The promised note on Albert Payson Terhune — with a name like that, he’d have to have been at least upper middle class, and he was, he was — and his dog books.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
A musical interlude
August 26, 2026About my daily life, because I’m so backed up in things to do that I’m just picking little stuff out of a hat. (The incidental good news is that my lab tests were very pleasingly improved, and I’m now starting, eek, a very slow withdrawal from prednisone; think good thoughts about woolly mammoths for me.)
Meanwhile, I took an early break in my sleep last night, to search, I don’t really know why, for material on the dog books of my childhood.
I did indeed speed-read (and barely comprehend, though I got Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear for life) all of Shakespeare at the age if 9, of my own volition, but I also adored imaginative fiction for kids. Dr. Doolittle, Freddy the Pig, every Oz book there was. And books about noble dogs. My West Lawn PA companion for several years was a sweet mutt dog (part terrier, the rest mystery). Spot / Spotty (not an imaginative name, but fitting).
Out of this I will produce soon a posting on what we all called at the time LadADog (three syllables rushed into a ball). And Albert Payson Terhune. But that’s not what this posting is about. This posting is about the music that Apple was playing for me when I went on my computer dog search around 9:15 pm last night.
Lecterns on wheels
August 13, 2026They bring me reference volumes for work in progress, allowing me to hold them open on the lectern itself.
My reference works are mostly big heavy volumes, very hard for my disabled hands to cope with at all. Lifting them is a problem in itself. Then I used to have a space on my worktable, in front of my tv, where they could lie open, right next to my computer’s keyboard, to the pages I needed. But that space had to be used as the phone center for my home office, so more complex measures were required. From an office supply company, lecterns on wheels.
Oh dear, now you’re entertaining fantasies of crazy-eyed mad professors zooming around dusty lecture halls, all jazzed up on their turbo-charged lecterns — bumper cars for the academic elite. Sadly, the excellent Interion mobile podium / lectern from Global Industrial (which mostly provides heavy-duty industrial office supplies) moves slowly but majestically; it was just what I wanted, and I needed two of them, one for each of two bookish rooms. They definitely required assembly by a professional — and even so consumed a fair chunk of time for the mechanic — during which I suffered sharp pangs of tool envy, an affliction I am prone to.
But it was done, and here’s the one from the main room of my apartment, with the most-often used reference works installed in convenient places:
Yesterday’s metromanteau
August 13, 2026The Wayno / Piraro 8/12 Bizarro: “The Metromorphosis”:
metro- [the libfix, representing the noun metrosexual] + metamorphosis [the abstract noun meaning ‘transformation’] = metromorphosis ‘transformation to metrosexuality’ (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Two contributors:
Marjane Satrapi
July 26, 2026In The Economist issue of June 13th, in print; on June 11th on-line:
Obituary: Veil and beard and nuclear weapon
Marjane Satrapi set out to correct the West’s views of Iran
The author of Persepolis, an international sensation, died on June 4th, aged 56
Sorting
July 24, 2026After many grueling hours, I now have my books and DVDs sorted into (admittedly eccentric) categories on the bookshelves, in the various places the movers put the shelves. This task creates a series of insoluble puzzles in categorization, which I have been inclined to solve in an assortment of ad hoc ways.
There’s one giant category of linguistic structure, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, arranged (in a desperate faute de mieux move) alphabetically by author — which is truly not useful, but resists breakup because so many of my interests cut across subareas. Similarly for a giant agglomeration of public-intellectual books, many (but not all) touching on matters of language; this is where you’ll find Geoff Nunberg, Arika Okrent, Steve Pinker, and Ben Yagoda.
Then there are more specialized topic collections: your library probably doesn’t have a subcollection on male prostitution or comics studies, but mine does. I’ve done less breaking down of the DVDs, because there aren’t a great many of them, but that has led to some surprising neighbors — as with the sequence of Marx Brothers movies, then My Neighbor Totoro, and then The Night of the Hunter.
But at least if it’s survived to get here, it’s on the shelves. Somewhere.
Small worlds
July 23, 2026In recent news: the publication (on 7/6) of John D’Emilio’s latest book, Making Gay History: Memoir of a Scholar-Activist (Duke University Press). From Jonathan Ned Katz’s blurb:
a report from the trenches, a history of the struggle to create a history of sexuality, a personal history of political activism, the story of a [AZ: devoutly Catholic] smart boy from the Bronx who made himself into a pioneering, left, feminist, anti-racist gay, public intellectual.
Which prompts me to tell an anecdote about my man Jacques and me — and John D’Emilio. So my tale will of course begin with Larry Kramer, the author of the controversial novel Faggots, but more important to my tale, the founder of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which means that through his ceaseless abrasive hectoring, he changed the world for the better and helped to save untold numbers of lives.
(There are brief accounts of Kramer and D’Emilio in my 7/21 posting “Two celebrated gays”)
Alpine flora color plates
July 17, 2026From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago):
guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.
Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations.
Merest note
July 16, 2026Managed a shower, with improvised adjustments so I could sit down (though the shower is designed for a standing person) and also cope with a — surprise! — low-flow shower stream. All very edgy.
Then began some attack on the books, which are all mixed up, arranged on shelves in totally new ways in new places. As with pruning my library way down for the move, this requires handling large numbers of heavy books, so that my hands now barely work, cramp up, and hurt like hell. Constantly having to reinvent some new schemes for locating the books so that they’d be most useful and then rework them to fit the spaces I have. Utterly exhausted, barely able to speak. This is going to take many difficult days. Meanwhile, books are piled on the floor, on tables, and so on, while I sort things out. It’s a zoo.
Meanwhile, I’ve accumulated a huge number of fresh posting topics. Life lurches on.
Josef K. is summoned to appear
June 23, 2026From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (my daughter) on 6/20, completely out of the blue:
Re: Assessment Thursday 10:30: The assessment visit is at the Avant [“a WellQuest Living Community”, offering independent living for seniors in Palo Alto]. All their departments meet you to make sure you’re a fit. I think it takes about an hour. Somebody will take you.