Archive for the ‘Language and religion’ Category
April 30, 2024
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 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate April; this is Lepus Eve, that fearful moment before the rabbit hordes of May descend, in a cloud of fragrant muguets, to ravish and despoil the golden youths of spring, the band of bros, of buddies, bonding to spread their seed and alliterate aimlessly: Bunnies Bash Buds
Two images for the day: a cinematic account — Night of the Lepus — of the threatening rabbit hordes; and just one of those adorable buds at risk in this moment of peril: Dean Young. serving as the embodiment of the vulnerable golden youths of spring.
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Posted in Art, Gay porn, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language acquisition, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv | 3 Comments »
April 17, 2024
In my final dream of the night, I was explaining to a group of rapt visitors that “Come, thou fount of every blessing” was the official hymn of Stanford University — an idea no doubt provoked by the fact that my Apple Music was at the time playing a series of performances of this very hymn (most often set in the US to the tune NETTLETON), of which I am very fond. As it turns out, in addition to an official fight song, Stanford does have an official hymn, its alma mater, “Hail, Stanford Hail” (which is rarely played — deservedly so, in my opinion —  except that it’s obligatory at Commencement). Meanwhile, though I have hymn resources from three largely separate traditions and have consulted hymn repositories, there appears to be no tune named STANFORD (STAMFORD is something else entirely), despite the fact that the prolific Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford wrote a number of hymn tunes, among them the often-set ENGELBERG.
So there is in fact a Stanford (University) hymn and a number of (C. V.) Stanford hymns, but no STANFORD hymn (tune).
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Posted in Language and religion, Music, Names, Poetry, Stanford | Leave a Comment »
March 21, 2024
From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this splendid piece of cover art for the May 1954 issue of Mystic Magazine, an illustration by Malcolm Smith showing a sci-fi Archangel Michael (as I see it) leading his etheric army of the skies in a charge into battle:
(#1) Smith’s diaphanously robed Michael, shining in white, muscular, with long arms, long legs, enormous wings, wielding a beautiful bright sword (have I mentioned that I have a thing for hunky well-um-armed men with wings?)
Etheric armies — armed men flying through the ether, the air, the sky — literally struck a chord for me. Well, they came with a specific tune, fierce and haunting, and the words etheric armies cloud the skies, which I eventually recognized as a Mystic Magazine-fostered amalgam of ten thousand angels filled the sky and a solemn darkness veils the skies. Both texts by Isaac Watts (from 1719 and 1709, respectively), tunes by William Billings (from 1778, a bright celebration of the angels attending to the resurrection and glorious ascension of Christ, while those heavenly guards around thee wait like chariots that attend thy state) for the first and by Amos Pilsbury (from 1799, that fierce and haunting tune for the same occasion, on which cherubic legions guard Him home and shout Him welcome to the skies) for the second.
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Posted in Art, Fiction, Language and religion, Music | Leave a Comment »
March 17, 2024
(Part of this posting will dive right into gay porn for the day, with street-talk musings on man-on-man sex that’s totally off-limits for kids and the sexually modest; I’ll hold this part off until the end, so if you need to you can bail out then)
âď¸ âď¸ âď¸ It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and in my e-mail: two Bob Eckstein cartoons for the day (on turning and wearing green for the day); and a Falcon  Studios sale on gay porn, made holiday-appropriate by the mere addition of a shamrock, but which opens the topic of gay porn with actual St. Patrick’s day themes.
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Posted in Clothing, Color, Costumes, Facial expressions, Flags, Gay porn, Hats, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Point of view, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »
March 7, 2024
Awoke this morning for a 12:50 whizz, with the line “‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave” (from “Hard Times, Come Around No More”) in my ear, causing me to think that if there were a memorial service or wake for me after my death, this is one of the pieces of music I would want played at it; death is a constant presence for me, so I muse on things like this.
But then I realized that there would be no memorial service for an old person whose surviving friends are spread all over the world; if they aren’t able to spend some moments with me while I’m alive, why would they gather to mourn my death? The song line for this is âGive me the roses while I liveâ, from Odem (Second), Sacred Harp 340 (more on this below). Come by and I will entertain you with random thoughts and stories from my life — and play for you my music of joy, or all the versions of “Hard Times” I have (listed below), or my favorite Mozart Operas (Figaro and ZauberflĂśte, but it’s a hard choice), or Sacred Harp songs, or the rock music I used to dance to (heavy on the Rolling Stones), or Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli, or Linda Ronstadt, or Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or Candide (the original one), or Company, or Heitor Villa-Lobos, or I can go on annoyingly for a really long time in this vein.
