Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
October 27, 2025
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).
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Posted in Academic life, Awards, Books, Gender and sexuality, Linguists, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »
October 26, 2025
Yesterday’s leg of the train trip, on this blog in my posting “Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas”:
[On] cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
Then in this comment on that posting, NM sets us off on the next leg (which you can think of as Vienne en Isère 4 (there will be a Vienne en Isère 5):
You are right that Tex-Mex enchiladas are a world away from your dacquoises. I can’t think of anything in Tex-Mex cuisine to match those. But Helen Corbitt might have had something. She was Texas’ answer to Julia Child and wrote a lot of fine food books that were popular in my mother’s generation. I am sure one of her cookbooks has a pleasant cake, perhaps alternating layers of angelfood cake and Cool Whip with some tinned fruit to gussy it up. Not quite French patisserie but pretty fancy for Dallas.
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Posted in Books, Language and food, Music, Social class | 6 Comments »
October 21, 2025
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.
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Posted in Books, Events and occasions, French, Names, Placenames | 1 Comment »
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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Posted in Art, Books, Language and the body, Morning names, Names, Writers | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Age, Books, Gender and sexuality, Photography | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Porn, Rhyme, Signs and symbols, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »
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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Posted in Address terms, Books, Conjunctions, Coordination, Faith vs. WF, Movies and tv, Music, Prosody, Punctuation, Quotation, Signage | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Books, Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Books, Humor, Memory, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »
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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Posted in Books, Categorization and Labeling, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Lives, Movies and tv, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
