Birthday Loot 2026.
Our take
Seventy-five. Two tons of King Oliver. *A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema*. Parcels in Beijing. The sheer accumulation of things, the cascade of generosity triggered by a milestone birthday, is almost overwhelming. Almost. Because to the Spoot brain, this isn't just about presents; it's about the fascinating, fractal nature of human connection and the peculiar rituals we construct around marking time. It’s about the linguistic quirks that underpin our celebrations, the way we ascribe meaning to objects, the echoes of history vibrating within a vinyl record. It's a perfect storm of the delightfully obscure, and frankly, we’re here for it. The birthday recipient’s brother’s extravagance highlights a fascinating point: sometimes, the most meaningful gifts aren't necessarily the *most* useful, but the ones that signal a deep understanding of the recipient's passions – a recognition of their inner world. This impulse towards idiosyncratic generosity reminds us of figures like Brian Sietsema, Brian Sietsema, Linguist/Priest, whose dedication to a single, beloved word speaks to the power of focused appreciation. And it’s not entirely dissimilar to the impulse that drives efforts to preserve languages like Louisiana French, as explored in Helping Save Louisiana French – a desire to safeguard something precious and unique, even if it defies easy categorization.
The sheer specificity of the gifts – the jazz set, the film history, the Beijing parcel delivery narrative – points toward a generation increasingly resistant to broad strokes and generic gestures. We've moved past the era of the universally-appreciated gift card. This is about curated experiences, niche interests, and a deep dive into the particularities of another person’s intellectual landscape. Think about it: the act of selecting *A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema* implies a shared appreciation for film theory, a willingness to engage with dense and challenging ideas. It suggests a conversation waiting to happen, a shared intellectual playground. And King Oliver? The two tons of it, no less? That’s not just music; it’s a commitment to a particular sound, a specific historical moment, a lineage of artistic innovation. It’s a physical manifestation of devotion that hums with the resonance of brass and the murmur of history. The implicit message, of course, is “I see you. I see your passions. And I’m celebrating them – with a lot of jazz.”
What's particularly intriguing is the juxtaposition of the intensely personal (a brother's gesture) with the increasingly impersonal (the logistics of parcel delivery in Beijing). There's a blurring of lines happening here, a recognition that even the most mundane aspects of modern life—shipping packages across continents—can hold a narrative weight, a human story worth exploring. This echoes a broader cultural shift towards finding meaning in the unexpected, uncovering the hidden histories embedded within everyday objects and experiences. We see it in the resurgence of interest in genealogy, in the meticulous cataloging of personal belongings, in the desire to understand the provenance of everything we consume. And, as demonstrated in pieces like Vikings Hidden in Declaration, even seemingly straightforward historical documents can yield startlingly complex layers of meaning when examined closely. The birthday haul, in this sense, becomes a microcosm of the modern condition: a cluttered, overflowing landscape of connections, narratives, and artifacts.
Ultimately, this lavish birthday haul might be less about the objects themselves and more about the act of giving, the deliberate construction of a personal mythology around a milestone. It’s a potent reminder that human connection thrives on specificity, on the willingness to delve into the particularities of another person’s world. But the real question, the one that keeps us up at night (between A/C-cooled bedroom visits), is this: what will a 100th birthday look like? Will the gifts be even more extravagant? More esoteric? Will the narrative be entirely mediated by algorithms, or will the human touch – that surprising, idiosyncratic act of generosity – still manage to surface, squirt a little water, and remind us of what it means to truly see another person?
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!
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