Archive for the ‘History’ Category
November 15, 2024
Coming 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.]
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Posted in Academic life, Art, Events, History, Language and culture, Literature, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
November 11, 2024
🎆 🎆 🎆 fireworks for 11/11, the double-lucky day the Great War was over (my parents, now long gone, were only 4 at the time and didn’t remember it; I was just short of my 6th birthday when V-J Day, recognizing the end of World War II, came along; celebrating it on the streets of West Lawn PA is my first clear memory of events in the larger world)
Hard to appreciate now what a gigantic rupture the Great War (beginning in 1914) was; the horrors of its modern warfare came along with those of the Russian Revolution (beginning in 1917) and the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and (as Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory) fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility, wiping out much of what had gone before.
Then, as I wrote in my 11/11/22 posting “Carousing for St. Martin”:
It’s Armistice Day [commemorating the 11/11/1918 armistice ending World War I] (in the US, Veterans Day), solemnly following on the solemn anniversary of Kristallnacht, but it’s also (as Hana Filip just reminded me) the feast day of St. Martin of Tours: St. Martin’s Day, which has its serious saintly side — St. Martin and the beggar in rags — but is, as well, a day of wild revelling, initiating the winter season. An occasion that, ultimately, inspired a piece of music that is just sheer noisy unbridled fun: the Wine Chorus from Haydn’s The Seasons (aka “Juhe! Der Wein ist da!” from Die Jahreszseiten).
But now about 11/11:
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Posted in Books, History, Holidays, Music, My life, Numbers | 3 Comments »
October 25, 2024
Posted to Facebook yesterday. I had been recalling Albert Camus’s play Caligula (adapted into English by Justin O’Brien), which I happened to see in February 1960, during its famously brief — one month long — run at the 54th Street Theatre in NYC — which led me to investigate Wikipedia’s long and intricate entry on
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula …, Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.
and then to write on FB:
Was just musing on TFG as the new Caligula (vengeful, unclear on the separation of his personal fortune and the state’s coffers, declaring himself a god, etc.) when I thought to look for parallel uses in the press. I bring you
the Daily Beast in 2011, Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Caligula; the Times (of London) in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the new Caligula; the Irish Times in 2016, [Helmut Grabpussy], the new Caligula?; POLITICO.eu in 2020, Boris Johnson the new Caligula
(there are probably more)
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Posted in Figurative language, History, Language and politics, Names, Nicknames, Plays | Leave a Comment »
October 5, 2024
My morning name from Thursday, 10/3: MARENGO. Which is:
1 an Italian place name
2 the name of a Napoleonic battle fought (near) there
And then from that:
3 the name of Napoleon’s horse
4 any one of various place names in Canada and the US
5 the French dish chicken Marengo
6 any of various colors in the black, dark blue, dark brown, and gray or blue-gray spectrum
As if that weren’t complex enough already, the name MARENGO brought with it a torrent of name associations, from MANDINGO to NINTENDO, which I’ll sample below.
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Posted in Color, History, Language and food, Morning names, Names, Semantics | 3 Comments »
September 4, 2024
In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks the end of the Western Roman Empire as a political entity and consequently (in some people’s view) the beginning of the Middle Ages. So let’s say goodbye to the boy emperor Romulus, aka Augustulus, and antiquity; and hello to the barbarians and, oh yes, medieval times!
Bye-bye, Imperial times
Took Romulus to the border, to see the Empire die
I’ll get to Augustulus in a while. But first the cartoons.
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Posted in Gesture, History, Holidays, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Opposition, Plays, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 1, 2024
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of July (and recognize, with a flourish of maple leaves, Canada Day), with American Independence Day about to be upon us — plenty of local fireworks on Saturday night, more to come; and it’s time to contemplate my annual celebratory (kosher) hot dog
Meanwhile, Hana Filip posted, on Facebook yesterday , this enigmatic photo — Napoli 1979, by Josef Koudelka — without explanation or other comment:
(#1) A young woman sunbathing, face down, on a Naples seawall while reading from a book
Which I turned into an exploration of Koudelka’s life and work. My response:
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Posted in Art, History, Holidays, Photography | Leave a Comment »
April 22, 2024
Today, a long guest posting on intellectual history, specifically on the transmission of ideas in linguistics, in particular on the innovation and spread of linguistic terminology. This is an immensely scholarly follow-up to my 4/15/24 posting “Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class”, in which I reproduced a 1970 Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine with that title and wrote:
and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history [the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell)] has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature)
Today’s guest post is the current fruit of Michael Weiss’s RUKIstorical investigations, with minimal intrusions in his text by comments from me.
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Posted in Historical linguistics, History, My life, Phonology, Russian, Sanskrit, Terminology | Leave a Comment »
March 26, 2024
In recent days, I’ve been exchanging e-mail with my (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi) linguistics colleague Luc Baronian about ethnic and linguistic history, with special reference to the Welsh (and the Welsh language, Cymraeg) in Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Dutch (and their language, Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch); and about tracing ancestral history. Three pieces of background here:
First, Luc is an Armenian-Canadian, the way I’m a Swiss-American. Luc is by recent paternal ancestry Armenian (as you can tell from his surname), by upbringing French Canadian; I am by recent paternal ancestry Swiss (as you can tell by my surname), by upbringing (and maternal ancestry) Pennsylvania Dutch (a descendant of primarily 18th-century immigrants to southeastern Pennsylvania, mostly from the Palatinate region of southern Germany).
Second, some years back, Luc — whose ancestry-search competence is vastly better than mine — helped me trace connections on my mother’s side and correct my misrecollections of several facts.
Third, Luc had gotten interested in the history of the Welsh language in Pennsylvania, which begins in colonial times, with late 17th-century negotiations over the Welsh Tract as a landmark event, and then apparently vanishes, leaving only place-names in its wake.
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Posted in German, History, Kinship, Memory, My life, Names, Welsh | 2 Comments »
March 14, 2024
In the Economist‘s 2/10/24 issue, early in the piece “Chronicling the past: The present as prologue” (a review of 2020 by Eric Klinenberg, a book treating the Covid pandemic, still unfolding, as a historical event), this passage:
It has been an alarming few years. History — widely assumed to have stopped somewhere around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Spice Girls’ first record — has got going again, with gusto.
The implicit claim is that any history worth recording came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989 (the end of an old political order), and the Spice Girls’ first record, in 1996 (the end of an old pop-cultural order), but sprung back to life with the onset of the pandemic; things are happening again.
Readers with a keen ear, especially if they are British (the Economist is a British publication), might have detected something vaguely familiar in the way that claim has been worded; it’s a distant, glancing allusion to the first verse of a famous (in some circles) poem by British poet Philip Larkin — easy to miss, especially since it contributes nothing of substance to a review of Klinenberg’s book, but is just a little gift to readers who recognize the allusion to a culturally significant text: it’s what I’ve called an Easter egg quotation.
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Posted in Allusion, History, Poetry, Quotations | Leave a Comment »
January 9, 2024
(Along the way, some direct talk in street language about man-on-man sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
On AZ’s Astounding Bookshelf, the remarkable Mammoth Drop: Murder, Mammoths, and Mimosas (Kea Wright Mysteries) by R. J. Corgan, independently published in 2022 in paperback and Kindle editions. An ad for the book (supplied to me on Facebook yesterday by Michael Palmer, with a link to the Amazon site for the book):
(#1) Obviously up my alley: as a fan of murder mysteries and a highly visible homo, with a woo(l)ly mammoth as my totem animal (MP has my number)
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Posted in Books, History, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Mammoths, Social sciences | 2 Comments »
