Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category

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Three more years

October 3, 2025

The reward at the end of an extravagantly difficult week (don’t ask): confirmation that I have actually been appointed for three more years at Stanford. No longer do I get a letter of appointment from the cognizant dean; instead, my department’s administrator (the Kelly Battcher in this e-mail) gets a notice from FASA — Faculty and Academic Staff Appointments, the online integrated management system for academic appointments at Stanford. This notice:


Thus implying that the cognizant dean did in fact approve the appointment; there is an actual human being in the middle of all this, you just can’t see them

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Posted in Academic life, My life, Stanford | 1 Comment »

Peter Paige

September 30, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tigers seeing off the month of September; meanwhile, the October Oz-rabbits are massing behind the great fence that separates the two months, and will soon burst through, to blanket the calendrical landscape

Today I will step way from the events of the day and of my life to pick up a recurring theme on this blog, that of the cultural type the queen, moved by catching an admirable exponent of the type, the actor Peter Paige, in an episode of the tv drama Bones (S6 E14, “The Bikini in the Soup”, from 2011):


(#1) Emily Deschanel (as Temperance “Bones” Brennan), Peter Paige (as Darren Hargrove), David Boreanaz (as Seely Booth); Paige plays Hargrove with plenty of queeny mannerisms, but also a certain degree of slyness (he looks serious here because he’s being arrested) (screen shot from IMDb)

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Posted in Academic life, Actors, Effeminacy, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

A moment of renewal

September 17, 2025

Cast your mind back to 8/15, when I posted “CV time at Stanford” on this blog. Where I noted that

To maintain my adjunct status [at Stanford], I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean.

My previous appointment, for 2022-25, was to expire on 8/31; the CV was to be for a 2025-28 appointment. I prepared a statement (included in that posting) that was not a conventional CV, but a summary showing who I am, what I do, and what I have done. An experiment, on my part.

The summary did make it clear that I am, among many other things, a very visible and noisy LGBT+ figure. Someone who’s liable to get in trouble with the current American government, and to get Stanford in trouble too, and might be a barrier to Stanford’s raking in contributions. So the dean might well choose to terminate me.

August, and my appointment, came to an end. My department came to the rescue by paying for a month of the university services I need to do my work.

And then, yesterday, the offer of a new appointment came through, and today the resourceful Opal Armstrong Zwicky, armed with technical advice from her mother, stepped me through signing my name electronically to a .pdf document (accepting the offer) that could then just be e-mailed to my department’s administrator. Who will relay it to the dean’s office. Which will then issue a letter of appointment. In the house that Jack built.

Of course they could take it back. All sorts if things can happen. But I press on.

The new appointment greatly simplifies the task of getting me to Stanford Linguistics’ 50th anniversary celebration on October 10th. And that is a Good Thing.

(The rest of my life is in utter shambles, but you really don’t want to hear about it. Though I will mention that most of the furniture in the house will be carted away Friday afternoon. Sleek and spare, spare and sleek is the land where the mammoth grazes.)

 

Posted in Academic life, My life, Stanford | 2 Comments »

Speech act for the day: happy you keep having birthdays

August 22, 2025

To 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.

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Posted in Academic life, Age, Events and occasions, Linguists, My life, UIUC | Leave a Comment »

Penguin-oriented art

August 20, 2025

From 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).

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Posted in Academic life, Art, Language and animals, Language and plants, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »

CV time at Stanford

August 15, 2025

Ever since I retired from Ohio State in 1995, I’ve been living in the gig economy, mostly in various irregular and temporary appointments at Stanford, eventually ending in an odd status that is neither faculty nor staff, that of adjunct professor: someone who is presumed to be actually employed somewhere else but is available for various services to Stanford. For which I receive other services from Stanford: access to things available through the university library (for me, this is primarily free and easy access to the on-line Oxford English Dictionary) and stable document storage (most of my publications, in .pdf files, citable on-line for almost instant access by others; thousands of such citations have been embedded in my blog postings over the years).

To maintain my adjunct status, I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean. My actual CV is a gigantic document; the last printout was 17 pages of densely formatted material (publications, courses taught, papers delivered, honors and awards, academic service activities, graduate students advised, at three different institutions). I can’t imagine anyone gaining illumination from it.

Then, from the administrator of the Stanford linguistics department yesterday, 8/14/25:

Your current adjunct appointment is scheduled to end 8/31/25.  If you are interested in renewing your affiliation, please send me your current CV and I’ll get that paperwork going with the Dean’s Office.

8/31 is only two weeks away, so there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong, even though the exercise used to be thought of as mostly pro forma, a reassurance that I was still intellectually active. Now that I’m a flaming symbol of DEI, who knows? These are perilous days.

