It’s đ Equinox Day đ — autumnal, here in the northern hemisphere; vernal, in the southern — and it’s been unusually humid (yesterday morning, a bank of fog rolled in around 10 and then rolled out about 15 minutes later), so I have another crop of boletus mushrooms, big — about 4 inches across — yellow-brown plates, here and there throughout my little garden strip. One of them, peeking out from the edge of the ivy:
Author Archive
Briefly noted: the return of the boletes
September 22, 2024
A Magritte roundup
September 22, 2024A Sunday Dan Piraro Bizarro, a little RenĂŠ Magritte festival that doesn’t actually mention the Belgian surrealist, but just assumes everyone recognizes the three paintings the cartoon alludes to:
Framed as a police lineup to identity a malefactor (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip â see this Page)
Central Europe
September 21, 2024The term for a region of Europe that’s neither north (Scandinavian) nor south (Mediterranean), but, most significantly, neither west (France, the Low Countries, the British Isles) nor east (Russia plus at least some portion of its sphere of influence, especially in the old Russian Empire). In between lies territory historically under a shifting patchwork of rule, notably including: the Habsburg Empire  and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that succeeded it; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Bavaria; Prussia; and eventually a unified Germany.
After World War II the German nation was starkly divided into two: West Germany, allied with France and the UK (and the US); and East Germany, allied with the Soviet Union. Germany was central in Europe only in the sense that that’s where the dividing line between west and east fell.
Somewhere along the line, the region-term Central Europe came to be applied to Germany (plus more) as the hinge between regions called Western Europe and Eastern Europe (as well as between Northern Europe and Southern Europe); I don’t know the history of the term (so I hope someone has already studied it). But if you just look at a map of modern Europe and look only at national boundaries, there’s a huge territory between Germany and Russia, with a swath just to the east of Germany that looks like something that you could reasonably call Central Europe (and brings to mind the Habsburg Empire); without going south and east into the Balkan peninsula:
(A) Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia
Then there’s a more eastern strip that would (with western Russia) count as Eastern Europe; without going north into the Baltic states, at least:
(B) Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria
Meanwhile, at the other side of Germany, there’s Switzerland, with strong cultural and linguistic ties to both Germany and France (plus, to confound things further, shared boundaries with Austria and Italy).
I took up some of the nomenclature back in 2018, as an interested party (I am only two generations away from German-speaking Switzerland — canton Glarus in the northeast, to be specific). And then on 9/15, along came another interested party, Hana Filip (born in the Czech Republic — in Moravia in the east, to be specific). Both of us reacting to specific nomenclatural proposals.
Arctic education
September 21, 2024I was delighted to discover yesterday that there is an Arctic University of Norway (UiT), with 11 study sites / campuses across northern Norway and administrative offices in Tromsø. As someone whose friendship network embraces the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (plus my collaborator Jerry Sadock, who is a scholar of, among other things, Greenlandic Eskimo), I’m pleased to see teaching and research flourishing in the far north.
Now consider this map of the continental Scandinavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland) and nearby lands — and marvel at just how far north Tromsø (marked on the map) is:
I have friends, students, and colleagues who have grown up in, studied in, or taught in most of the Scandinavian cities named on this map, but the farthest north of these cities is Oulu in Finland (Don Steiny loved his time there), which is way south of Tromsø (and Murmansk in Russia); meanwhile, on the Linguistic Typology mailing list, Dave Sayers often writes about the pleasures of his home university, Jyväskylä, in Finland, which is away from the madding crowds, but far south even of Oulu, in the Finnish central lake district, north of Tampere on this map
Annals of bureaucracy: the jury summons
September 20, 2024Or: how I spent my Friday morning.
On Wednesday I got this mail notice from the Superior Court, County of Santa Clara Office of the Jury Commissioner:
(#1) with some of my information deleted
This morning I went to the website, registered by providing my personal information and went to the Request for Hardship Excusal page, where I completed this section:
(#2) Where I made the crucial error: I was willing to get a hardship excusal just for this occasion, so I submitted this form
Immediately, a response:
Your Request for Hardship Excusal was successfully submitted on 09/20/24.
