Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
Archive for the ‘Stanford’ Category
Tomorrow x 4
November 21, 2025Gods and tables
November 10, 2025In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
50!
October 4, 2025From Beth Levin to the Stanford linguistics department on 9/10:
The Department of Linguistics was officially established on September 1, 1975, and so this year is our 50th anniversary! In celebration, we will be hosting a reception from 4-6pm on Friday, October 10 in the Linguistics Courtyard behind Margaret Jacks Hall. We have invited our many Ph.D. alumni and emeriti to attend, and we are anticipating a good turn out.
An astounding number of PhD alumni have said they’re coming (going back to 1970, from the precursor to the department). I don’t know how many emeritus faculty are coming. And then there are the people currently in the department. So it will be quite a scene.
Three more years
October 3, 2025The reward at the end of an extravagantly difficult week (don’t ask): confirmation that I have actually been appointed for three more years at Stanford. No longer do I get a letter of appointment from the cognizant dean; instead, my department’s administrator (the Kelly Battcher in this e-mail) gets a notice from FASA — Faculty and Academic Staff Appointments, the online integrated management system for academic appointments at Stanford. This notice:
Thus implying that the cognizant dean did in fact approve the appointment; there is an actual human being in the middle of all this, you just can’t see them
A moment of renewal
September 17, 2025Cast your mind back to 8/15, when I posted “CV time at Stanford” on this blog. Where I noted that
To maintain my adjunct status [at Stanford], I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean.
My previous appointment, for 2022-25, was to expire on 8/31; the CV was to be for a 2025-28 appointment. I prepared a statement (included in that posting) that was not a conventional CV, but a summary showing who I am, what I do, and what I have done. An experiment, on my part.
The summary did make it clear that I am, among many other things, a very visible and noisy LGBT+ figure. Someone who’s liable to get in trouble with the current American government, and to get Stanford in trouble too, and might be a barrier to Stanford’s raking in contributions. So the dean might well choose to terminate me.
August, and my appointment, came to an end. My department came to the rescue by paying for a month of the university services I need to do my work.
And then, yesterday, the offer of a new appointment came through, and today the resourceful Opal Armstrong Zwicky, armed with technical advice from her mother, stepped me through signing my name electronically to a .pdf document (accepting the offer) that could then just be e-mailed to my department’s administrator. Who will relay it to the dean’s office. Which will then issue a letter of appointment. In the house that Jack built.
Of course they could take it back. All sorts if things can happen. But I press on.
The new appointment greatly simplifies the task of getting me to Stanford Linguistics’ 50th anniversary celebration on October 10th. And that is a Good Thing.
(The rest of my life is in utter shambles, but you really don’t want to hear about it. Though I will mention that most of the furniture in the house will be carted away Friday afternoon. Sleek and spare, spare and sleek is the land where the mammoth grazes.)
CV time at Stanford
August 15, 2025Ever since I retired from Ohio State in 1995, I’ve been living in the gig economy, mostly in various irregular and temporary appointments at Stanford, eventually ending in an odd status that is neither faculty nor staff, that of adjunct professor: someone who is presumed to be actually employed somewhere else but is available for various services to Stanford. For which I receive other services from Stanford: access to things available through the university library (for me, this is primarily free and easy access to the on-line Oxford English Dictionary) and stable document storage (most of my publications, in .pdf files, citable on-line for almost instant access by others; thousands of such citations have been embedded in my blog postings over the years).
To maintain my adjunct status, I must periodically demonstrate that I am worthy, by submitting my CV for scrutiny by the relevant dean. My actual CV is a gigantic document; the last printout was 17 pages of densely formatted material (publications, courses taught, papers delivered, honors and awards, academic service activities, graduate students advised, at three different institutions). I can’t imagine anyone gaining illumination from it.
Then, from the administrator of the Stanford linguistics department yesterday, 8/14/25:
Your current adjunct appointment is scheduled to end 8/31/25. If you are interested in renewing your affiliation, please send me your current CV and I’ll get that paperwork going with the Dean’s Office.
8/31 is only two weeks away, so there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong, even though the exercise used to be thought of as mostly pro forma, a reassurance that I was still intellectually active. Now that I’m a flaming symbol of DEI, who knows? These are perilous days.
In any case, it occurred to me to use the material from the “About AMZ” page on this blog (without the embedded links), which gives some actual sense of who I am and what I do (please don’t tell me that my work is, well, so idiosyncratic; people have been berating me about the eccentricity of my ideas and interests for at least 50 years now, without any effect). So I created, from this page, a .pdf file that my department’s administrator can submit to the dean, reproduced below. (I see now that the “About AMZ” file needs a reference to my published poetry and to exhibitions of my comic homoerotic collages.)
Below the line, the file I sent the administrator:
RESIST
July 7, 2025The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
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.
AmAcad 2025
April 24, 2025On Facebook yesterday, starting with a message from Andrew Garrett (the Berkeley linguist):
— AG: Couldn’t be happier for Leslie Kurke [interdisciplinary scholar of antiquity at the University of California, Berkeley] …, one of the new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in great company! [among them, CNN newsanchor Anderson Cooper; filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer Ava DuVernay; actor, producer, and humanitarian Danny Glover]
The sting in the tail
November 15, 2024Coming 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.]