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Posted in Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
March 7, 2024
đŠ¸đŠ¸đŠ¸ … on this day in 1965: NEVER FORGET
From my 4/15/22 posting “LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BLACK WOMEN”, about the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, but also about James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (celebrating the Appalachian poor) and about the late US Representative John Lewis, who on 3/7/65 led the first of three Civil Rights marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma AL — an event now known as Bloody Sunday, because of the savage attack on the marchers by state troopers and police:
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Posted in Holidays, Language and religion, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
December 25, 2023
A Facebook exchange today between Vadim Temkin and me, on biblical spans of life (among other things):
— AZ > VT [reacting to the news that the upcoming year in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar is a Year of the Dragon] I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940 [so I’m 83 years old; this is signficant below].
— VT > AZ: Â You are a veritable menagerie: penguin, wooly mammoth, and a dragon as well! Here is for the other 12 years, and while we are at it, let’s wish for a traditional Jewish 120!
— AZ > VT: [about my animal identities] Oh, and for a brief period, an aardvark (Zot, from the B.C. comic).
[about the 120-year span of life] I cannot, alas, quote from the Torah; but I know how it came out very much later in the KJV (I’m a nonbeliever, but the Lutherans and the Episcopalians gave me a good religious education): his days shall be a hundred and twenty years (Genesis 6:3). But then there’s a contraction from the times of Genesis to those of the Psalms (Psalm 90: The days of our years are threescore years and ten). 70 years, maybe 80 if we’re strong.
Whoops, my boat is already sailing to the underworld (I picked up some Greco-Roman myth stuff too).
Posted in Age, Calendars, Language and religion, My life | 1 Comment »
December 17, 2023
(Sexually transgressive gingerbread folk, so not to everyone’s taste. But massively silly.)
Well, you could eat them, but would you? Probably not, so it looks like they’re jokey folk art. I’m talking about gingerbread houses, in particular the 7 entrants in the 2023 on-line Gingerbread Competition, year 14, overseen by my old friend, the vagrant multinational (and enthusiastically gay) dancer-artist Matt Adams (hard to describe: when I first met him, he was a bartender at the Three Seasons fusion-Vietnamese restaurant up the street from my house in Palo Alto; now he lives with his husband Justin in the Netherlands), who is to be distinguished from the (straight but also admirable) Stanford-PhD linguist Matthew Adams, also of my acquaintance.
On to the winner, #3, and the runner-up, #7.
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Posted in Art, Holidays, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and food, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex | Leave a Comment »
October 19, 2023
Glimpsed on Pinterest a little while back, this MMS (male-male sex) painting, Contra Mundum by Fyodor Pavlov: a pair of young men kissing, seductive male buttocks highlighted, their Edwardian-picnic amour unfolding beneath the point of a potent abstract phallic design, the down-pointing triangular shape of the male genitals (often given physical form as a hanging bunch of grapes, here as a cluster of leaves on the tree that shades the young men’s secret tryst):
(#1) Packed with further details worthy of comment, among them: the dark-light (paired with dominant-submissive) contrast of the two men, the overarching U of the tree’s branches complementing the cupped U of the submissive man’s body, the red of the strawberries against a mostly b&w composition, the stuffed bear, the vibrant green of the men’s sweaters, the neck of the wine bottle poking out from the confines of the picnic hamper, the phallic reeds on the far shore of the lake
Things to comment on: picnics;Â contra mundum; and the artist. This turns out to be quite a lot.
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Posted in Art, Books, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Literature, Logos, Male art, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »
September 16, 2023
Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Psychiatrist cartoon with a Biblical theme:
(#1) Wayno’s title:”Revised Translation” (if youâre puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon â Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip â see this Page)
Note the concessions to the ancient setting in the furnishings of the therapist’s office. (Do not write me about the impossibility of writing with a quill pen on parchment in the fashion shown in the cartoon; this is, after all, a kind of imaginative fiction, combining features of some fictional world and the modern real world. Get a grip on things: there were no psychoanalysts in Flood Times.)
However, a Biblical theme is appropriate for the day, since it’s Rosh Hashanah, Jewish new year.
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Posted in Comic conventions, Holidays, Language and food, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