Painter of the male form
September 19, 2024Two days ago on this blog, David Tanner, a representational painter who works in a variety of forms (portraiture, still lifes, landscapes, nudes), but with special attention to men and male bodies. Now, also encountered through Pinterest, Cornelius McCarthy (1935 – 2009), nonrepresentational but definitely figurative: intensely focused on the male body (single men, couples, groups — often with matter-of-fact penises in the compositions, but no sexual acts, or even bodily contact), in a series of styles, most notably in a cubist-influenced period that then developed into the late style of the painting that caught my eye on Pinterest:
(#1) Moonlit Park (2008); exposing the body is a recurrent theme in the late paintings, as is the Catholic church in the background
More art to follow. Then some information about McCarthy from the ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon website of an anonymous artist I’ll  call Ultrawolf, who supplies basic information (from Wikipedia), plus some awkward commentary on the art. And finally, a bit about Ultrawolf and some about the artist Keith Vaughan, who was an influence on McCarthy.
Mango(e)s and papayas, anything your heart desires
September 18, 2024From the Economist‘s 8/24/24 issue, under the characteristically jokey head Beneath the (ap)peal, the informative subhead
South Asia’s long love affair with mangoes
(yes, about the appeal of the fruits in South Asia, incorporating –peal as a pun on peel ‘outer covering of a fruit or vegetable’)
Which stopped me in my tracks, because I would have written mangos rather than mangoes. It turns out that there’s real variation on this point; both mangos and mangoes are well attested (and have occurred in postings on this blog, though all the instances of mangoes are in quoted material, not from my hand). And, entertainingly, published lyrics for the song titled “Mangos” (made famous by Rosemary Clooney) come in two different versions, from different sources: one with mangos, one with mangoes.
JCL for Hump Day
September 18, 2024In recognition of Wednesday as Hump Day, I offer you (from today’s Pinterest mailing) a brief notice of some hump-worthy (verb hump: … 3 [with object] vulgar slang have sex with (NOAD)) young men in a vintage ad by J.C. Leyendecker (who appeared most recently on this blog in my 9/2 posting “Leyendecker Labor Day”):
A JCLÂ ad for Ivory Soap, set in an athletic homosocial space, the locker room showers (note the male buttocks, a recurrent object of JCL’s artistic — and presumably also personal — engagement).
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of checking-out going on in that shower room. No doubt dwelling on those “muscles … in perfect trim” and the “sweating skin” that has been cleansed “under the rushing water”.
A representational oil painter
September 17, 2024David Tanner, whose portrait of the artist at work caught my eye on Pinterest a little while back:
(#1) Model Break (2016), which attracted my attention for its interest in the male body, also because it’s an example of modern representational painting by a serious artist, in one of the forms (portraiture) where this traditional approach flourishes (other such forms: still lifes, nudes, landscapes, and magic realism and fantasy — all of which, except the last, Tanner has also taken up)
Tanner has also provided us with a detailed account, in plain language, of his development as an artist. And thrown off a passing reference to his husband, so providing some background for his attention to the male body.
He’s a prolific artist, turning out enormous numbers of paintings in the following categories (of his own devising):
scenes with male figures [especially dancers and athletes], scenes of musicians [all male], landscapes and cityscapes, scenes of Italy, scenes with female figures, Richmond Virginia [the city he lives in] scenes, scenes of artists [all male]Â at work, still lifes
Two further examples, and then DT in his own words.
A dragon, some pansies, and a dispute in the Bob family
September 16, 2024Presents from Max Vasilatos a couple days ago: a little brass dragon figurine (the dragon is my Chinese astrological animal), a box of Max-designed flower notecards (prominently including some pansies; I’m a well-known pansy), and Silver Bob, a Max-crafted face now joining his brother Wooden Bob, who’s lived at my place for about 30 years now, but provoking a certain amount of fraternal dispute in the Bob family about their respective merits and characters.
I will elaborate (but with few pictures, since I haven’t yet rediscovered how to upload pictures from my little camera to my computer; my life is currently way overfull).