8/31 e-mail from me to Li Li, “senior executive director at Palo Alto Commons and The Avant” (lightly edited):
Talking with you briefly about your path from China to Palo Alto brought back a gigantic flood of memories of my teaching at what was then the Beijing Language Institute in 1985 (under a program of country exchanges of college professors — I was exchanged by Fang Li of BLI, and then sponsored his time a bit later at Stanford).
Posted in Chinese, My life, Social class, Stereotyping, Teaching | Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Books, Clothing, Education, Language and animals, My life, Princeton, Race and ethnicity, Social class | 8 Comments »
About the moment. From my 8/17 posting “Cool nights”, on my greatly increased prednisone dosage:
it seems to me that my already unusually keen senses of smell and taste have heightened; all my food is fabulous, especially if jazzed up to be even more bitter, more sour, more aggressively fermented, or more spicy than before, and I’m now getting stronger sniff bulletins from my environment
Posted in Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Smell, Social class, Taste | Leave a Comment »
(man-on-man sex, riffed on in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
I have tons of news, much of it truly wonderful, some of it just eccentric bits of stuff I’ve come across, but all postponed after an exhausting day yesterday that turned, for me, on six exhausting hours of one thing after another going terribly wrong. Still organizing my thoughts about it all — so now for something completely different, inspired by my playing the 60s-generation music channel on my Xfinity tv. Which got me to thinking about the 60s, which was exactly my 20s, and I seem to have stumbled through a whole multi-ring circus of lives (here an acrobat on a trapeze, there a sword-swallower, over there some clowns) in those ten years. Everything happened at once.
More or less in order, insofar as that’s possible (but starting in 1958):
Posted in Effeminacy, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Race and ethnicity, Social class | Leave a Comment »
Yesterday’s leg of the train trip, on this blog in my posting “Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas”:
[On] cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
Then in this comment on that posting, NM sets us off on the next leg (which you can think of as Vienne en Isère 4 (there will be a Vienne en Isère 5):
You are right that Tex-Mex enchiladas are a world away from your dacquoises. I can’t think of anything in Tex-Mex cuisine to match those. But Helen Corbitt might have had something. She was Texas’ answer to Julia Child and wrote a lot of fine food books that were popular in my mother’s generation. I am sure one of her cookbooks has a pleasant cake, perhaps alternating layers of angelfood cake and Cool Whip with some tinned fruit to gussy it up. Not quite French patisserie but pretty fancy for Dallas.
Posted in Books, Language and food, Music, Social class | 6 Comments »
Adventures in furniture inspired by a Benjamin Dreyer posting on Facebook yesterday:
Goshamighty, I completely forgot to mention, when I posted my Old Acquaintance piece a few hours ago, that in commencing this morning to read John Van Druten’s 1942 The Damask Cheek (co-written with one Lloyd Morris), I learned a new word! It’s cellarette: “a movable cabinet or container, often made of wood, designed to store and secure alcoholic beverages.”
If there’s a more perfect word to turn up in a play set in “The library of MRS. RANDALL’s house in the East Sixties, New York. December 1909,” [the setting of The Damask Cheek] I can’t think of it.
BD locates the sociocultural milieu of the item (and then its name as well) as privileged urban upper class — traditional, elegant, and elite — and we will see that his classdar is first-rate.
I then broke in with the news that I have one of these things, a very nice one, of Danish design, made of teak, on wheels, with a durable bar top, in two parts that slide open to reveal the storage spaces within (there will be photos). I am neither elegant nor elite — I have several good points, but they are not these — but this clever and handsome object suits me (and it was mine and Jacques’s, and before that mine and Ann’s, so it comes with with waves of sweet memory; I will soon pass it on to my grand-child Opal).
But first, the cellaret / cellarette. The object and the name.
Posted in Furnishings and tools, Language and food, Language play, Music, My life, Plays, Social class | Leave a Comment »
In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.
Posted in Clothing, Humor, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Social class, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
A note on two items of American working life which are, in fact, connected to one another. A little follow-up to my 8/14 posting “The watch and the microscope”, where I wrote:
the watch is … from my grandfather Melchior Arnold Zwicky’s (1879-1965) retirement from the Textile Machine Works in Wyomissing PA
Posted in My life, Social class, Social life, Time, Work | Leave a Comment »
A brief follow-up to my 7/31 posting “Of money, class, and prejudice”, where I told a story about an acquaintance, Johnny, from early in my life, who was blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections, and turned out to be, unsuspectedly, a reflexive anti-Semite, revealing himself while he was dissing me and my family (“they might as well be Jews”). My friend Bill (from summer camp in childhood, then from Princeton, and then from the summer of 1961, when I stayed in his family’s house) served as a kind of counterbalance in this tale, as someone blessed with privilege, family money, and social connections who has been a good friend to me and also has devoted a big slice of his life working doggedly against poverty, urban decline, and racial injustice, just because he thinks these things need fixing and he can do something to help).
At this point there’s a posting to be written on the nature of friendship, involving as it does a recognition, on both sides, of significant disparities between the two of you, which each of you then respect by working around them with as little comment as possible (adjustments often made without conscious reflection), in exchange for enjoying the good qualities the other person brings to the relationship.
In e-mail Bill and I have been looking at these disparities, at how we dealt with them long ago and how we come at them now. Back then, he was somewhat uncomfortable with his position of privilege, family money, and social connection, but is now untroubled by these things, understanding that, as I said to him:
in large part, these are things that just come to you, and the question is what you’ll do with them
and that he had in fact put these advantages to good use throughout his life. Indeed, one of our first exchanges had to be cut short because he was off to demonstrate in the local Good Trouble National Day of Action (honoring John Lewis) — at the age of 85 (Bill is 6 months older than I am, and obviously vigorous in a way I am not).
And then I riffed some on advantages:
privilege, family money, and social connections, along with other advantages on this (seriously incomplete) list (some of them guy-specific):
Posted in Friendship, My life, Social class, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
Earlier today, Pinterest offered me this arresting painting by American artist John Koch:
(#1) Koch’s After the Sitting: the artist and his male model
Koch (1909 – 1978) was famous as a painter of New York society, but also produced studies of the male body, including male nudes (also female nudes, but that’s not my focus here), and many of working-class men. This made him an American 20th-century counterpart to the French 19th-century painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848 – 1894), another society painter who did startling male nudes and depictions of working-class men. And to some degree comparable to the American society painter John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), who also produced many male nudes and sketches of working-class men.
Posted in Art, Language and the body, Male art, Social class | Leave a Comment »
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