Culture – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
The fabulously successful idiot plot
March 5, 2026
I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.
But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).
Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.
Posted in Culture, Dance, Dancers, Formulaic language, Movies and tv, Music, Pop culture | 1 Comment »
“As the Mind Spins”
October 27, 2025
The title (taking off on As the World Turns) of today’s (10/27/25) Zippy strip, in which Griffy and Zippy balance the pros against the cons for our planet:
(#1) Griffy sez: what makes the world go round isn’t love, but greed, lust, denial, and (of course) the conservation of angular momentum
But wait! We’ve seen this strip before.
Posted in Cartoonists, Culture, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas
October 25, 2025
Or, more exactly, cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
I’ll give you NM’s food take first, then some words about NM, whose interests (all represented on his blog) also include gay activism and queer studies, and software engineering too. A gay foodie techie, who could have imagined such a thing! (And he’s been a friend since he was an undergraduate at Reed College.) Then I will return to les dacquoises, for yet another pass.
Posted in Culture, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, This blogging life | 6 Comments »
Another hunker
September 13, 2025
(A little posting at the end of a ghastly week, just to show I’m still alive.)
Blogging brings with it a variety of unexpected tasks — notably, dealing with vast amounts of spam, malicious comments, faked commenters, and the like, but also coping with the fact that my blog postings are publicly available from way back (and should be, because they’re complexly intertwined and cross-referential, as I develop and pursue ideas, and exemplify them in fresh ways, creating a dense fabric of postings — about 15,000 of them now, going back decades on a number of different blogs), with the result that a reader will comment on an individual posting, even from long ago, as if it had just appeared — because, of course to that reader the posting was indeed a fresh discovery. So I need to respond to such a comment in the same spirit.
Invariably, I have to re-read the old posting (I often have no recollection of it at all) and, usually others linked in it (to get the context), so responding to such comments takes a fair amount of time and thought. This effort is just simple respect for my readers, but it’s also gratifying, because it comes with the suggestion that my writing lives on, has an audience, was worth the sweat it took. That means a lot to me, because this endless stream of postings is the single work of my late life, the product of my profession. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at intellectual entertainment and in fact resent the other demands on my time and energy that divert me from my calling.
Which brings me to a comment from one m. lewis (someone I don’t think I know, but whose reality and good intentions I have no reason to doubt) on 9/11, about my 8/11/13 posting “crouch, squat, hunker” (from only 12 years ago, so I had a vague recollection of the piece, but still had to research it):
Posted in Culture, Language and the body, This blogging life | 2 Comments »
Is the farmer busy or pretty?
November 25, 2023
An old One Big Happy strip, one in a long series in which Ruthie or her brother Joe is confronted with some type of test question (rather than an information-seeking question):
Ruthie is laboring at a workbook — a culture object that subjects a student to test questions, in this case a question requiring the student to demonstrate their understanding of the culturally appropriate grounds for publicly assessing the characteristics of other people: industriousness is an appropriate ground for assessing a farmer (because it’s relevant to his doing his job), while a conventionally attractive appearance is not
Even though she’s filling in questions in a workbook, Ruthie falls back on treating busy-or-pretty? as a question about her opinions, rather than her knowledge of cultural appropriateness. In fact, for all we can tell from the workbook picture, Farmer Brown might not be at all busy; he might be sitting upright in a stationary tractor, daydreaming about what’s for supper. But he could perfectly well be busy, while even if was drawn to look like a handsome film star, his looks would be culturally irrelevant to his job. (Subtle point: they would, however, be culturally relevant in general, since men judged to be conventionally good-looking have a social edge over other men in various contexts.)
Here, Ruthie personalizes her response by giving her opinions. In other OBH test-question strips she looks situations from her point of view or takes her own experiences as background for answering questions. But test questions demand a depersonalized stance — and then regularly plumb very fine points of sociocultural awareness. Fine points that for the most part aren’t treated in the workbooks, aren’t explicitly taught in schools. I’ll give one further example from an earlier posting of mine below.
