When Rusty Barrett and I did the special Sherzer issue for JLA, we had to decide between a photo taken by J. David Sapir of Joel or one taken by Dina, in the end we chose the picture taken by Dina because Joel and Dina were such a team, and the idea of not including Dina seemed wrong
From a book my dad gave me long years ago:
"When you remembered that all this had sprung from the hands and the soul of this one man, without technical resources, you understood that men could be as effectual as God in other realms than that of destruction"--Jean Giono
Happy Earth Day
In the city of giants
The green world
I've now had a chance to look over the new book by the Dauenhauers, Geiger, and Leer on Yéil Kundayaayí and it's as good as one could have hoped for, just a marvelous book, and done thoughtfully, storytellers from the 1950s into the 1980s, presented well and with useful notes
Turtle crossing
Out today - four new titles in our Essential John Berger series!
This week only - buy any of the new titles from the Essential John Berger series and save 30% on all books in the series.
The Dauenhauers have a new book (40 years in the making)
‘Hearing our language is like medicine to us’: new book features Tlingit Raven stories in original language
www.kcaw.org/2026/04/08/h...
"In the clearing stands a woodchuck
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
'I am leaving, I am leaving'
But the fighter still remains"
The lane to the lake
The island
Beautiful day
I am haunted by pelicans
Come visit Austin
My colleague Aaron Sandel is in the news
Morning reading. I was glad to help bring this to publication at Anthropological Linguistics
From the Tropical Forest to Caribbean Islands to Cities and Beyond: Migration, Displacement, and Travel of the Kuna
Dina Sherzer and Joel Sherzer
jstor.org/stable/27303854
"The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity, is to an incalculable extent a history of error...fruitful misunderstanding."--Frank Kermode
Evening reading, on Koasati, Tunica, Ishak, and Chitimacha, and thinking about the next time I teach my Native American Languages and Cultures class
"The memory of that first period of poetry. It was so different from what I had set my life up to be; I mean, being a Naval officer and all that. But the poetry became so extraordinarily important to me. The reading of it and the trying to write it became simply matters of life and death to me"--RPW
"As clearly expressed by Eleanor Burke Leacock (1981), the...cross-cultural critique argues that to hold a priori that women are everywhere inferior is to subscribe to a kind of cultural deficit or culture of poverty approach to women, which is... invalid"
"It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways in which we try to make sense of our lives."--Frank Kermode
And then the Easter bunny charged me...
A Michigan State University forestry professor questions the logic of U.S. Forest Service's reorganization.
I am saddened to hear of the passing of Luisa Cadena, who had a profound impact on the work of Janis Nuckolls and of our understanding of Quechua ideophones and beyond
White Horse, Thomas Hart Benton, at the Blanton
This is the NSF program that funds all of linguistics (and which funded my graduate study). Because of course knowing about how language works is woke nonsense that couldn't possible be in anyone's national interest 🫠
Going through some stuff from my graduate school days, and came across this still relevant flier
My paper honors the generosity of Joel Sherzer and the laureate of ambiguity Rex Lee Jim