In any case, it occurred to me to use the material from the “About AMZ” page on this blog (without the embedded links), which gives some actual sense of who I am and what I do (please don’t tell me that my work is, well, so idiosyncratic; people have been berating me about the eccentricity of my ideas and interests for at least 50 years now, without any effect). So I created, from this page, a .pdf file that my department’s administrator can submit to the dean, reproduced below. (I see now that the “About AMZ” file needs a reference to my published poetry and to exhibitions of my comic homoerotic collages.)

Below the line, the file I sent the administrator:

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Posted in Academic life, Gender and sexuality, My life, Ohio State, Stanford, UIUC | Leave a Comment »

The out@in shirt

July 5, 2025

From yesterday (for me, a long 4th of July work day, 6 am to 6 pm) on my Facebook page (somewhat edited):

In going through stuff in my closets, I came across a t-shirt (one that fits me, so I put it on) that has a logo on the front: a (portrait) rectangle with horizontal stripes of the rainbow flag in it and the word IN in white letters superimposed on the rainbow stripes. The back of the shirt identifies it as from out@in, which is presumably some sort of gay organization, but I don’t recognize the name or remember how I came to have the shirt.

My attempts to search for the organization and the logo came to nought, as did my attempts to scan the t-shirt logo into my scanning printer, so I appealed to readers to supply me with information about the organization and with a copy of the logo. (Given the precarity of my current life, I did not take well to people who, instead of giving me the information I sought, explained to me how I should have done the searches.)

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Posted in Academic life, Clothing, Gender and sexuality, Logos, My life, Names, Rainbow, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Morning has broken

June 7, 2025

Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
— “Morning Has Broken”

Today, Saturday, awaking officially at 4:52, but lying for maybe 20 minutes in that wonderful half-waking state, with genuinely useful ideas chasing around my head, while an Istomin / Stern / Rose recording of the Brahms trios for piano. violin, and cello (for some reason, in reverse order, ending with No. 1) played on my Apple Music — fabulously passionate, exuberant in bursts, and musically complex. The Brahms is Morning A.

One thing that I worked on in my head was a kvetch from Michael Newman (on Facebook on 6/1, with a response from me) that I didn’t get to post on yesterday, because yesterday was largely a great trial, following on the events reported in my 6/5 posting “An indescribable day”. But now I will introduce Michael and show our exchange; that’s Morning B. Which comes with the promise of a future posting celebrating Michael, singing his praises.

Then, after morning cleanup, I went to my worktable, to turn off the Apple Music, check my vital signs (good), and turn on the tv to MSNBC, which immediately presented me with this panel:

Harvard University Professor Maya Jasanoff and Ankush Khardori join The Weekend to discuss why President Tr**p keeps losing in his war against the nation’s oldest college

In which I was once again impressed with Khardori, who came across as extraordinarily bright, incisive, tough and down-to-earth, and surprisingly charming. Also, to my famously queer eye, definitely sexy; he’s Morning C.

After him, Bob Eckstein’s newsletter The Bob popped up, in a special French edition yesterday, to cap things off with a wonderfully silly cartoon — Morning D.

Morning was then broken, and the day shambled on, with variously astonishing, distressing, and alarming news breaking in one wave after another.

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Posted in Academic life, French, Gender and sexuality, Language and politics, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

And now: a real award

May 12, 2025

Just posted on, a fabricated award from Google Gives Back, and then an announcement from the Linguistic Society of America, seeking nominations for its actual awards, a list that now begins, in alphabetic order (so for once the last shall be first):

Nominations due on June 30, 2025:

— Arnold Zwicky Award: recognizing LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community.

— C.L. Baker Award: recognizing mid-career scholars in syntactic theory.

The description of the award (now in its fifth year) named after me has been slightly altered (to satisfy current law); but I continue to be moved that an award on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community was established in my name, and while I was still alive. My joking description of this honor is that I am now officially a Famous Faggot; in the circles I care about, that’s a great honor indeed.

I included the second award from the list because it has a special meaning for me: Lee Baker was my first PhD student, some 60 years ago: a sharp and thoughtful linguist, a remarkable teacher, and a good man, taken from us way too young.

 

Posted in Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

AmAcad 2025

April 24, 2025

On Facebook yesterday, starting with a message from Andrew Garrett (the Berkeley linguist):

— AG: Couldn’t be happier for Leslie Kurke [interdisciplinary scholar of antiquity at the University of California, Berkeley] …, one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in great company! [among them, CNN newsanchor Anderson Cooper; filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Ava DuVernay; actor, producer, and humanitarian Danny Glover]

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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Linguists, Stanford | 3 Comments »

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