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.

Photo taken from my window, zoomed in substantially, cropped with reluctance.

Above: Rubble. A long reach excavator with a big fat chomping robot claw has been slowly demolishing parts of this derelict eight-story brick building across the street from us. Here on the west face of the Hotel Fantod we get to observe this spectacle up close. Lean out the window a bit and one may watch, hear, and savor the bouquets of the resultant dust clouds as the claw meticulously eats each section of the building one floor at a time, releasing great thundering showers of crumbled brick and concrete blocks and rusty-looking girders and roughly several hundred million billion petrified rat corpses all over the debris-strewn ground below.

I guess I disapprove of the demolition — I’m told, persuasively, that it would’ve been better for the city had the building been converted into lofts (as was done with the Hotel Fantod) — but I’m not exactly shedding tears over the loss of the building, a former federal-government hellhole where tax-department drones of yesteryear slaved away at their lead-and-asbestos desks. I’ve only ever known the building as an old, ugly, long-abandoned embarrassment taking up space in the downtown core. It is an eyesore. A reptilian local developer with a comic-book-villain name is knocking it down to build some sort of new and even worse eyesore. And of course the long process of knocking-down and building-back-up will enliven the downtown area with plenty of interim eyesoreness to tide us over. The sort of thing Ogden Nash refers to in “Paradise for Sale” as: This manic, fulminating ruction / Of demolition and construction.

Ogden Nash, “The Germ”:

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.

Monday my annual episode of illness arrives. A stomach bug. Never had one before. Now I know. The bug loses no time grinding me under its great big pathogenic boot heel. That Monday is a lost day, a day of half-awake blanket-wrapped couch convalescence and just about zero higher brain function. Not in the mood for reading, music, movies, any of the standard sick-day comfort media. Only a brief fit of internet — symptom-surfing, of course, to make sure I haven’t got the Helsinkian Pig-Dog Lurgy or something. I subsist on a diet of water. With tentative forays into Gatorade, tonic water, Banana Scream protein mix, and powder-packet bird broth.

Tuesday the bug has departed, I’m mostly better, back to work, dining on bread and soup and Saltines. Laura brings home bottles of vitamin water, which taste of delicious health. I appreciate that the label copy on this one Canadian raspberry-apple vitamin-water bottle ends with Pull it together, friend. (On the French side of the label: Reviens sur terre, mon ami. Come back to earth.)

Anne Carson, “Short Talks: Introduction”:

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Ogden Nash, “Put Back Those Whiskers, I Know You”:

There is one fault I must find with the twentieth century,
And I’ll put it in a couple of words: Too adventury.
What’d I like would be some nice dull monotony
If anyone’s gotony.

Ogden Nash, “Lines Fraught with Naught But Thought”:

Descartes was one of the few who think, therefore they are,

Because those who don’t think, but are anyhow, outnumber them by far.

If of chaos we are on the brink

It is because so many people only think that they think.

In truth, of anything other than thinking they are fonder,

Because thought requires the time and effort to reflect, cogitate, contemplate, meditate, ruminate and ponder.

Their minds are exposed to events and ideas but they have never pondered or reflected on them

Any more than motion picture screens meditate on the images that are projected on them.

Shakespeare:

There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a willful stillness entertain
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,
As who should say, “I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!”

Ambrose Bierce:

We know by one’s reading
His learning and breeding;
By what draws his laughter
We know his Hereafter.
Read nothing, laugh never —
The Sphinx was less clever!

Ogden Nash:

I shall pronounce with profundity
Judgments solemn and pundity,
Steal quotations from Bartlett’s
To impress nymphets and tartlets,
And interpret Kafka
To the rifka and rafka.

Some sloth-texts: Flanders and Swann, in the old pronunciation slowth:

For days and days among the trees
I sleep and dream and doze,
Just gently swaying in the breeze
Suspended by my toes;

While eager beavers overhead
Rush through the undergrowth,
I watch the clouds beneath my feet …
How sweet to be a Sloth!

Ogden Nash on same:

Said the slothful tree toad to the three-toed sloth,
Is it true you are lazy enough for us both?
I don’t bother to scratch even when mosquitoed,
Said the three-toed sloth to the slothful tree toad.

I like Roethke’s take:

In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his ear;
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird)
He will assume that you have Heard —

Film-geek/lit-geek awesomeness: Slate’s movie critic Dana Stevens writes her review of Beowulf in Old-English-style alliterative verse. (Albeit sans caesurae, mostly.)

Lo! Let this humble scribe unlock her word-hoard
To tell of great Zemeckis, he of Gump
And Contact, Back to th’ Future, Cast Away.
He, stone-romancer, framer of Roger Rabbit,
Hollywood myth-molder, box-office bard.

In the antepenultimate stanza she refers to Beowulf as “The ’Wulf”. Great minds!

Also: I like that she quotes Ogden Nash while discussing Daniel Craig naked:

… Daniel Craig’s body is truly something to behold. He’s ripped without being the least bit muscle-bound and possessed of a coiled, catlike grace that’s atypical for an action star. Like Uma Thurman, he’s somehow athletic and delicate at the same time. Craig’s naked body, which is partly, if not fully, on view in virtually every movie he’s made, puts me in mind of a great couplet from Ogden Nash: “Should you behold a panther crouch/ Prepare to say ouch.”