The author of the little — 67-page — guidebook The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing (first published in 2013), the old-school newspaper editor John E. McIntyre, writing as a curmudgeonly, sometimes imperious, character of the same name, as seen on the book’s front cover:
(#1) The name of this image file is McIntyreOldEdtor.jpg; that fact will eventually become significant
The rooms in the grade school of my childhood — West Lawn Elementary School in West Lawn PA, west of Reading — had high ceilings, and all the rooms had, I believe, reproductions of artworks above the blackboards, where there was plenty of space for them. Uplifting artworks on patriotic, social, or religious themes (yes, religious; every day started with recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag and the Lord’s Prayer).
One classroom — my third grade, I think — had Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners:
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The significance of the painting, we were told, was that just as these women were gathering food in the field, so we children were extracting useful knowledge — gleaning it — from our lessons at school. (This is a specialized metaphorical sense of the verb glean: ‘[with object] extract (information) from various sources: the information is gleaned from press clippings‘ (NOAD)). I don’t think anyone ever explained to us who those gleaners were or what they were actually doing, so I recall being surprised when, more or less by accident, I came across the details in my World Book Encyclopedia.
The title of an abstract of mine for the 20th Stanford SemFest (Semantics Festival), to take place on March 15th and 16th (the Ides of March and National Panda Day, respectively). The SemFests feature reports (primarily 20-minute presentations, plus 10-minute question periods)
on recent work on any topic touching on meaning broadly construed, ranging from traditional topics in semantics and pragmatics to social meaning to natural language understanding and beyond
This posting is primarily about my snowclone paper, but there will also be some very personal reflections on the conference and its significance in my academic life.
(Thanks to a cascade of medical conditions that began at the beginning of this month and has consumed much of my time, I’m still working my way through Christmas-oriented postings. Better late, as they say. [And yes, the back-truncation better late is in my files.])
The classic vehicle for carrying Christmas ornaments is the Christmas tree, an up-standing object. But suspended vehicles are also possible: hanging baskets, for instance, or this festive arrangement in Virginia Transue’s dining room that takes advantage of a chandelier:
(#1) Virginia’s 2018 smilax chandelier, with ornaments
(This posting ends up knee-deep in gay porn, so there will be references to men’s bodies and to mansex, though the X-rated visuals are off in my AZBlogX posting today “Manly Beach”. This material might not suit all readers.)
A Facebook exchange this morning:
Michael Newman [posting a photo on an antipodal vacation]: Notorious [venomous] funnel web spiders? — in Manly, New South Wales, Australia.
Arnold Zwicky: I long ago got used to the place-name Manly, but every so often I see it afresh and giggle.
Michael Newman: I couldn’t help thinking about it the whole time.
The history of the placename Manly is both straightforward and surprising. Manly and nearby Manly Beach then led me to the 1991 Kristen Bjorn gay porn flick Manly Beach (manly mansex among the manly lifesavers of Manly Beach) and to brief notes on facial expressions in gay porn.
(There will eventually be reproductions of religious artwork incorporating images of naked boys, genitals and all — the boys represent the disciples of Christ, and the artwork is a giant fresco in a (Lutheran) cathedral. Ok, the images are from Scandinavia, where attitudes about such things tend to be much more relaxed than they are in Anglo-American settings, and the artist almost surely chose prepubescent boys to represent the twelve apostles because he viewed such boys as innocents, free from sin. (In my experience, this is not even remotely an accurate view of the emotional and imaginative world of prepubescent boys, but I think we have to grant the artist a right to his idealizations.) I’ve chosen not to relegate these images to AZBlogX, in the hope that on WordPress they fall under the Fine Art Exemption for genital nudity, while understanding that they would almost surely be unacceptable on Facebook. In any case, if such images distress you, read on about Hugo Simberg’s gloomy artworks and then bail out when I get to The Garland Bearers.)
Thanks to Bernadette Lambotte and Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook, I was made aware of the Finnish artist Hugo Simberg and one of his most famous works, the deeply enigmatic The Wounded Angel (1903):
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Another chapter in the Lives of the Gay Pornstars, this time the story of Greg Patton (with his sometime boyfriend Bobby Pyron), who performed in porn in the 1980s under the name Rod Phillips (while Pyron performed under the name Lee Ryder). This posting is not particularly lubricious, but it is about male sex workers and does refer to anal sex between men, so it won’t be to everyone’s taste.
My interest is in how these men managed their lives in the porn business (separately and together), how they balanced their everyday lives — Pyron had a passion for flower arranging, Patton for jewelry design (how queer is that?) — with their careers in porn, and (insofar as this can be determined) how they coped with growing up in a largely hostile straight world and managed relationships with their families. The central question — one that has dogged me all my life, from early childhood on — is:
How, in these circumstances, does an anomaly like me fashion a life that is both decent and bearable?
A souvenir from Juan Gomez, who visited Peru (Cuzco, Machu Picchu) with his family for the New Year’s holiday: a little stuffed llama I’ve named Glama Grrl (he’s seen here perched high in the spathyphyllum forest on my worktable):
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The Peruvian camelid has been exploited for all sorts of word play purposes, perhaps most famously in the light verse of Ogden Nash, but also in joking that turns on the fact that the element llam– has (at least) three separate sources in Spanish (referring to the camelid, to fire or flames, and to calling (out)). Glama Grrl will then lead us to the original traveler from darkest Peru, Paddington Bear.
The 1/17 Wayno-Piraro collab on a Bizarro:
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
There’s a lot in this; I’ll start with the purely linguistic question: What does the N + N compound party linguist refer to? Then turn to the question of what’s happening in the cartoon, in particular how the notions of minority and diversity figure in it.
