Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category

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Thrifty, Brave, Clean, & Flammable

May 8, 2020

Wayno’s title for today/s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, in which the world of summer scout camp for kids intersects with the complex fictional world of the animate marionette Pinocchio. To understand the cartoon, you need to recognize both of these worlds (a matter of considerable cutural knowledge); and to understand why it’s funny, you need specific detailed information about each of these worlds.


(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page

The key words are kindling and fibs.

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Posted in Books, Fiction, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Narrative, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »

Tod und Verklärung

April 18, 2020

Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes a literary and anatomical turn:


(#1) literary: Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” / anatomical: the uvula, a tissue structure in the oral cavity (relevant here because of its involvement in snoring)

To make the allusions even denser, on his Facebook page, Wayno supplied the title “Mystery and Respiration” for #1, echoing the Paschal [that is, Easter] Mystery and Resurrection [of Jesus Christ], and alluding to the apparent resurrection of the body buried beneath the floorboards. And then this Death and Resurrection theme led me to Richard Strauss’s tone poem Tod und Verklärung, a secular (but still transcendent) story of death and transfiguration. Meanwhile, “Mystery and Respiration” also, of course, echoes the snoring theme.

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Posted in Etymology, Fiction, Metaphor, Metonymy, Music, Phonetics | 2 Comments »

The first two days of Christmas

December 26, 2019

On the first day of Christmas, in a Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, Jesus seeks therapy for a life that has gotten out of his control. On the second day of Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, Daily Jocks enlists a hugely overstuffed musclehunk to memorialize St. Stephen of the Sacred Box.

(Note: a certain amount of male flesh, crude wordplay on package and box, and lots of sacrilege. Use your judgment.)

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Posted in Comic conventions, Fiction, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Linguists, Reference, Underwear | 1 Comment »

Annals of misreadings: the Cthulhu caper

February 26, 2019

From linguist Avery Andrews on Facebook:


(#1) Avery: “My first reading of this was ‘Cthulhu Towers’, indicating that whatever the top-down constraints on my linguistic processing may be, real world plausibility has at best a delayed effect”

To judge from my own misreadings — some of them reported on in the Page on this blog with misreading postings — real-world plausibility has virtually no role in initial misreadings; we tend to notice these misreadings, in fact, because they are so bizarre.

On the other hand, they sometimes clearly reflect material currently or persistently on the hearer’s mind — if you’ve been thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, Italian pasta names are likely to insert themselves into your peceptions; if you’re a gardener, plant names will come readily to mind, even if they’re preposterous; and of course it’s common to see sexual vocabulary where none was intended —  but often they look like the welling-up of material from some deep chthonic place in memory, inexplicably in the context.

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Posted in Books, Context, Fiction, Linguistics in the comics, Memory, Misreadings, Pragmatics, Processing | Leave a Comment »

Fiction: He kissed me

January 1, 2019

On AZBlogX this morning, the short short story (under a thousand words) “He kissed me” from 1/16/96, intended for a volume of such stories that was never published, perhaps in part because of the sexual explicitness of this story. The story is also one piece of my fiction about the characters Sundance and Butch (index to these here); it’s a short story about Sundance and a t-room kiss. (Explicit mansex in street language, so the story is entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest — but none of that in this posting.)

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Posted in Fiction, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Music, My life | 4 Comments »

More porn for the holidays

May 28, 2018

(About gay porn, but not wildly racy. Edgy for kids and the sexually modest.)

On the 26th, about the Lucas gay porn sale for Memorial Day 2018: “Memorial mansex” on AZBlogX; and “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes” on this blog, about offering gay porn for various holidays (for Memorial Day as a cultural celebration of summer, in particular), and about interpreting narrowed eyes and drooping eyes.

Now, in “More Memorial mansex” on AZBlogX today, two more gay porn ads for the holiday: one from TitanMen featuring Liam Knox; and one from Dirk Yates featuring Rod Peterson. Here I’ll pick up some themes from those ads: from the Titan, Knox’s tats, and what tats convey; from the DY, a note on palming off pros as amateurs, plus reality vs. fiction and the playful invention new cummer.

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Posted in Fiction, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language play, Pragmatics, Semantics, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Four things are two binary oppositions

May 8, 2018

From Bitty Ramirez on Facebook:

It is really unusual to have a K-12 lesson that allows discussion of dice and playing cards. This may be the first time I’ve encountered it. And I am finding it really disconcerting that the writer keeps dividing suits by color instead of by major/minor.

This was at first completely baffling to me: major/minor?

It turned out to be significant that Bitty is a bridge player, and I am not. Major/minor is a thing in bridge.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Fiction, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

The family fetish

March 18, 2018

(Men’s bodies, mansex, and elaborate incest fantasies, discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

The raw material for this posting is in two AZBlogX postings:

from 3/16/18 “On the fetish patrol: FamilyDick”, on a March 16th ad for the Michael Lucas FamilyDick line of inter-family gay sex porn

from 3/17/18 “Josman’s family”, on comics by the artist Josman depicting  ecstatic interfamilial mansex

There’s a striking difference in the way incest is handled in filmed porn (like Lucas’s FamilyDick videos) vs. printed porn (written fiction as on the nifty.org website, comics like those by Josman), a difference that’s tied to the way gay porn treats identities — by tending to conflate the real-life actors, their pornstar personas, and the characters they portray in particular flicks. The result is that in filmed porn, the (fantasy) incest is only step-incest (typically, pairing stepfather and stepson or two stepbrothers), while in printed porn, the (fantasy) incest frankly and celebratorily pairs father and son or two brothers.

So, yes, this is about porn, but it’s also about the conventions of narrative.

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Posted in Fiction, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

With an ax(e)

February 9, 2018

The Zippy strip from the 5th:

(#1) Alfred Jarry?

A Muffler Man-style fiberglass figure: a lumberjack with an ax(e) slung over his shoulder.

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Posted in Fiction, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Jason Phoenix redux

May 12, 2016

(About lines between real life and invented life — as it happens, in the world of gay porn, using the model / actor Jason Phoenix as a case study, though genre clashes between non-fiction and fiction are pretty much unremitting. But there’s no getting around the fact that there’s a lot of talk here about men’s bodies and man-man sex, so the posting is not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Jason Phoenix (hereafter, JP) has retired from gay porn, but he is revived, again and again — he is a phoenix, after all — by Channel 1 Releasing and its subsidiaries (most recently in a sale ad yesterday, noted in AZBlogX), including two managed by Dirk Yates and his associates. One has been filming

“Straight Military Guys Doing Not-So-Straight Things” for nearly 30 years. (link)

(the conceit is that the guys are straight amateurs doing it only for the money) and the other provides flat-out gay porn, performed by professionals. But the studio regularly blurs the line between the two enterprises by presenting the pros as military naifs off the street. JP is an interesting case because it seems he did start out as a military naif off the street.

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Posted in Fiction, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »

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