A follow-up to my 10/21/25 posting “A world postcard”, about a card from the Librairie Lucioles (the Fireflies Bookstore) in Vienne en Isère, France. First, a bit more about the town of Vienne, with its Roman history. Then, a note on one particular feature of note, the Vienne Pyramid, an obelisk originally from the Roman circus in Vienne. Which leads to the extraordinary Vienne restaurant, Fernand Pointe’s La Pyramide, named after the circus obelisk. And then to e-mail from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell, with a recollection of a lunch she and her husband had at the restaurant in 1971. So: from bookstore to Roman chariot races to food, glorious food.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Another visit to Vienne en Isère
October 23, 2025Revolt against the bad guys
October 15, 2025From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook on 10/5, passing on material from Tony Michaels’s Facebook page (“The Tony Michaels Podcast: Considered ‘The Rush Limbaugh of the Left’”), also from 10/5:
A Tony Michaels fabrication (see below)
Holy Romaine Empire
October 11, 2025🏳️🌈 👨❤️👨 🏳️🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)
The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:
(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)
The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.
Orange roses
September 7, 2025Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care turned up yesterday with a surprise present for my 85th birthday: a big vase of orange roses (on the pinkish or peach side of the color), because those were the really big and beautiful roses she could find on the spur of the moment, without assigning any meaning to the color (though I’m a Princeton A.B., rah rah orange and black and all that), and indeed not knowing what the particular variety was named (you wouldn’t believe how many rose-growing companies there are in the world and what an encyclopedia of names they have registered for orange cultivars). Now located right in my line of sight as I type at my worktable:
Roses of the Orange 85th; for roses, orange seems to be the color of joy, enthusiasm, and desire, and that does feel like a good fit for me
Now, how the color orange came to be associated with Princeton is a remarkably tangled tale involving the Holy Roman Empire (the tale begins in 1163), the French region of Provence (the town of Orange), the Rheinland-Palatinate region of Germany (the town of Nassau), the Netherlands, and of course William-and-Mary, rulers of Great Britain and Ireland. Quite remarkably, oranges the fruit and the color orange have nothing to do with all this, or at least didn’t until Princeton (founded in 1746) adopted orange and black as the official colors for academic gowns in 1896, which is virtually yesterday in this context (I mean, my father and mother were born in 1914). What the story does have to do with is mostly the astounding rapacity of the great bulk of the ruling classes. I will attempt to fill in some of the details in a forthcoming posting, but today I just want to enjoy those roses.
The 5/26 New Yorker
May 24, 2025The latest issue of the magazine has two cartoons I want to pick out for comment, one (by Mick Stevens) because it’s an addition to Arnoldia, the domain of things with the name Arnold; the other (by David Sipress) because it’s a pointed comment on this alarming and dangerous time in my country.
Graphing and slavery
April 9, 2025An upcoming Stanford Humanities Center lecture:
“The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Modern Data Visualization” by Lauren Klein of Emory Univ., on Tuesday 4/15, from 4–6 pm in Levinthal Hall and online
Summary: “The Line Graph and the Slave Ship” returns to the eighteenth-century origins of modern data visualization in order to excavate the meaning — and power — of visualizing data. Exploring two examples of early data visualization — the line graphs of British trade data included in William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas (1786) and Description of a Slave Ship (1789) created and circulated by a group of British antislavery activists — this lecture will connect Enlightenment theories about visual and statistical knowledge to contemporaneous ideas about personhood and race.
I’m posting this as an example of the sort of fascinating research supported by the SHC, looking in fresh and unexpected ways at events, practices, and conceptualizations from many times, places, and social settings.
The world is too much with me
April 3, 2025Und die einen sind im Dunkeln, und die andern sind im Licht, doch man sieht nur die im Lichte, die im Dunkel sieht man nicht
— Bertholt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper
Over the past six days I suspended a complex series of postings on LGBTQ people integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment, slowly focusing on the examples closest to me: gay men in linguistics. I intended to begin with one specific example that came my way a while back, in this announcement (with special emphasis on a passage I’ve boldfaced; read it in conjunction with the Brecht quote above):
The George A. Smathers Library [of the University of Florida, Gainesville] cordially invites you to the Michael Gannon Lecture on Tuesday, April 1st, from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m., featuring linguistic anthropologist George Aaron Broadwell [AZ: called Aaron], Ph.D., the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at University of Florida. A booksigning will be held immediately following the event.
