The heat here has ramped up to the point where it’s hard to think coherently (we have A/C only in our bedroom), but I wanted to report on the unusually generous load of presents (I’m turning 75, so people have overdone it). My especially over-the-top brother not only gave me the two-ton Centennial King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band set (includes 4 CDs, two vinyl albums, a hardcover book with annotations, and a poster), A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton, and I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Anyan Hu but three Russian movies in classy Deaf Crocodile editions: In The Moscow Slums (Khitrovka. The Sign of Four; characters include Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Anton Chekhov!), the classic White Sun of the Desert (which I saw and loved many years ago), and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (the Estonian movie based on the Strugatsky novel — I read and enjoyed it but don’t seem to have reported on it here). My exceedingly generous wife splurged on Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note: The Complete Recordings, which I am now listening to with supreme pleasure. My sister-in-law and her significant other gave me The Saragossa Manuscript, the crazed and irresistible movie by Wojciech Has (based on Jan Potocki’s 1815 novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which I own but have yet to read), and Franz Koglmann’s Fruits Of Solitude, the most recent album by one of my favorite European jazzmen (I already have over a dozen of his albums, including the long-deleted early hatARTs); Songdog and his family dropped by with the BGO set of John Surman’s first three albums, fabled highlights of British avant-garde jazz (he goes into my small pantheon of jazz baritone players, along with Gerry Mulligan, Lars Gullin, and Serge Chaloff, whose surname I just discovered is ancestrally the Russian-Jewish Халов), as well as a bottle of Connemara. A LH reader sent me Franz Koglmann’s Fruits Of Solitude, the most recent album by one of my favorite European jazzmen (I already have over a dozen of his albums, including the long-deleted early hatARTs) — thanks, David! And Slavo/bulbul gave me Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok, which I’m very much looking forward to (see my rave for his earlier Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia — my god, that post is now two decades old!). Quite a haul, and tonight I get to see the US team play Bosnia!
And if you want to give a present to yourself or a deserving other, may I recommend Michael Erard’s new book The Language Beat: Essays and Reporting on Language and Life? As longtime readers will know, I consider Erard one of the few journalists worth reading on the topic of language — see my reviews of Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (2007) and Babel No More (2011) — and this looks to be an excellent read. The publisher’s description says:
THE LANGUAGE BEAT collects 47 essays and pieces of reporting that he originally published in The Atlantic, Science, Aeon, Nautilus, Lingua Franca, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere.
The topics that he explored range from dialects, language learning, and multilingualism to language policy, sign languages, naming practices, political rhetoric, and the work of linguists themselves. They showcase Erard’s ambition to tease out the language part of the human story and to locate the human in the language world.
Erard says “As a physical book, it would be 450 pages long, so out of a concern for the environment, it will only appear digitally,” and the price is definitely right, so what are you waiting for? Support good language journalism!
No presents from me (you’ve said you already got many, n’est pas?) but biz hundert un tsvantsig all the same. Not a birthday song, but it just remembered to me Ballad about love.
Many thanks — I love Vysotsky!
We had two slight rainstorms yesterday, but it will be back to normal temperatures today — which means it will be back to almost 40 C by 11 am — that’s about 100 F; it’s about 4 am here. At least we had one evening of normal temperature — it’s 20 C now, which is about 70 F.
languagehat : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Mountaineer%27s_Inn I had not even heard of this Strugatsky novel. I need to ask some friends who are Strugatsky fanatics about it.
It’s not well known but it’s a lot of fun.
I just asked a friend of mine who probably has it in the original Russan to lend it to me for reading.
ביז הונדערט צװאַנציק!
to the most charming and irreplaceable of hosts!
生日快樂! ¡Feliz cumpleaños! Thank you for providing so much interesting material for so many fascinating and educational (and often humorous) discussions, and for being such a gracious host!
You’re fun, amicable, interested in linguistics, but most importantly know how the internet _should_ work, socially. I like you quite a lot.
Tavasz után eljön a nyár és ősz után a tél
De minden évben eljön a nap, amikor születtél
Köszöntünk hát téged, ha már így együtt vagyunk
S ajándékul fogadd el vidám kis dalunk
Congratulations on reaching three-quarters of a Century.
Many hatty returns!
Congrats!
For some reason I thought you were rather younger.
Hurra for deg som fyller ditt år, ja deg vil vi gratulere!
Alle i ring omkring deg vi står, og se, nå vil vi marsjere,
Bukke, nikke, neie, snu oss omkring,
Danse litt for deg med hopp og sprett og spring,
Ønske deg av hjertet alle gode ting
og si meg så hva vil du mere?
Gratulere!
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag!
Bareka nɛ fʋ du’am di’ema daar!
He does! But it’s not in Sofia 🙁 Also, happy birthday!
For some reason I thought you were rather younger.
Ah, that’ll be my youthful joie de vivre. (Definitely not a deal with the devil — don’t look at the portrait my pal Basil painted!)
It would be disingenous to say I’d forgotten the early Koglmann discography because I don’t think I ever knew it particularly, but i *had* forgotten it seems about the hatART record label and the wider Hathut (or Hat Hut) record empire of which it was a facet. I guess it doesn’t surprise me that our host found that label more memorable. In any event I’ve now used the internet to listen to several tracks from this excellent archival release on the affiliated hatOLOGY label, which is apparently a combo reissue of what had earlier been two separate releases on hatArt. https://www.discogs.com/release/2717947-Mal-Waldron-Steve-Lacy-Live-At-Dreher-Paris-1981
Waldron and Lacy are two of my favorites, so it won’t surprise you to learn that that excellent 4-CD set is on the pile next to my stereo (yes, I’m a Boomer) where I keep the albums I may need to hear at a moment’s notice.
Separately, my condolences to hat and all others born on 7/1/51 on the sad recent passing of the most musically prominent (outside of jazz) of your number. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/07/01/victor-willis-village-people-ymca-death/90764573007/
¡Apio verde!