Posted in Childhood, Culture, Linguistics in the comics, Questions, Speech acts, Teaching | 2 Comments »
Lisztomania enters the 21st century
November 13, 2023
As a follow-up to my posting yesterday, “Anti-Ode to Liszt” (slamming his piano transcription of the Ode to Joy section of Beethoven’s 9th symphony), an amazing New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, in print in the 9/11 issue (under a version of the title above), on-line on 9/4 under the title “The Greatest Show on Earth: Liszt defined musical glamour. But pianists now see substance behind the spectacle”.
I was pointed to the Ross piece by Lise Menn in e-mail. Apparently, I saw a thumbnail announcement of it in my New Yorker feed but missed it in scanning through the issue when it came out (I lose days, sometimes more, of attention to the media through medical or personal crises, so these reminders are genuinely helpful to me).
Now, a section from Ross’s synoptic view of Liszt — his life, his career, and his music. From here on, it’s all Ross:
Posted in Culture, Music, Performance, Pop culture, Writers | Leave a Comment »
Bowls of gumbo
March 12, 2023
In the mail from bon appétit magazine this morning (Daylight Saving Day in the US), this hymn to the gumbo restaurants of New Orleans:
(#1) Artwork for the story, “The 8 Best Bowls of Gumbo in New Orleans: Pretty much everyone in this city has strong opinions about gumbo. Writer and New Orleans native Megan Braden-Perry shares her picks for the eight best versions you can find”, by Braden-Perry on 3/5/23
As it happens, I am a gumboiste, a gumbophile, known in years long ago at academic conferences in New Orleans for indulging in 7 or 8 different gumbos in a single day. As I wrote in my 8/17/22 posting “Knuckle macaroni”, about elbow macaroni, and then “knuckle dumplings”, that is, gnocchi:
for me gnocchi are like gumbo: there are a zillion variants, hugely different in their ingredients and preparations, some of them transcendent, some of them delightfully weird, some of them pedestrian, but all of them good, each in its own way.
So bon appétit _‘_s celebration of New Orleans gumbos derailed my intended posting for the day. Now, from Braden-Perry’s main text, plus her notes on two of the eight restaurants, with photos.
Posted in Culture, Language and food | 3 Comments »
Contamination by association
August 13, 2019
(Regularly skirting or confronting sexual matters, so perhaps not to everyone’s taste.)
Yesterday’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro takes us back to the Garden of Eden:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)
The bit of formulaic language for this situation is a catchphrase, a slogan with near-proverbial status (YDK, for short):
YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE IT’S BEEN
The leaves are conventionally associated with modesty, through their having been used to cover the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden — a use that then associates the leaves with the genitals, from which the psychological contamination spreads to the entire plant, including the fruits. You don’t know where that fig has been.
Posted in Catchphrases, Culture, Formulaic language, Idioms, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pragmatics, Proverbs, Slogans, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
Avocado Chronicles: 4 avotoast
July 15, 2019
Although, or perhaps because, I live in one of the world’s avocado toast hot spots, I’d hoped to avoid posting on the silly fad for avotoast, but then this Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon — with its pun on toast — appeared in my comics feed:
(#1) Up off the counter and onto the table
Three things: avocados, toast, and avocado toast.
Posted in Ambiguity, Child language, Culture, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »
Word geographies
October 2, 2014
Some good words here about Asya Pereltsvaig’s explorations in word geography, from the etymology section of her Languages of the World site, which has some cool maps. In no particular order (some postings have come by more than once, in different versions):
The Geography of ‘Book’ (link)
The Geography of the “Onion” Vocabulary (link)
What will you have: tea or chai? (link)
Say “Cheese”! (link)
The Geography of “Cucumber” (link)
The ‘cheese’ map:
Posted in Culture, Language and food, Languages | Leave a Comment »