“Reading Florida’s First Native Authors: Towards an Understanding of Timucua Literature”
This talk introduces the public to some of the most interesting passages of Timucua literature and discusses the techniques that our team has used to read and interpret Timucua texts.
Having assembled a host of texts written in Timucua, the native language of the inhabitants of northern Florida from around the twelfth century into the eighteenth century, Broadwell has spent years working to translate what the writers were recording. Through his own efforts, work with colleagues, and assistance from students Broadwell has reconstructed substantial parts of Timucua vocabulary, in some cases interpreting previously untranslated texts, and also offering new revelations about those with Spanish corollaries.
His work has revolutionized understanding of the conquest and colonial eras in Florida, giving voice to the people who lived under Spanish rule and revealing what their letters and writings say about dramatic changes taking place in their lives and world. The topic is especially appropriate for a lecture in honor of [historian, educator, priest, and war correspondent] Michael Gannon [(1927-2017)], who included in his own discussions of Florida history an example of the Timucua-language version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Alas, the world has been too much with me, so I now bring you the news of this excellent event after it has taken place; I’ve been posting little things to show that I’m still alive, while I try to cope with the threatening turmoil instigated by President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon (two monstrous buckets of pathologies, of different sorts); my current mantra is Stand Up and Stand Out, and I’ve been doing my best to be pointedly offensive. Meanwhile, I have a complex personal and medical life, with much I’d like to report on (I visited my department at Stanford this morning, first time in years, and showed some of the delightful campus to my caregiver J — who then showed me that I will need to post about Antigua Guatemala, all new to me).
In any case, I have tons of stuff to say and feel overwhelmed. But I intend to move on to Aaron Broadwell, and try to distill many pages of a remarkable c.v. into something digestible, before moving on to the story of his relationship with the author Peter Marino (Aaron and Peter have been together for 30 years and were in the earliest group of gay people who got married in Massachusetts, in 2004, wow. Then to get back to the larger topic, with other examples of gay male linguists of substantial accomplishment and some words on why people should care about us, especially during a time when concerns about DEI mask a concerted attack on (among many other things) LGBTQ people and our rights — one of a number of bullshit smokescreens spread by Putinitsa and Evilon in their program to establish domination over a cowering and compliant populace.
Poetic note. “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807; in it, the poet maintains that industrial society has damaged the connection between people and nature and replaced it with getting and spending.
A coat of arms
February 19, 2025Unus pro omnibus
Omnes pro uno
This display came by me on my Facebook feed this morning; as a grandson of Switzerland I found it offensive (and, by the way, inaccurate):
(#1) From the Holy Roman Empire Association, the coats of arms of “European Kingdoms, Duchies and Principalities in 1519”
Switzerland is a confederation, with no ruler — not king nor duke nor prince — and has been (with occasional hiccups) since its founding in 1291. Like the Friends / Quakers, it is (in principle) radically egalitarian, as am I personally (though I concede that every person, and every human institution, is imperfect, flawed; but that’s a core principle of radical egalitarianism).
The nuh-DEER
February 3, 2025Caught out of the corner of my ear on 2/1 and 2/2, discussions on MSNBC (which might have been re-plays from earlier dates, I haven’t been able to tell) with Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator of The 1619 Project), about the Nadir, or Great Nadir, of American race relations. I’ve since looked up some information on the subject (see below), but what got my attention was the pronunciation of nadir — back-accented nuh-DEER /nǝdír/ or sometimes nay-DEER /nèdír/ — that everyone involved used all throughout these exchanges; it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb because, I’m sure, I’d never heard it before. It was totally bizarre.
The sting in the tail
November 15, 2024Coming to the Stanford Humanities Center on November 18 at 4:00 p.m., the 2024 Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture, “Caravaggio’s Americas” by the poet and scholar Edgar Garcia of the University of Chicago; the announcement:
This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.
Dense with the abstract vocabulary of sociocultural analysis and cultural and literary history — it makes actual claims about the sources of the baroque / Baroque style in the Western arts, but it might take you some work to figure out what they are — the announcement devolves into a vividly earthy thumbnail characterization of Caravaggio as “the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs”. A sting in the tail. [Here we laugh and applaud.]