From Chris Ambidge a little while back, this arresting piece of sculpture in the form of a human body — a collaboration between model and photographer to yield an image that looks like something made of a silvery metal. In a pose that reminded Chris of photos I’ve posted of male ballet dancers executing movements that make them appear to be flying in mid-air; but this man is posing supported:
An extraordinary, almost hyper-real body in a remarkable pose.
(Plain talk about male bodies and man-man sex, plus a decidedly steamy image of young men in the midst of having sex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
From a “news for penises” posting on the 5th, a burlesque of Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies” beginning
Thick and big, thick and big,
Are the dicks where the Yaoi live
followed by some explanation, with a promissory note:
yaoi (roughly, ‘boys’ love’) is a genre of Japanese manga (comics) depicting romantic and sexual relationships between young men. (I will soon post some examples, including material from the manga story Himitsu no Yoasobi (titled Secret Night Play in English) — which is relevant here because the sending address for the ad above [for gay porn with Thick and Big dicks] was yoasobi.com).
Now to fulfill that promise.
Posting a Zippy yesterday about F. Scott Fitzgerald reminded me of one of 2015’s more remarkable obituaries, for Frances Kroll Ring, who was Fitzgerald’s secretary and assistant. To put ths in context: Ring started working for Fitzgerald before I was born, and when the writer died, I was only three months old. Now I’m an old man, and Ring died only last June 18th (aged 99), a relic of times long gone by. Her story was told by J. R. Moehringer in the New York Times‘s “The Lives They Lived” issue on December 27th, under the heading “More Than a Secretary: She befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald and never let go”.
I have created a new Page “Homosexuality postings” (about postings on homosexuality and anti-homosexuality), under the Page “Lists”. I was moved to do this by my recent posting on heteronormativity, which touched on themes that have come up a number of times on this blog in the past. At the moment, it’s still skeletal, but I’m working on adding material to it.
It’s under “Lists” (rather than “Linguistics notes” or “XBlog essays”) because the postings I’m listing concern both homosexuality and language, in varying proportions, while “Linguistics notes” has postings that are much more narrowly focussed on matters of linguistics, and “XBlog essays” has postings that are much more narrowly focussed on gay life and the world of gay men. The topics in “Lists” — which include “Animal postings”, “Plant postings”, “Food postings”, “Language and the body”, and “Language of sex” — have a dual focus: the postings on these lists typically concern some non-linguistic domain of interest to me (animals, plants, food, the human, especially the male, body, and sexual practices), but usually with a language-related take on these domains, and that’s what’s going onto the “Homosexuality postings” Page.
Suggestions (by e-mail) about postings that should go onto this Page are, of course, welcome.
Zippy continues today with another set of burlesques on quotations from famous writers:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the ridiculous guise of F-Stop Fitznebbish, and (like those who have preceded him) caricatured in a Pinhead muumuu.
(Steamy, but not actually X-rated, images of hot men, though most are NSFW. Some plain talk about gay sexual practices, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Homoerotic illustrator is how the Spanish graphic artist Kike Sorroche describes himself (in Spanish) on his Twitter page. His work includes art for its own sake (usually homoerotically tinged, sometimes sexually explicit), commercial art (often for gay-related organizations and causes), and cartoons (all, I think, gay-themed). He favors bearded men with muscular furry chests (much like himself, in fact), especially in leather, and in general can be characterized, in terms he uses of his work, as mucho-G (that is, really gay, given that the name of the letter G in Spanish is pronounced /ge/, close to gay in English). Publicity for his three-panel cartoons about the character Aday:
(#1)
(Aday’s adventures at the beach, mostly cruising in the dunes. Un chico entre las dunas is an allusion to Wakefield Poole’s landmark gay porn movie Boys in the Sand.)
In the January 18th New Yorker, this notice:
(#1)
A typically complex, crowded Pittman, composed of disparate elements (see my discussion of Pittman in this 5/10/11 posting).
(No sexually problematic content, but not much language either.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad, this time for Diesel underwear. With a caption added by me:
Tony came to in an empty featureless
Cell, all in grey, with no door he could find,
Wearing only his new Diesel “Under Denim” Trunk in
Dusty Blue, with its hot contour pouch to show off
His stuff – Where was he? How did he get here?
What would happen to him? And what was in that
Drink that Hunky Dude bought for him?
Just when you thought that the ship of bromanteaus and other brocabulary (involving the (North American) slang term bro ‘brother, buddy’, used especially as an address term) had long ago sailed into oblivion, Geico comes along with a recent ad campaign that erupts with goofy brocabulary.
It’s the “gym commercial” for Geico insurance, showing two buddies working out with weights at a gym (one of them bulking up considerably in the process). For fans of shirtlessness, here’s a still from the commercial:
Right on the heels of fractured Proust, today’s Zippy brings us fractured Joyce:
The title, “You, Lizzie”, is a play on Ulysses, the title of James Joyce’s most famous work, a gigantic stream of consciousness re-working of the Odyssey (published in 1922) on the streets of Dublin in a single day (June 16th, 1904). The novel’s central character, Leopold Bloom, appears in the strip as Neapolitan Gloom, and James Joyce (caricatured here, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu) has become Jimmy Joust.