The promised note on Albert Payson Terhune — with a name like that, he’d have to have been at least upper middle class, and he was, he was — and his dog books.
Archive for the ‘Princeton’ Category
Rhinoceros
August 23, 2026The ultimate topic here is my sleep patterns, which I will post about more systematically in a while. Here I’m trying to take some of the burden of background material off that posting by stashing it for easy reference later. Picking an item — the revival by Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros — that I also view, in desperation, as carrying an urgent message about today’s sociopolitical climate.
It will start with odd everyday routines of no consequence, but will end with contemplating literal dehumanization, staring evil in the face. I’m touchy on the point, having never fully recovered from the shock of seeing the Nazi death camps exposed when I was a child. And understanding that that could happen to me. (No, I don’t think children should be protected from such knowledge. They should be treasured and supported, as I was, but they should also see the dangers clearly, so that they can arm themselves against them.)
But first, the routines. (If you think I’m just a nutter or a pathetic neurotic in need of professional care, fuck off; it’s none of your business. I’m doing stuff that works for me; why should you care?)
The first step
August 15, 2026Now, a piece of my life story you have heard about from my side of the event — the first meeting of Ann Walcutt Daingerfield and Arnold Melchior Zwicky (which happened in the bowels of the Firestone Library at Princeton University) — from Ann’s viewpoint, as rehearsed in e-mail yesterday from our old friend Benita Bendon Campbell:
In September of 1959, I called Ann, who was languishing in Lexington [KY] and said something like, “I have a job and a nice apartment in Princeton. Would you like to join me?” She replied, “Bonnie, I am so miserable that if someone said ‘I have a job and an apartment in Hell. Would you like to join me?’ I would say, ‘Yes!'”
So she did. A week or so thereafter, she started a job in the Language Lab. Mr. Keefer [AZ: possibly Kiefer] was her boss and she reported in pleased tones about a pair of Student Assistants called “Franklyn and his partner Arnold.” [AZ: partner as in teammates / buddies; Frank Carr and I were roommates for three years]
That is how the milk got into the coconut.
I Did It. By Jove, I Did It.
And deserves credit.
Working through
September 24, 2025Creeping up on more difficult topics from my life history (along the lines of my 9/22 posting “Former Gifted Child”), here near-suicidal depression and bit of accompanying PTSD that’s still with me, almost 65 years later. The topics came up in an exchange with an old friend, a colleague in linguistics, and has finally moved me to talk about them on this blog, though the whole story is so long and complex — and throws up provocations to thought that hadn’t occurred to me before — that I’ll have to just jump in and write up chunks of it as best I can, building up the larger story.
The trigger was this 9/15 e-mail from my friend, who I’ll refer to as L (for linguist):
I only now checked your recent blog posts and found a mention of your work at the Reading Eagle [AZ: the afternoon and Sunday newspaper in Reading PA, where I worked from 1958 to 1961], where you stayed on even while studying at Princeton. All that work must have been a lot, though maybe something you handled by not wasting time on the more typical undergraduate frivolities.
And I jumped in with this answer to L:
The Vouch Joke
May 22, 2025(Warning: this will end up with a naked man on all fours, in a display that’s meant to be sexual rather than jocular)
I had occasion this morning to vouch for Scott Schwenter (Ohio State professor of Hispanic linguistics) having gotten a PhD from Stanford, and in doing so alluded to the Vouch Joke, which I heard many years ago from Paul Benacerraf (Princeton professor of philosophy, especially the philosophy of mathematics, and the director of my senior thesis in mathematics back in 1962). PB told the joke as Alonzo Church’s only known joke (AC, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Princeton, was another of my professors and was on my thesis committee); relevant to PB’s telling of the joke, AC was one of the most earnest, least playful people I have ever known (but he was good-hearted and not without his quirks, one of which was a passion for murder mysteries, another a meticulous enthusiasm for atlases and gazetteers), and he was an American WASP Christian, a lifelong Presbyterian, while PB was a Jew, a genuinely cosmopolitan one, with an early life in Paris and Caracas before establishing firm roots in New Jersey as a teenager.
All this religious stuff is important because the joke as AC told it was thoroughly whitebread. It has two main characters (both male): the vouchee, the subject of the joke, who is interrogated by some kind of authority about his status (“Who are you?” and “Why are you here?”); and the voucher, the person the subject offers as someone who can vouch for him — two characters that AC gave WASP names to (an ordinary name like Harold for the subject and Richard for the voucher). In telling me the joke, PB prefaced it by giving the names AC used, but then actually performed the joke as a Jewish joke, in which the subject was called something like Abie and the voucher was named Moishe.
“Moishe will vouch for me; get Moishe!”
In my opinion, this makes it funnier — as a general principle, Jewish jokes are funnier than other jokes, because Jewish jokes originate as stories told by Jews for other Jews, and they are affectionate or self-deprecating or instructive or some combination of these, neither aggressive nor contemptuous — and even more delightful as a kind of commentary on AC’s whitebread version.
Goodbye, Jim
October 23, 2024Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.
I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.
IMMIGRANTS EAT OUR DOGS
September 12, 2024So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
A hell of a queen
June 15, 2024(Some readers will find some of the material in this posting distasteful, but there’s nothing visual or verbal in it to merit keeping the kids away from it.)
I’ll blame this on the luminous Minnie Driver, playing Queen Elizabeth I in season 2 of the Starz tv period drama The Serpent Queen.
(#1) MD in one of her fabulous QEI costumes; the character invites extravagance in costuming and makeup (further examples to come)
Through an accident of dates, QEI will take us to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” song and secret worlds hidden from everyday life (and, of course, gay bears). Then, through the excellent “hell of a queen” quotation, she will take us on a further wild ride to the Princeton Triangle Club in 1960 and, more generally, to queens in drag.
Buckle up.
The Princeton rub tool
June 14, 2024(Even choosing my words carefully, a fair amount of this posting is going to be inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; you’ll see why in a couple of seconds)
Two themes for today: tools, and their masculinity; and male-male frottage, especially one variant of the Princeton rub. Somewhat astoundingly, these two themes intersect in what I think of as the Princeton rub tool: a dual masturbation sleeve, a device to facilitate two guys getting off together face to face.