More remembrance of times past, recollections triggered by e-mail exchanges between Waynes Browne (at Cornell) and me (at Stanford). The story comes in three parts:
— my 10/12/24 posting “Namesakes and surnamesakes”, which reported on e-mail from WB, the first half of which I riffed on in that posting
— the second half of that e-mail, all about Welsh (recalling our Welsh days at MIT 64 years ago)
— the product of years of my work on the description of Welsh syntax and morphophonology, from only 40 years ago (in a 1984 Chicago Linguistic Society paper)
From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this cover art by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951): The Literary Digest of 6/12/1909:
(#1) Homoerotic soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (complete with a laurel wreath for the author au naturel); the laurel wreath identifies the writer as an incarnation of Apollo, the god of poetry, who is often depicted with a laurel wreath (recalling his desire for Daphne, a nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god’s advances); meanwhile, the writer is nude, because he’s a god (the model for this drawing was JCL’s favorite model, also his partner in life, Charles Beach (1881-1954))
I’m a writer (among other things), and I mostly work in my underwear, but I don’t write commando. Well, I’m no Charles Beach, and certainly no Apollo.
(Male bodies and man-on-man sex discussed in street language, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
Yesterday’s Cyber Wednesday sale ad from the Falcon gay porn studio, edited for WordPress modesty:
(#1) Five things: a strikingly handsome face (vaguely familiar to me); a pitsntits presentation of one armpit and the pecs; bodybuilder abs; nicely furred forearms; and a thick 9″ cut pornstar cock, displayed rock-hard for shoppers’ delight (but fuzzed out here for modesty)
Steven Levine on Facebook yesterday, contemplating Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-34) at the National Gallery in London:
(#1) [SL:] Those golden idol worshipping Israelites were pretty hot. I didn’t learn this in Hebrew school
Note: Poussin’s canvases are mostly huge — far too large to be appreciated properly in reproductions like the ones I’m giving you — and sprawling, crowded with characters (voluptuous women and studly men plus, where appropriate, adorable cherubs) in motion in an assortment of encounters, the whole scene illustrating some biblical or mythological theme, set in a wild natural landscape under a dramatic sky. (The celebration of the picturesque famously characterizes the Romantic movement in the arts, but in Poussin it flourished in the Baroque.)
Now: notes on Poussin; then on his religious painting on the Golden Calf theme in #1; then on to a mythological painting, Acis and Galatea; to a mythological painting in which six different encounters on a single theme (metamorphosis into a flower) are gathered together: The Empire of Flora; and, finally, to a mythological painting focused on sheer physicality: Bacchanale.
Then I will digress to Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, evoked for me by Poussin’s character-packed canvases. Then from Poussin’s surname, I drift to the tasty French dish poussin, and from this young chicken (typically roasted), I drift further to other chickens, young men considered as desirable sexual objects. Which brings us back to those steamy Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf. It’s the curse — or gift — of the associative mind.
… the better to see the coming five days
The inspiration for this posting is Tom Toro’s cover “Incognito” for the New Yorker‘s 12/2/24 issue:
(#1) Farm turkeys in pre-Thanksgiving disguise; turkeys (which are not especially clever creatures) apparently believe that no one will see past their Groucho glasses, so that rather than experiencing a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block, they’ll be offered a cigar
So #1 is a big holiday ball of American pop culture; I wonder what your random Japanese, Turk, or Indonesian would make of it, even if you gave them the artists’s title as a clue.
🎄 🎄 when I began this posting, it was penultimate November, and this year also Black Friday, when the anticipation of Christmas becomes a constant, unremitting dinging, accompanied by exhortations to SHOP NOW; I held to my long-standing practice of not leaving the house on Black Friday for any purpose other than retrieving my mail from the mailboxes in the condo parking lot
Meanwhile:
(#1)
A tale of the jim-jams, the most acute form of the jams (joint and muscle afflictions), a story that began on Friday 11/22 with the jams, reached utter jim-jam misery on Monday 11/25, and then slowly moderated since then; but also a tale of plans gone utterly awry (lyrics above from “Walk on the wild guardsman side”)
Another Rabbit Day item in the stew (see my earlier posting today “Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons”), taking off from this Facebook posting by Greg Morrow yesterday (with some editing by me):
In sort of an opposite of the pen–pin merger [AZ: in which syllable-offset /ɛn/, as in pen, and /ɪn/, as in pin, are both realized as [ɪn]], local dialect (including mine) has [vǝnɛlǝ] vanella as the pronunciation of vanilla [vǝnɪlǝ].
(Heard it today in the grocery, and I was like, yes that’s right, wait a second…)
A further comment went on with the idea that this ɪ > ɛ (before l) that gives widespread US vanella was in some way the opposite of the ɛ > ɪ (before n) shift that gives us US midlands inkpin [ɪŋkpɪn] ‘(ink)pen’.
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the month of December; for the occasion, an assortment of non-holiday-related topics — though I have to point out that Saturnalia will be upon us in a couple of weeks, so get your ass in gear for the occasion — that have come by me recently: a rabbit stew for your pleasure
rabbit stew. From Wikipedia, some bare facts:
Rabbit stew, also referred to as hare stew when hare is used, is a stew prepared using rabbit meat as a main ingredient. Stuffat tal-Fenek, a variation of rabbit stew, is the national dish of Malta. Other traditional regional preparations of the dish exist, such as coniglio all’ischitana on the island of Ischia, German Hasenpfeffer and jugged hare in Great Britain and France. Hare stew dates back to at least the 14th century … Rabbit stew is a traditional dish of the Algonquin people and is also a part of the cuisine of the Greek islands. Hare stew was commercially manufactured and canned circa the early 1900s in western France and eastern Germany.
Rabbit stews are characteristically rich and flavorful. Yes, even the British jugged hare.
🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate November and the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle, patron saint of 🏴 Scotland 🏴 (and several other countries) and of fishermen, fishmongers, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, pregnant women, butchers, farm workers. and more
A follow-up to my 11/28 posting “Today’s surprise etymology”, about the history of Jordan almond, which elicited a nice brief comment by David Preston about Baker’s Chocolate and German Chocolate Cake. Which I now elaborate on.
