The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”:
The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting junk I cough up constantly, and is, alas, not much affected by nasal saline sprays. Mostly, it’s unbelievably tiring. Hence, my being chair-ridden (the analogue of bed-ridden).
Now I’m going to amble discursively through the rest of this story. Walk with me.
Today’s morning name (pure playfulness after a long night of uneasy sleep fragmented by joint pain): from the Cambridge French-English dictionary, the noun
pantoufle (fem.): slipper; a loose, soft kind of shoe for wearing indoors
(#1) An array of pantoufles (from the Cambridge dictionary)
Considered as a nonsense word, it’s silly-sounding in French, or when borrowed into English as /pæntúfǝl/, which sounds like a cousin of kerfuffle.
But then the things it denotes are often indulgences — playfully pleasurable in design, material, or color (as in #1), so that the word comes with an air of the ridiculous, both in sound and in meaning.
An air that carries over to uses of pantoufle as a name. Two of which I now explore: an imaginary rabbit Pantoufle, from the world of fiction; and me as Monsieur Pantoufles, the woolly moccasins guy. (more…)
🎈 election day in my country🎈 (the first Tuesday in November) — for which I re-play this Jim Benton cartoon:
(#1) From my 3/3/25 posting “Warnings”: it’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them
In my posting yesterday “Penultimate October”, 10/30 was billed simply as Halloween Eve (with two, more eventful, days to follow). In fact it’s two — two! — occasions in one: Grace Slick’s birthday (1939), and the War of the Worlds broadcast anniversary (1938), 86 and 87 years ago (so GS is just a year older than I am). Very brief notes.
💀 💀 💀 three days in October: Halloween Eve, Halloween, Day of the Dead — with today’s Bob cartoon for the second of these occasions; and then the Day of the Dead is also a significant day for me personally — my (Path to) Sobriety Day, the day I took my last drink, 5 years ago now
Today 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).
In my mail yesterday, 10/20, a World Postcard Day postcard from my old friend and Stanford colleague Ryan Tamares, mailed from him (in Mountain View CA, a few miles from my place) on 9/22, to go through the World Postcard Day site in College Station TX on 10/1 (the day itself) and then wend its way to me (whether by intention or misadventure) as if had come by surface mail from the place in the card’s picture, Vienne en Isère, France (note: not the much better known Vienne en Autriche / Vienna in Austria / Wien in Österreich).
I’ll put off the occasion and its sponsoring organization to an appendix to the main posting, which is about the card itself: the town pictured in it, the shop in that town pictured in it, and its source.
[warning: female full frontal nudity at the end, plus a beheading, so not to everyone’s taste (note that this is an actual Penguin Books cover, and it counts as art; certainly it’s not intended as, shudder, pornography]
My morning name on awaking on 10/15 — almost surely the result of subliminal perceptions during sleep, through some story broadcast on KQED-FM during the night (I’m now doing talk rather than music during the night). From Wikipedia:
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn [AZ: Tarahata is her birth surname, Hagedorn her (Filipino) husband’s surname; Hagedorn is a surname of Germanic origin (MHG hagedorn ‘hawthorn’)] (born May 29, 1949) is an American playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.
Hagedorn is an of mixed descent. She was born in Manila, Philippines, to a mother of Scots-Irish, French, and Filipino descent and a father of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese heritage. Moving to San Francisco, California, in 1963, Hagedorn received her education at the American Conservatory Theater training program. To further pursue playwriting and music, she moved to New York City in 1978.
In 1978, Joseph Papp produced Hagedorn’s first play, Mango Tango. Hagedorn’s other productions include Tenement Lover, Holy Food, and Teenytown. Her mixed media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. From 1975 until 1985, she was the leader of a poet’s band — The West Coast Gangster Choir (in SF) and later The Gangster Choir (in New York).
… [And she wrote] the novel Dogeaters, which illuminates many different aspects of Filipino experience, focusing on the influence of America through radio, television, and movie theaters
From one of my crew of transgender friends, family, students, and colleagues, a pointer to the book To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer Verlag, 2018):
(#1) Cover of the book; from photographer Jess T. Dugan’s website for the book:Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For over five years, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre traveled throughout the United States creating To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults. Seeking subjects whose lived experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and geographic location, they traveled from coast to coast, to big cities and small towns, documenting the life stories of this important but largely underrepresented group of older adults. The featured individuals have a wide variety of life narratives spanning the last ninety years, offering an important historical record of transgender experience and activism in the United States.
The resulting photographs and interviews provide a nuanced view into the struggles and joys of growing older as a transgender person and offer a poignant reflection on what it means to live authentically despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
To Survive on This Shore exists as a book, limited-edition portfolio, museum exhibition, and community exhibition. It has also been used extensively in educational initiatives and political campaigns.
