Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In yesterday’s Bizarro strip, Wayno brings us a restaurant that offers a genuine desert — désert — menu, featuring triumphs of food in Sonoran miniature (the howling coyote is a masterpiece of sculpture in mackerel skin, and the cornichon saguaros make a piquant contrast in texture and flavor):

The cartoon restaurant actually offers deserts; real-world restaurants offer desserts, but their menus can fall prey to desert as a typo (a slip of the sort my disabled fingers make many dozens of times every day) or as a misapprehension about the spelling of the noun for the sweet course eaten at the end of a meal, perhaps through confusion with the homophonous verb desert (desért) meaning ‘leave (a place), causing it to appear empty’ (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

So there are three routes to a desert cart: as an accurate name for what the restaurant offers; or as either of two kinds of mistakes. On the latter, from my Language Log posting of 5/6/08, “The thin line between error and mere variation 7: getter better”, about:

the distinction between inadvertent slips and other sorts of “mistakes”: in [the terms in my Mistakes booklet], between INADVERTENT and ADVERTENT mistakes; in Erving Goffman’s terms, between KNOWS BETTER and DOESN’T KNOW BETTER mistakes; in Geoff Nunberg’s terms, between TYPOS and THINKOS (see the discussion in Michael Erard’s book Um).

Then there was the point that you can’t tell what the status of any PARTICULAR mistake is just from its form: the same output can be the result of several different mechanisms. One person’s slip can be another person’s intended production (possibly non-standard, but intended).

About death and life.

Out of yesterday’s gun death news, from Minneapolis, one detail sticks in my mind: older kids lying on top of younger ones to shield and shelter them. A moment of both bravery and loving care, a reminder of the good that people are capable of, in the face of immense evil — the evil, not of the shooter, who was dreadfully deranged (and apparently crammed with conspiratorial fantasies), but of the machine of death constructed over decades by political leaders in collaboration with gun manufacturers and the NRA. So that for times so numerous that they blend together into one bloody tapestry of slaughtered children, college students, churchgoers, shoppers, and party-goers, we cry out in agony (as the mayor of Minneapolis did yesterday) NEVER AGAIN, while those mechanics of death offer only pious thoughts and prayers against an event they triggered themselves but fervently disavow, telling us that no one could have predicted this, it’s a mental health problem, and the only protection would be to arm teachers, professors, leaders of religious congregations, grocery store clerks, and doormen at dance clubs — it takes a gun to stop a gun — and to lock up every place where people gather (so that guardians can protect them from those unpredictable crazies).

Meanwhile, ONLY IN AMERICA are so many so bloodily deranged.

Their stance is thoroughly disingenuous, consciously evil. But they are the people with serious money and political power, entirely capable of putting down the resistance of millions. So that what we face is FOREVER AGAIN, fresh slaughters every few months or so, as we’ve become inured to.

It is possible for endless patient resistance on a large scale to counter this evil, but that can take a century or more; consider civil rights for Black people in my country, finally more or less achieved in about a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation (but now being undone by rich and powerful white people), while the larger program of true racial equality is still a dream in Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye, requiring maybe another century. The alternative is a genuine bloody revolution, whose consequences are notoriously unpredictable and often unpleasant.

But I fear that we’re on the Gun Death Train, with lots of stops, on a line whose final destination is constantly receding and might well never be within reach. What we’ve got for solace along the way is small acts of bravery and loving care. We need more of them, many more of them, and we need to act in concert whenever we can, to do these things together, because we are stronger together and it’s going to be a long hard road, one none of us will see the end of, so we’ll need that strength to get from day to day.

Meanwhile, keep your power dry.

An old Calvin and Hobbes strip, in my comics feed for today:

Calvin attempts to police the invidious distinction between high art (art for art’s sake, as they say, with no goal other than ennobling the subject of the art or critiquing its content — as opposed to art serving some sociocultural function), taking off from paintings (high art) vs. comic strips (low art), but then falling into a bottomless pit of meta-art, meta-meta-art, etc.

“But is it [high] art?” is a recurrent theme on this blog. I routinely note the judgment of high art is not in fact primarily made on the basis of the goal of the work, but always is made by reference to an established structuring of the world of artists, exhibitions, agents, and the like. And I have advocated for the celebration of high levels of craft wherever it’s found.

(Men’s bodies, man-on-man sex, raunchy talk — not for kids or the sexually modest.)

To celebrate high summer, my male-calendar pages for the month of July, both featuring smiles: a smile of callipygian appreciation in a Tom of Finland drawing; a subtle half-smile on the face of Cocky Boy Levi Karter — which led quickly to a photo of a sexual encounter between Mr. July Karter and Mr. June Blake Mitchell that exemplifies a common trope of gay male porn (which cries out for a name), combining a facial component — two faces pleasurably engaged with one another (in what I’ll call facial coupling) — and a groin-buttocks component — a back-on-front sit-fuck (what I’ll call a lap fuck). And led from that to the complex career of Levi Karter, with reflections on personas.

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Welcome to the holiday fire pit! For Memorial Day (this year, Monday May 30th, today) — because searing slabs of raw meat over an open fire is an obvious way to honor our war dead — and for Father’s Day (this year, coming up on Sunday June 19th) — because searing slabs of raw meat over an open fire is the obvious way to recognize a man’s ability to, as the poet put it, fuck kids up.

In past years, advertisements that came my way for the masculine meat holidays were entirely focused on  conventional grilling apparatus: from various forms of charcoal-fired grills (the simplest round portable grill / barbecues, more substantial wheeled rectangular devices), through gas-fired stoves on wheels, up to motorized spit-roasting machinery.

But in my on-line life, this seems to be the year of the fire pit, ‘a pit dug into the ground or a freestanding metal vessel, in which a contained outdoor fire is made’ (NOAD).

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A follow-up to my posting of the 4th, “A dark week in early December”, noting that the 4th is Frank Zappa’s death day, the 8th — today — John Lennon’s (and the 6th Wolfgang Mozart’s, but he doesn’t figure in today’s story). Now Kyle Wohlmut has posted on Facebook a Guitar World 10/8/17 story “John Lennon and Frank Zappa Jam in New York City in 1971” by Damian Fanelli:

Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Frank Zappa

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