Birthday Loot 2026.

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!