On 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]
Coming 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.]
It is my annual November pleasure to discourse some on the just-revealed winner of the AZ Award from the Linguistic Society of America; the minimal announcement from the LSA:
This award … is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Arnold Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ president of the LSA.
Join the Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics in congratulating Robert J. Podesva on receiving this prestigious award! A Stanford Associate Professor, he researches phonetic variation and identity while actively mentoring LGBTQ+ students to promote inclusivity in academia.
Rob is the fourth awardee — preceded by Kirby Conrod for 2022, Rusty Barrett for 2023, and Lal Zimman for 2024 — and will be officially feted at the LSA’s annual meetings in January. I always provide some encomium material for the awardees on this blog, but this year is special, because Rob is an old friend; a former student of mine (his PhD dissertation committee was Penny Eckert (chair), John Rickford, and me, which is about as socioculturally diverse a committee of three as you could concoct in the academic world); and a valued colleague of mine at Stanford. So there are four reasons for me to write this posting, and I will take some liberties in digressing into personal remarks along the way.
From a 9/16 visit to Stanford’s Arizona Garden — the “cactus garden” in local talk — engineered by my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez (who will be L from here on out), to investigate new things (for him) in the area — so many wonderful places open to the public for free — and to provide me with enjoyment (and useful exercise with my walker).
When we came around a corner of the path from the parking lot, and suddenly faced an alien-planet vista of huge astonishing plants of all sorts, as far as the eye could see in every direction, L gasped in surprise and delight. And close to the ground there were all manner of other plants, every one of them a novelty. Nothing labeled, no information supplied, but I could provide some facts from memory. Though mostly L was being carried away in delight by the visual excess: everywhere you looked, another bit of (mostly dangerous) living magic.
Then, around a corner there was a large garden island populated by cactuses I certainly recognized. “These are called barrel cactuses, for obvious reasons”, I said, but for a few moments he didn’t care what they were called, they were amazing, and in fact adorable. Some of them were arranged in what you could think of as family groups. They were golden-green, with huge spines all over them. Spines so big you could feel them individually, discover they were soft and flexible, but with spear-sharp tips.
Eventually, L looked them up on his phone and discovered that they were, specifically, golden barrel cactuses. From Mexico originally, but in the desert far from the Mexico City region he grew up in.
… in Stanford linguistics — the announcement:
The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce a dissertation oral presentation on 6/12/24:
Indexing Respectability by Zion Mengesha
Committee: Penny Eckert (co-chair), Rob Podesva (co-chair), Jonathan Rosa, John Rickford, Paula Moya (university chair)
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).
The second installment of my adventures with Howdy Boy, aka Troy Anderson (Stanford ’89/’90). In the first installment (my 3/8 posting “Howdy”), with the folksy-friendly salutation “Howdy”, he introduced himself as a student in my gigantic 1989 syntax course — and thanked me for not flunking him. Now, I have a passionate interest (both personal and scholarly) in people’s lives — their daily lives and their life histories — so when I learned that Troy was not only a Stanford football player (a huge guy who looks like the offensive tackle he was at Stanford) but also a high-ranking Go player, now a business executive, who got a BA in anthropology, and as a member of the Coquille tribe in Oregon compiled a dictionary of its lost language, Miluk, for his MA thesis in linguistics, well, I was totally intrigued. We embarked on learning about each other.
Meanwhile, there was the almost flunking out. I wrote him:
It [has] occurred to me that if there was any chance of your flunking out, it would have been because you were juggling too many balls at once, always a danger for very smart manic multi-taskers, as you obviously were at the time (and probably still are).
(I’ll return to the barely not flunking out below). And I added:
I haven’t been able to piece together your history in recent years, so if you could fill me in some, I’d like to hear about it. I might try to talk you into letting me write about you on my blog. (You can sample my blog at www.arnoldzwicky.org.)
