Archive for the ‘Social life’ Category
September 12, 2026
A while back I lamented to Sacred Harp singers Leigh Cooper and Mark Godfrey (wife and husband; some of us come in couples) over no longer being able to sing face to face, in one another’s company (instead, having to sing along alone at home via Zoom). Leigh took my lament to Paul Kostka, who acts as arranger for our twice-monthly singings in Palo Alto, and they picked a day (9/10) and time (11 am). That turned out to be the exact time I was scheduled to get flu and covid vaccinations, and Mark’s schedule that day precluded his taking part at all. (Juggling schedules is hellish).
But the plan eventually came together, with many singers invited to take part, but only four actually able to turn up on 9/10 : Leigh, Paul, Lorraine Sohlberg Kostka (yes, another couple), and me. Four is the magic number — SH is 4-part a cappella music — and together the four of us could cover the treble, alto, tenor, and bass lines. I’m a male treble; in the world of ordinary vocal music, I’m a natural baritone (roughly corresponding to SH tenor), but astonishingly I can do this other stuff too and love the lines I get. And when I have a voice (various degrees of laryngitis have dogged me in recent weeks), I am wildly, fiercely shake-the-windows loud.
But what is so touching is that the whole event was a gift to me. Causing me to spill over with joy at being back in the community — SH is communitarian, elaborately egalitarian, and comfortable with difference (I am often adorned in way-gay apparel) — with these wonderful people.
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Posted in Conversation, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Music, My life, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
September 7, 2026
You say it’s your birthday / We’re gonna have a good time
— the Beatles, Birthday (1968, from The White Album)
[evoked for me in e-mail by Brian Joseph]
💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻 for (US) Labor Day, the flexed biceps of a manual worker (like my two grandfathers: Bethlehem Steel (maternal), Textile Machine Works (paternal); Melchior Zwicky doubled as a small-farmer as well). I’m two generations down and have ascended, as a professor and writer, to the status of scholar and artist rather than worker and peasant — socioculturally if not financially in the upper middle class. With a thick veneer of high culture, but also fiercely egalitarian. It’s a balancing act.
Birthday greetings. I now veer onto something completely different (but hang on; things will come together): amidst the great avalanche of well-wishing for my birthday, #86, yesterday, an especially charming pair that came as a package. (more…)
Posted in Academic life, Bilingualism, Events and occasions, Language and culture, Languages, Linguists, Music, My life, Names, Ohio State, Social class, Social life, Teaching and learning | Leave a Comment »
September 6, 2026
The big scheme is Pleasure as Therapy: something I do for pleasure (or play or engaged curiosity) turns out to be excellent therapy, alleviating some affliction of mine or extending my life. These are unintended, but gratifying, consequences. Gravy.
Previously on this blog, the story of my singing Sacred Harp hymns in communities of shapenote singers, a practice that moves me deeply, sometimes taking me into an ecstatic state. That’s the pleasure. Then my pulmonologist — who had me using breathing apparatus to strengthen my lungs — discovered this and said that my singing full-out was much better therapy than his, and I should do it as much as possible, ideally some every day. I see this as getting a prescription to eat cake. Or, to pick a different metaphor, go for the gravy.
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Posted in Age, Language and medicine, Lexical semantics, Linguists, Metaphor, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Play, Social interactions, Social life | 2 Comments »
September 1, 2026
On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:
— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.
I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.
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Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2026
(all the way at the end, we get to some sexual street talk, which I think has exactly the right shock value for its context; but if s*cking c*ck offends you, skip the next-to-last sentence)
It starts with Steven Levine — a sparkling vehicle of joy, enthusiasm, and congeniality — roused to anger and protest, as I reported in the 8/3 posting “Two notes on gay moral purpose”:
SL breaks out in a combination of, on the one hand, genuine pride in occasions of humane concern and (to put it grandly) moral purpose in the gay world and, on the other, righteous anger at a long-standing tradition in psychology, sociology, and medicine of blanketly treating homosexuality as dysfunction and disease. With, as sideshow, celebration of the raw sexuality in homosexuality — recognizing the physical and emotional pleasures of the associated sexual practices — in the wonderful BIG FAG t-shirts created by Steven (which he’d been distributing with abandon at Amsterdam Pride).
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Moral worlds, Music, My life, Poetry, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
August 25, 2026
This morning, I went to get a bunch of lab tests done at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (for a nephrologist consultation tomorrow) and discovered that a lot of the phlebotomists recognized me, greeted me enthusiastically by name, and asked about my life since they had last seen me. The thing is, I’m really visible (well, I also remember them, and facts about their lives too; they’re interesting people, and the question “How did you end up working here?”, while they are drawing my blood, elicits some extraordinary stories). Almost always wearing stunningly gay clothes (today, rainbow-flag track shorts and a honking big rainbow-colored DEI t-shirt).
(#1) The DEI shirt
The PAMF staff find these clothes cheering, which is indeed one of the things they’re for.
This makes me happy.
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Posted in Clothing, Connotation, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Moral worlds, My life, Rainbow clothing, Social life, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
August 22, 2026
In conversation with a local friend, whose identity I will conceal because I’m going to say some nice things about them that might embarrass them …
I’m trying to think of ways to tell people that I aim to be outrageous but not threatening. Maybe even admit that I think every organization should have at least one highly visible fag, because we’re so decorative.*
Actually, a fair number of people will find me threatening and contemptible and will wish me ill (a startling number will wish me dead). A hard fact, but the real world.
Defending myself against them takes a good bit of care and real work. I have to figure everybody out. You got weighed in the balance like everyone else I meet — and showed me your character when we first met. You deserve praise (and thanks) for being who you are, and it’s a mark of this character that you now will not understand why I’m thanking you. And you will think, sweetly, that if other people just get to know me, they will like me.
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Posted in Compliments, Gender and sexuality, Identities, My life, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
October 5, 2025
From the New Yorker issue of 10/13/25 (which has not yet arrived at my house), on-line on 10/5, “Takes: Rebecca Mead on Mary Ellen Mark’s photo from the Puerto Rican Day Parade” — from the New Yorker Classics, about “Forward, March” by MEM, in the 6/23/2003 print edition. This photo:
[caption:] Candice Lozada, nine, and Fantashia Toro, eleven, of the S.B.K. (South Bronx Kids) Dance Group, waiting for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to start
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Posted in Art, Childhood, Music, Photography, Race and ethnicity, Social life | Leave a Comment »
August 21, 2025
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.
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Posted in Clothing, Humor, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Social class, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
