Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category
Tomorrow x 4
November 21, 2025LSA news bulletin: awards
October 27, 2025Today turned out to be the annual awards announcement day for the Linguistic Society of America. Two awards of special interest to readers of this blog, in e-mail from the LSA (both announcements edited, rearranged, and expanded here):
The Bloomfield Book Award Committee, recognizing a volume that makes an outstanding contribution of enduring value to our understanding of language and linguistics, congratulates George Aaron Broadwell — Aaron Broadwell, of the University of Florida, Gainesville — as an award finalist (there are two finalists) on his book The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024. The award is named after Leonard Bloomfield, author of the influential textbook Language (1933), one of the founding members of the LSA in 1924, and its president in 1935.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) in congratulating Kira Hall — of the University of Colorado, Boulder — as the 5th recipient of the prestigious Arnold Zwicky Award, intended to recognize LGBTQ+ scholars and those whose work in linguistics benefits the LGBTQ+ community. The award is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
So it’s LSA President’s Day (Bloomfield and me), and also LSA Pride Day (Aaron, Kira, and me).
Living out loud
October 22, 2025The beginning of an e-mail exchange with a graduate student in linguistics, call him GS, who wrote to tell me that he’d found my blog a few years before he went to grad school in linguistics:
and I thought it was excellent and exactly the thing I needed at the time
I replied with delighted thanks, and asked if he would be willing to say, more specifically what is was that I provided for him.
GS then elaborated on his thoughts at the time in a particularly thoughtful flight of introspection (and, yes, said more nice things about me).
Now: details.
Three more years
October 3, 2025The 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
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)
A moment of renewal
September 17, 2025Cast 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.)
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.
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).
CV time at Stanford
August 15, 2025Ever 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:
The out@in shirt
July 5, 2025From 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.)