Troy turned out to be extraordinarily open in his response — giving me an inventory of major life events, some quite personal in nature, offering to supply further details, and inviting me to post whatever I wanted. An attitude that resonates with the way he presents himself; as I wrote to him a little while later:
you’re a sunny person; your most natural facial expression is a smile of pleasure... I take that disposition to be a sign of a way of being, a moral quality — of openness, of empathy, of enthusiastic commitment. In any case, whether you know it or not, you project a kind of niceness (despite your imposing body) that has surely served you well in life
Clearly, I appreciated his brand of charm, despite his being so startlingly unlike me (except for sharing linguistics, that sunny presentation of self, and serious moral commitments).
But then, more or less in the middle of the inventory, came a swerve and a surprise.
Under the header “Howdy” (a folksy salutation I rarely encounter), this e-mail from 3/4 (somewhat edited):
I was in your syntax class at Stanford in the late 80s …
Recently had a colleague [who] said he was basing [a] clitics and circumclitics paper on your theories! So, thought I’d say hello and thank you for not flunking me.
Now, I get an unbelievable amount of ill-intentioned mail from trollers, spammers, and seekers of commercial deals; now that these annoying entities have access to impressive AI programs, their junk e-mail regularly makes reference to details of my published work and is generally pretty sophisticated in its attempt to gain my confidence. That “Howdy” really was a red flag; also, although Howdy Boy wouldn’t have been the first former student to thank me for not flunking him, it’s a rare event, and might just have been a clever stroke to catch my attention.
On the other hand, his colleague’s paper was said to be about the language Miluk (a language I don’t recall having heard of before; it’s an extinct Coosan language of Oregon), and his e-name was miluk — two things lending some verisimilitude to him. And then his signature was
Troy Anderson, ‘89/‘90
which would put him at Stanford when I taught my really big Intermediate Syntax course, Linguistics 121, in winter quarter 1989 (more on this course in an appendix to this posting; but it’s relevant here that enrollment in the course was unexpectedly gigantic, requiring the last-minute hiring of a raft of additional grading assistants, who I then had to co-ordinate and manage, and making my memory of individual students quite hazy). But then “Troy Anderson” is the sort of everyday name that trollers and spammers make up.
Alas, my net experience includes astonishingly inventive malicious trollers, whose only purpose is to demonstrate their cleverness by deceiving otherwise intelligent people and wasting their time; and, a few months back, being disastrously defrauded by people who did a remarkable job of creating detailed counterfeits of a series of commercial websites. So I’m really really cautious. (Yes, this is a truly grotesque way to have to live.)
From today’s (5/16) Stanford Report, a feature on the outgoing Stanford Tree, Grayson Armour, who cavorted on the football field of Stanford Stadium as the team’s mascot, the Tree, a costumed figure representing El Palo Alto, the redwood tree featured on the university’s logo; meanwhile, Armour was preparing himself for “a career in human spaceflight”. Kids these days!
From the Stanford Report:
(#1) Armour in Stanford StadiumMeet Grayson Armour, ’23: The former Stanford Tree grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois, where nightly views of the Milky Way inspired a fascination with distant horizons. He graduates in June with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace computational engineering and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and plans to pursue a career in human spaceflight.
The Blogger, tied in furious knots
I was about the do a quick posting on Roger Federer, who announced his retirement from professional tennis today — because Federer is an admirable person in a whole series of ways, and because Federer is really really Swiss (he and I share the Alpine nose!).
But I was interrupted by Life, in ways mostly gratifying, but both time-consuming and exhausting, so the piece about RF and his splendid Swissness remains unfinished.
Well, the Federer piece interrupted my progress on a “RELAX ARNOLD” posting (about something that had popped up in a Facebook ad).
And “RELAX ARNOLD” took me away from posting on two other ads that had appeared suddenly: “funny aperitif board” and “the social lives of ruff dudes”.
And those two interrupted my advance on a whole set of half-prepared postings: “tastes like glazed donuts”, “ride the wild okapi”, and more.
I can’t imagine how I’m going to dig myself out of this hole.
But, you ask, how did I spend this day (after taking in the hot news about Federer)?
