Ogden Nash: Besides pollution and erosion / We now must face a goose explosion.
Yesterday I dig out the industrial glue and reconstruct the exploded goose from last weekend. No problem. The cracks are an aesthetic improvement. Am feeling better about 2012 already.
As shown in the first photo above, after I reduce the number of pieces from twenty-six down to two, and am all set to close up the bird for good, I inscribe a message to future goose-breakers (most likely me) inside the tail, along with the dates of breakage and repair. How often does one get a chance to write on a sealed object’s inside surface? To hide a quote-unquote Easter egg inside a bird? At the time this seems clever, but now I kind of wish I hadn’t done it — I feel like from now on whenever I see the goose around the house I’m always just going to think of the concealed message inside it. I can see this eventually bothering me. It’s possible I’ll have to re-break the bird so I can blacken the writing out.
Also: Somehow I’m reminded of that old, bad Groucho Marx joke (though it involves the wrong animal): Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Department of Bad Starts: Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve I accidentally drop a full champagne flute on the floor. And on New Year’s Day I accidentally knock a vintagey folk-art ceramic goose off a table onto the floor. Both items fight the concrete and lose. Better them than me. Fragments of shallow symbolism fly all over the place and have to be carefully swept and vacuumed up. The goose ends up in twenty-six grabbable pieces and can probably be glued back together. Maybe if I leave a few pieces missing I can drink champagne out of it.
Above: Photo by Laura, 2006.
Said the Budgie to the Pigeon:
“You seem plagued by indecidgeon.”
Said the Pigeon to the Budgie:
“How’d this statue get so sludgy?”
Said the Puffin to the Penguin:
“Your complexion’s quite exsenguine.”
Said the Penguin to the Puffin:
“Fuckin freezin; fanks for nuffin.”
Said the Auk to Mr. Dodo:
“You looked thinner in your photo.”
Mr. Dodo to the Auk:
“This extinction gig’s a crock.”
Said the nugget to the frittata:
“Why I oughta … !”
Said the frittata to the nugget:
“Fuggit.”
Annie Dillard, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”:
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need … We can stage our own act on the planet — build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils — but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds. We can only witness them — whoever they are.
This passage has been stuck in my mind for years, and seems to come back to me all the time during the warm months, whenever I hear birds chirping outside our windows or see robins hopping around on downtown lawns. Why don’t we eat them?
Kafka: A cage went in search of a bird.
We eat dinner at a restaurant decorated with dozens of bird cages hanging from the cathedral ceiling. The cages are empty and illuminated from inside, casting light up through the bars to the ceiling and returning an ambient glow down over the dimly-lit dining room. It is an attractive effect, but the sight of this profusion of birdless bird cages becomes unbearably funny poignant eerie after about five minutes and a cocktail. “Oh my god … all the birds have escaped!” “Shhh! They’re in the kitchen!” (Mine were served tastily in a lagoon of tamarind sauce with a side of sticky rice.)
Follow-up to Keats’s guerdon-givin’ bee: Old Crow Medicine Show, “Hard to Love”:
Well I wish I was a pretty little bird! I wish I was a pretty little bee-EEEEEEEEEE!
Canadian girls resemble birds. As a general rule. I absolutely do not mean this in a bad way. It is just that throughout my travels to Canada, whilst milling about in stores and streets and shopping malls and restaurants, being immersed in the public, and sort of osmotically taking in in aggregate the faces of passersby — and gradually becoming plagued by a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that there was in fact some elusive differentiating quality in how everyone there looked, along the lines of the way young faces from old photographs look subtly different from young faces now — I have observed and encountered an initially-disproportionate-seeming number of local females (of all ages, body types, and ethnic backgrounds) whose facial features strike me as tending toward the vaguely avian: thin-bridged whittled-sharp noses, tapered teardrop chins, elegantly wide-spaced eyes kept ever alert and chillingly limpid, a downward angularity to the lips and mouth that seems both demure and predatory (and/or both pouty and anatine), poised jawlines, raptorially-arched eyebrows, graceful curving necks, etc., and overall an abiding sense of facial streamlining, as though the skin and hair and dainty bird-bones had all been sculpted and drawn backward just ever so slightly in response to high-speed wind- and water-resistance; so that although you don’t actually see the beaks and bills and feathers and crests, your mind just subliminally fills them in for you. // I am confident that this assessment is hardly a revelation. Canadian girls know it and are proud of it. It certainly explains the popularity of the 2000 hit single “I’m Like a Bird”, by Canadian pop star Nelly Furtado, who is about as uncannily birdlike of face as one could dream of this side of Charles Le Brun. // (I am, perhaps judiciously, having a bit more difficulty discerning any sort of consistent character to the faces of Canadian males, other than that there’s an unsurprising prevalence of likenesses to scrappy woodland mammals.)
