Pleasure before obedience

Blazing hot Saturday morning in the granite mountains. I’m sitting at my writing desk  slurping up a raw carrot smoothie and feeling relieved that I haven’t  ever had much to do with fizzy  and sugary carbonated drinks (each single can of Coca-Cola has nine  spoonfuls of  sugar in it).  Streaming online this morning are thousands of PDF tributes to  Aaron Swartz,  free copies of research work uploaded to the Internet by  researchers all around the globe. I’m not even going to begin to try and  figure out the  ethical aspects of  this, what it might mean for  copyright-protected academic peer journals, or for the freedom of knowledge and benefits for  Third World  scholars excluded by  academic  paywalls, or  what might happen as regards plagiarism. It just seems to me, as I sit here slurping up blended carrot, celery and  orange juice, that the world  I live in is changing faster than the speed of light.

Hambe  kahle Aaron, as we say here to someone we will miss and  who died far too young and unnecessarily, goodbye and travel well .

 

Housemate,  rushing through the house on her way to another patient: What calm and  well-behaved dogs we have! Not a peep out of them. Good dogs!

Mary: They’re not good dogs, they’re just asleep.

But  of course they are good dogs, loved and cared for,  indulged and  petted and  trained to  do just enough to get their own  way on most occasions.

 

To the Quarry and Back

by Katia  Kapovich

White hail pelting the frozen bog,

I’m stuck in the first line of January,

following my host’s dog

on his walk through the stone century,

around the quarry, slices of marble and mud,

past a herd of miners exhaling smoke,

past a barn smelling of merde,

and back to where I’m stuck and broke.

The fucking dog barks at the night,

mad at the stars all his life and then again.

I rethink kicking him out,

but being cool, I let him in.

Useful word for which there is no English equivalent found somewhere on a gone-viral site of the expanding web universe:

Tartle (Scots)
The nearly onomatopoeic word for that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

I’ve forgotten her name, the visitor. Lucille? Lorraine? Lucie Mae? This afternoon, a  Great Dane breeder is  coming on a visit to admire the big dog. I hope he gets up off his rug long enough to say hello — well, he will because he is a very friendly and sociable  dog,  often wildly excited to see his admirers approaching the gate shouting his name. Such a joyful  dog. Alice Ostriker puts it so exactly:

 

As if there could be a world

Of absolute innocence

In which we forget ourselves

The owners throw sticks

And half-bald tennis balls

Toward the surf

And the happy dogs leap after them

As if catapulted—

Black dogs, tan dogs,

Tubes of glorious muscle—

Pursuing pleasure

More than obedience

They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand,

Sometimes they’ll plunge straight into

The foaming breakers

Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence

Toss them, until they snap and sink

Teeth into floating wood

Then bound back to their owners

Shining wet, with passionate speed

For nothing,

For absolutely nothing but joy.

 

 

About these ads