Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Jessica Hagedorn

October 19, 2025

[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

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To Survive on This Shore

September 27, 2025

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.

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A seminar on raunchy play

September 23, 2025

(entertaining, but totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

The seminar was called to order on 9/21 on Facebook by Michael Thomas, who introduced the key background element, the internet fridge. The participants were three gay men, long-time friends (our shared backgrounds and the relaxed, playful atmosphere are important here): speakers Michael Thomas and me, with Michael’s husband Aric Olnes in a non-speaking role. From the transcript (somewhat edited):

— MT: We [MT and AO] hooked our fridge up to the internet the other day. Here’s a question for the ages: do fridges watch porn while the doors are shut?

— AZ: But of course. And then they fall asleep and dream of abusing electric sheep. And you thought that was condensation on the fridge walls, didn’t you?

— MT > AZ: fridge spunk. just scrape it off for your coffee in the morning.

— AZ > MT: Absolutely. The best jizz there is.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff packed into this — some from the widespread sexual culture of modern America or from popular culture but also some from gay male sexual culture. I will now do some unpacking.

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Comma, comma, comma chameleon

August 3, 2025

Yesterday on Facebook, Michael Israel re-posted an item from The Oxford Comma site (showing the cover of an old issue of Tails pet magazine), with the (in this context) foolish advice “Use the Oxford comma, folks”:

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Lost in an uncrowd

August 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for August — and 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day 🇨🇭 (I am of course wearing my Swiss flag gym shorts — with a bright red FAGGOT tank top, to be sure, but I am sporting the flag of my forefathers)

Today’s (Piccolo & Price) Rhymes With Orange strip depends on the viewer identifying the main character, the one who says he wants to go someplace busy and crowded, as a pop-cultural figure known for losing himself in crowds:


British Wally / American Waldo, uncomfortable out in the open, with only one other person close to him

My 8/3/13 posting “The Weinerfest rolls on” has a section on the Where’s Wally / Waldo? books, with this Wikipedia note:

The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group. Wally’s distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses make him slightly easier to recognise, but many illustrations contain “red herrings” involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.

So of course he’s uneasy, sitting in such an exposed spot.

Thanks to his distinctive garb, Waldo is a frequent subject of cartoons. My 2/17/18 posting “Tell them you haven’t seen him” has a sampling of 4 of them.

 

 

Tip of the tongue

July 24, 2025

The briefest of shots. Following on my posting yesterday “A Monty Python formula pun”, Benita Bendon Campbell wrote to say that she has been reading The Autobiography of the Pythons by Chapman, Palin, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, and Jones (originally published in 2003) and reports that in it, John Cleese goes on at length about Clump of Plinths, a successful Footlights Club show at Cambridge (pre-Python); he really loves that show.

Clump of Plinths is evocative of (I think) some Scots expression that’s distressingly on the tip of my tongue but is being blocked for me by Firth of Forth. Or maybe that memory of mine is an illusion. My mind is in a whirl.

 

Stoop labor

July 6, 2025

Earlier on this blog I’ve had occasion to celebrate the humane gravity of MSNBC commentator Jonathan Capehart, who happens to be both Black and gay. Now in JC talking about his 2025 book Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search for Home, an observation about the stoop labor historically done by Black folk in the American deep south (harvesting cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane):

“My cousin Rita and I are the first generation in our family to not have to pick cotton, and for people of a certain age, they will understand what that means,” Capehart said. “… It wasn’t until I was writing this book that I understood, when our parents were our age, they were working. They were working in the fields, picking cotton, picking tobacco. We did not have to do that.

So JC and his cousin Rita represent a shift in the fortunes of Black folk. Here’s JC informing us, explaining things, interviewing political and cultural figures, a figure of importance on national television — and a moving reporter on his own life history in that book. In what I see as the release of great abilities, drive, and insights that follow on opening up opportunity to everyone: excellent qualities that are in fact distributed widely across the population will flourish in new places (and since those who succeed first will have had to run through a lot of tough hoops, they will be seen to be especially talented).

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Work

June 29, 2025

6/29, penultimate June, and 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ the day of the 2025 San Francisco Pride Parade (the 55th, theme: Queer Joy is Resistance), which I’ll be watching in another window while I’m working on posting, with breaks to assemble more of the thousands of objects I need to dispose of to move to assisted living months down the line; endless puzzlements, some of which I’ll soon be posting about. A move that serves as segue to the topic of work, thanks to this 6/26 note on Facebook from Heidi Harley, with my response:

— HH: the move will be a relief and potentially a joy, depending on the other residents and the nature of the place …

— AZ > HH: I’m actually doing just fine at home, with all sorts of workarounds, plus a helper / caregiver a couple times a week. But everyone’s worried about what will happen if I need intensive medical care. I’m determined to continue my writing, which I view as a profession and a calling (as you know).

An additional note: writing is real work — takes intense concentration, long stretches of rewriting and editing to make it better, and so on — but like many kinds of real work, it can be deeply satisfying, a source of genuine pleasure.

And from that I’m taken to the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (afternoon and Sunday), where I started my first real job (initially as a copyboy), beginning in June 1958, when I was 17; I was soon shifted to the editorial staff as a floater (I’ll explain), and worked full-time for three summers (and part-time during university breaks) while I went to Princeton. It was a dream job, combining experience with all kinds of writing; learning to work on one thing after another, all relentlessly on deadline; working with a huge cast of characters, of many different natures; and gaining detailed knowledge of the way the world works — gritty stuff, scary stuff, fascinating stuff, and uplifting stuff, all gemischt.

Some recollections of my Eagle days will then lead to Studs Terkel (who died in 2008) and to Calvin Trillin (who’s still alive, at age 89).

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Book offer: scholarly grammars of English

June 25, 2025

These can go to the Friends of the Palo Alto Library, but it occurs to me that among my friends and colleagues (I will also post this offer to Stanford Linguistics) there might be someone who would like a full set of one or more of these great scholarly grammars of English:

(paperback) Jespersen, Modern English Grammar (7 volumes), plus The Philosophy of Grammar

(hardback) Kruisinga, Handbook of Present-Day English (5 volumes)

(hardback) Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English (4 volumes)

I don’t have the resources to mail stuff, so you have to be able to pick things up at my Palo Alto house (if you don’t live too far away, I have helpful family members who could deliver).

Arnold (there are other, less scholarly, offers to follow)

(inquiries to: arnold dot zwicky at-sign gmail dot com)

 

 

Saturday, Sunday, and Monday

June 15, 2025

Three days heavy in events and occasions, including my beginning to work through the amazing pile of stuff I’ve accumulated here in Palo Alto, which has to be whittled down to what I can fit into my apartment in an assisted living facility; that’s a long way away, but the task is daunting and will take months (as it did when I moved out of the house in Columbus), and you will be hearing every so often about my puzzlements.

But now Saturday (yesterday), Sunday (today), and Monday (tomorrow). Pride Month continues throughout and that’s a Big Thing in my world. It’s been a long, hard ride, and now we’re facing another round of backlash and reversals, so this is a time for conspicuously joining together, all of us — and, at the same time, being as fabulous as we can.

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