused with energy and enthusiasm) in a wild variety of settings (and in an assortment of costumes): for example, in a pouring rainstorm in NYC (video here), on the snowy sidewalks of Chicago (video here), in a shoe store (with beautiful wood flooring) (video here), and in a cobblestoned passageway, as Rat and Mouse (video here).
(#1) Rat and Mouse hoofing “All That Jazz”; great fun
Penguin-oriented art
August 20, 2025From my 8/13 posting “Botanical linocuts”, about some artworks
that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away [in the Great Dispossession].
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects.
And today I bring you McReynolds and Munson, with two very different approaches to penguins from the Pacific coast (with thanks to Robert Emery Smith, for supplying photographs of works not available on-line).
American Chinese and Italian-American
August 19, 2025The trigger was the wonderful mixed seafood with tofu soup 海鲜豆腐汤 from the Amazing Wok in San Carlos, a couple weeks ago (and then several times since). which sent me back to lunches on my own in Reading PA roughly 75 years ago, after I was finished with the program of Saturday morning for boys at the Reading YMCA. I was then on my own in the city (browsing in stores, just walking the city, sometimes going to a movie, mostly ransacking the Reading Public Library), until late in the afternoon, when I went to my parents’ store on N. 5th St. — the Memo Shop, high-end costume jewelry — and the family did a little grocery shopping and my dad drove us the 4 miles home to West Lawn.
The lunches were sometimes sandwiches or other diner food at one of the lunch counters in town, but usually were Chinese (American) or Italian (American), at two little restaurants that I remember as being in basements on S. 6th St. (but these physical details are quite likely to have been altered in memory). There wasn’t room for a lot of menu adventure at either place. Typical lunches:
Chinese: egg drop soup or hot and sour soup; plus beef and broccoli, chow mein, or egg foo young
Italian: spaghetti and meatballs most often, sometimes veal parmesan or fettuccine Alfredo or a lunch special of the day
I had money from my parents to cover these cheap lunches, plus a 15% tip.
I don’t remember the decor at the Chinese place (probably minimal), but the Italian place had an impressive painting of what I recall as the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background.
Into the world of toothed bodyparts
August 19, 2025In human beings, the mouth is the only bodypart that comes equipped with teeth. Well, there are fables of the fearsome vagina dentata and even — top men, beware! — of the occasional anus dentatus. Now the wonderful world of prehistoric nature brings us a penis dentatus. Or so we learn from the latest WIRED.
From WIRED Science, “An Ancient Penis Worm With Rings of Sharp Teeth Has Been Discovered in the Grand Canyon: The 500-million-year-old fossil, containing a species named in honor of the krayt dragons in Star Wars, is a much larger ancestor of phallic marine worms that can be found on the seabed today” by Marta Abba on 8/19/25:
Penis worms are marine creatures with a distinctly phallic appearance. There are more than 20 known species living across the world’s oceans today, as well as a number of extinct ones, like this new discovery. The researcher who made the find was searching for fossils in the Grand Canyon and named the species Kraytdraco spectatus in honor of the huge burrowing krayt dragons that appear in the Star Wars universe. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science Advances.
Two Social Security cards
August 18, 2025Discovered in rooting through drawers during the Great Dispossession: my first two Social Security cards. In those days, the cards had addresses on them, so when you started a new job, your card had to have your current address on it, and if that had changed, you needed a new card. Here are (parts of) my first two cards, with my first two tax addresses:
My first job with taxable income was at the Reading Eagle newspaper in Reading PA, a job I began in June 1958, when I was 17 and lived in my parent’s house in what was then the Wyomissing Hills section of Wyomissing PA. That was my official home address through my first years at Princeton, where I continued working for the Eagle and had two separate paying jobs at Princeton University. (Along the way I had temporary residences in Princeton NJ — my parents had by then moved on to California, and I was now living independently — and on Reading Blvd. in Wyomissing PA.)
(As soon as I turned 21, in September 1961, I registered to vote at the temporary address in Princeton. And registered in turn at each of my subsequent permanent home addresses.)
Then in June 1962 (when I was 21) it was on to Cambridge MA, where I had taxable income from MIT and from the MITRE Corp. And had a new home address, off Concord Ave. north of Harvard Square, on Walden St.
Then the cards stopped including a home address, so there were no new cards for Urbana IL, Columbus OH, or Palo Alto CA. (And there were temporary residences in a great many places, in several countries.)
Comic collages
August 18, 2025I’ve lost faith in these offers reaching an audience. But just in case, I have a variety of framed / mounted comic collages, free for the taking (at my downtown Palo Alto condo). In three sets.
First set: eleven pieces of Barry Kite’s Aberrant Art (roughly 10.5 x 15 in. images, with generous framing white space), described in my 11/30/16 posting “Poet in Search of His Moose”; in general,
The collages are parodic or surreal, and quite funny, combinations of elements from art history and from popular culture, with wry titles. Like Bill Griffiths on art in Zippy the Pinhead, Kite shows great affection for the culture that he ransacks to create absurdist, countercultural works.
Second set: two similar works by a collagist De la Nuez (bought at a long-ago Palo Alto art fair; I’ve lost all information about him)
Third set: a large collection of smaller collages, by my hand: comic homoerotic (mostly XXX-rated) collages
Come by and browse; set up a time by e-mail to: arnold dot zwicky at-sign gmail dot com