… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.
Archive for the ‘Academic life’ Category
Graphing and slavery
April 9, 2025An upcoming Stanford Humanities Center lecture:
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization” by Lauren Klein of Emory Univ., on Tuesday 4/15, from 4–6 pm in Levinthal Hall and online
Summary: “The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate the meaning — and power — of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization — the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists — this lecture will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.
I’m posting this as an example of the sort of fascinating research supported by the SHC, looking in fresh and unexpected ways at events, practices, and conceptualizations from many times, places, and social settings.
The world is too much with me
April 3, 2025Und die einen sind im Dunkeln, und die andern sind im Licht, doch man sieht nur die im Lichte, die im Dunkel sieht man nicht
— Bertholt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper
Over the past six days I suspended a complex series of postings on LGBTQ people integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment, slowly focusing on the examples closest to me: gay men in linguistics. I intended to begin with one specific example that came my way a while back, in this announcement (with special emphasis on a passage I’ve boldfaced; read it in conjunction with the Brecht quote above):
The George A. Smathers Library [of the University of Florida, Gainesville] cordially invites you to the Michael Gannon Lecture on Tuesday, April 1st, from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m., featuring linguistic anthropologist George Aaron Broadwell [AZ: called Aaron], Ph.D., the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at University of Florida. A booksigning will be held immediately following the event.
“Reading Florida’s First Native Authors: Towards an Understanding of Timucua Literature”
This talk introduces the public to some of the most interesting passages of Timucua literature and discusses the techniques that our team has used to read and interpret Timucua texts.
Having assembled a host of texts written in Timucua, the native language of the inhabitants of northern Florida from around the twelfth century into the eighteenth century, Broadwell has spent years working to translate what the writers were recording. Through his own efforts, work with colleagues, and assistance from students Broadwell has reconstructed substantial parts of Timucua vocabulary, in some cases interpreting previously untranslated texts, and also offering new revelations about those with Spanish corollaries.
His work has revolutionized understanding of the conquest and colonial eras in Florida, giving voice to the people who lived under Spanish rule and revealing what their letters and writings say about dramatic changes taking place in their lives and world. The topic is especially appropriate for a lecture in honor of [historian, educator, priest, and war correspondent] Michael Gannon [(1927-2017)], who included in his own discussions of Florida history an example of the Timucua-language version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Alas, the world has been too much with me, so I now bring you the news of this excellent event after it has taken place; I’ve been posting little things to show that I’m still alive, while I try to cope with the threatening turmoil instigated by President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon (two monstrous buckets of pathologies, of different sorts); my current mantra is Stand Up and Stand Out, and I’ve been doing my best to be pointedly offensive. Meanwhile, I have a complex personal and medical life, with much I’d like to report on (I visited my department at Stanford this morning, first time in years, and showed some of the delightful campus to my caregiver J — who then showed me that I will need to post about Antigua Guatemala, all new to me).
In any case, I have tons of stuff to say and feel overwhelmed. But I intend to move on to Aaron Broadwell, and try to distill many pages of a remarkable c.v. into something digestible, before moving on to the story of his relationship with the author Peter Marino (Aaron and Peter have been together for 30 years and were in the earliest group of gay people who got married in Massachusetts, in 2004, wow. Then to get back to the larger topic, with other examples of gay male linguists of substantial accomplishment and some words on why people should care about us, especially during a time when concerns about DEI mask a concerted attack on (among many other things) LGBTQ people and our rights — one of a number of bullshit smokescreens spread by Putinitsa and Evilon in their program to establish domination over a cowering and compliant populace.
Poetic note. “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807; in it, the poet maintains that industrial society has damaged the connection between people and nature and replaced it with getting and spending.
Vacations
April 1, 2025[I wrote this while watching Cory Booker speak on the floor of the US Senate for a record of over 25 hours straight, passionately speaking against the wickedness of the president and his sidekick and in favor of (among other things) diversity, equity, and inclusion; calling repeatedly on my hero John Lewis; and cleansing the nastiness of the previous record-holder, Strom Thurmond, who was filibustering against the Voting Rights Act of 1957. I wept, I cheered, I was moved to hope, at least for a few moments.]
Two triggers for this posting:
— the Zippy strip for 9/30 (so, something close to hot news) in which Zippy and Zerbina reminisce about their fabulous vacation at the Diet of Worms in 1521 (yes, Martin Luther is involved)
— 2022 e-mail from my old friend and linguistics colleague Elizabeth Closs Traugott (who’s a year older than I am but in vastly better shape), about a trip for pleasure she was about to take to (the) Pinnacles, south of here, which reminded me of a similar trip my guy Jacques made years ago. Which then took me to a vacation J and I took together. (Yes, this topic has been simmering on my desktop for three years; I have a prodigious backlog.)
Sucking the life out of the state
January 28, 2025Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about
my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.
Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)
I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said
Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic. [call this State Suckers, SS for short]
Luminous birthdays
January 26, 2025First the depths of bleak mid-winter, in the third week of January, then a string of luminous birthdays in the last week, to bring the promise of a rising spring.
The sting in the tail
November 15, 2024Coming to the Stanford Humanities Center on November 18 at 4:00 p.m., the 2024 Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture, “Caravaggio’s Americas” by the poet and scholar Edgar Garcia of the University of Chicago; the announcement:
This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.
Dense with the abstract vocabulary of sociocultural analysis and cultural and literary history — it makes actual claims about the sources of the baroque / Baroque style in the Western arts, but it might take you some work to figure out what they are — the announcement devolves into a vividly earthy thumbnail characterization of Caravaggio as “the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs”. A sting in the tail. [Here we laugh and applaud.]
Goodbye, Jim
October 23, 2024Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.
I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.
The 2025 Arnold Zwicky Award
October 13, 2024It is my annual November pleasure to discourse some on the just-revealed winner of the AZ Award from the Linguistic Society of America; the minimal announcement from the LSA:
This award … is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics in congratulating Robert J. Podesva on receiving this prestigious award! A Stanford Associate Professor, he researches phonetic variation and identity while actively mentoring LGBTQ+ students to promote inclusivity in academia.
Rob is the fourth awardee — preceded by Kirby Conrod for 2022, Rusty Barrett for 2023, and Lal Zimman for 2024 — and will be officially feted at the LSA’s annual meetings in January. I always provide some encomium material for the awardees on this blog, but this year is special, because Rob is an old friend; a former student of mine (his PhD dissertation committee was Penny Eckert (chair), John Rickford, and me, which is about as socioculturally diverse a committee of three as you could concoct in the academic world); and a valued colleague of mine at Stanford. So there are four reasons for me to write this posting, and I will take some liberties in digressing into personal remarks along the way.
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
