From the New Yorker issue of 10/13/25 (which has not yet arrived at my house), on-line on 10/5, “Takes: Rebecca Mead on Mary Ellen Mark’s photo from the Puerto Rican Day Parade” — from the New Yorker Classics, about “Forward, March” by MEM, in the 6/23/2003 print edition. This photo:
[caption:] Candice Lozada, nine, and Fantashia Toro, eleven, of the S.B.K. (South Bronx Kids) Dance Group, waiting for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to start
Now coming by me on Facebook every so often, this mock ad for a cosplay costume:
There is of course no Spirit costume supplier; the ad is a total invention, serving as a vehicle to heap scorn on adults who were gifted children / (child) prodigies — I’ll call them g/ps for short — in one of the four ways Americans spew hostility towards these kids and the adults they become
I was a g/p, and I need to trust someone pretty solidly before I’ll expose my childhood to them. I’m adept at dealing with hostility towards me as a faggot, but the hostility towards me as a former gifted child is hard to cope with; it feels like a contemptuous assault on a defenseless little kid, the one who became the me I am now. But I’m working on unearthing the skeletons in my life history, including this one, in the hope that my openness will help others.
Now: the topic of g/ps is far too complex to do justice to in one posting. This is just a beginning. And, as always, there’s some background to get through.
Found in a mountain of boxes full of photos from all of my life, this sweet photo that I’m sure I haven’t posted before: of a fine collie (Blaze, by name, according to the note on the back) and Blaze’s boy, who looks like he’s sprung up some in a growth spurt — and his face has left soft childhood and developed fine adult features, though in size S — but hasn’t yet gotten the shot of pubertal testosterone that builds adult muscle mass:
(#1) A boyhood shot, taken ca. 1950, when the boy was 9 or 10
Here he is ca. 1978, plying his adult trade, teaching linguistics:
(#2) Now with a 70s haircut, and now more markedly a man of the south of France (with his mother’s features)Someday he’ll come along
The man I love
And he’ll be big and strong
The man I love
— George and Ira Gershwin
Yes, my leanly muscular man, Jacques Transue, from before all the disastrous things that befell us.
The second installment of my adventures with Howdy Boy, aka Troy Anderson (Stanford ’89/’90). In the first installment (my 3/8 posting “Howdy”), with the folksy-friendly salutation “Howdy”, he introduced himself as a student in my gigantic 1989 syntax course — and thanked me for not flunking him. Now, I have a passionate interest (both personal and scholarly) in people’s lives — their daily lives and their life histories — so when I learned that Troy was not only a Stanford football player (a huge guy who looks like the offensive tackle he was at Stanford) but also a high-ranking Go player, now a business executive, who got a BA in anthropology, and as a member of the Coquille tribe in Oregon compiled a dictionary of its lost language, Miluk, for his MA thesis in linguistics, well, I was totally intrigued. We embarked on learning about each other.
Meanwhile, there was the almost flunking out. I wrote him:
It [has] occurred to me that if there was any chance of your flunking out, it would have been because you were juggling too many balls at once, always a danger for very smart manic multi-taskers, as you obviously were at the time (and probably still are).
(I’ll return to the barely not flunking out below). And I added:
I haven’t been able to piece together your history in recent years, so if you could fill me in some, I’d like to hear about it. I might try to talk you into letting me write about you on my blog. (You can sample my blog at www.arnoldzwicky.org.)
Troy turned out to be extraordinarily open in his response — giving me an inventory of major life events, some quite personal in nature, offering to supply further details, and inviting me to post whatever I wanted. An attitude that resonates with the way he presents himself; as I wrote to him a little while later:
you’re a sunny person; your most natural facial expression is a smile of pleasure... I take that disposition to be a sign of a way of being, a moral quality — of openness, of empathy, of enthusiastic commitment. In any case, whether you know it or not, you project a kind of niceness (despite your imposing body) that has surely served you well in life
Clearly, I appreciated his brand of charm, despite his being so startlingly unlike me (except for sharing linguistics, that sunny presentation of self, and serious moral commitments).
But then, more or less in the middle of the inventory, came a swerve and a surprise.
An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):
Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not
Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)
Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBH test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.
🐇 🐇 🐇 Discouraged day yesterday, which I tried to find relief from by posting something small but entertaining, but every posting I started ballooned into a sizable project — including this one, but I’m going to ruthlessly cut out a big file on Lila that I assembled a couple of years ago, when she was still alive and I wanted to celebrate her, but then it just became one of hundreds of other similar merely nascent projects, so instead I’m going to ramble on about Lila and my life and Chuck Fillmore and probably my Aunt Marion, who like Lila was a sporty woman, direct and funny and tonic to be around.
The spur for this posting was Lane Greene’s Johnson column in the 8/21/21 issue of the Economist (which I finally got to yesterday; I’m hopelessly behind on my reading as well as my writing — though I got the bulletin about Lila’s dying — on 8/8, at the age of 91 — from Barbara Partee the day it happened).
(Well, the topic is phallicity, and there will be anatomical details — discussed with anatomical terminology rather than street language, but some might still find the posting edgy.)
The story is a month old, but interest in its central element, a rocket to space, is evergreen. And the imagery of this particular rocket, Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard, was fresh and noteworthy.
The symbolic resonance, of a rocket launch to active phallicity, to a penis rapidly tumescing and ejaculating, has been around ever since there have been rockets, but New Shepard makes a significant advance towards realism in this symbolic domain: the rocket looks a lot more like a penis than the rockets that have launched before it.
Not Frog and Peach, but Elephant and Plum, in a kid joke as told by Ruthie in the One Big Happy strip from 2/22 (in my comics feed on 3/21):
(#1)
Four things: kid jokes, of which the Elephant and Plum variant above is a particular clever example; the saying about elephants on which it depends; elephant jokes, of which the joke above is not the classic Elephant and Plum exemplar; and the ambiguity of “When did you laugh at it?”, which turns on the defining property of deictic elements like the interrogative when.
The One Big Happy cartoon from 1/6, recently up in my comics feed:
Ruthie and Joe are engaged in picking up elements of culture — American commercial culture, to be specific — beginning this particular bit of learning by reproducing material they’ve heard on tv, without much appreciation for what it means.
This is in line with kids’ learning of other bits of culture — song lyrics, joke routines, patterns of swearing and insulting, greeting and leave-taking routines, and much much more. At the same time that kids are picking up new words at a great rate, they are also incorporating those words into ways of performing the verbal bits of social life. (Meanwhile, they’re learning gestures, facial expressions, the physical elements of dances, games, and sports, and the rest of a vast universe of nonverbal behavior, which then has to be coordinated with verbal behavior.)
And much of this has to be picked up “on the fly”, from observing what people around you do, without being explicitly instructed — a fact that guarantees that their first efforts at performing these bits of culture will be decidedly imperfect and will have to be honed by practice.
