Currently reading:: Iflife, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, Masterpieces of Japanese Poetry Ancient and Modern, GEB

I’ve just had my first full flicker of a fundamental philosophical difference between myself and Douglas Hofstadter, circa page 99, but I’ll do both of us the courtesy of finishing out the book. Despite some relatively small grievances with the book’s approach to the visual arts and my newly-emergent qualms, GEB is weighty with potential. Only sometimes as I’m reading, my mind rolls over laughing with the silliness of it all, the fruitlessness of our intellectual pursuits (when they’re undertaken with any heartfelt seriousness), and the idiotic delights that come with embracing and even welcoming disjunction, incoherence, meaninglessness, and all those other mysterious little irksome bits and bobs of reality that poetry, in its infinite grace and stupidity, takes as among its most central and hallowed subjects.

In ornithological news, I’ve been wasting vast amounts of time compiling mallard, Canada goose, and barn swallow trivia. Those are the birds I’ve seen most often in recent months, though there are the usual starlings, and in the last couple of days, I spotted an American Goldfinch and what seemed in the distance to be a Great Egret. How lazily it flew, but then, so would you if you had to carry along those unwieldy black legs.

Mallards only mate for a season, and the hens are preyed on more often than the males, apparently for the simple reason that they’re often surprised while incubating their eggs in the nest. If approached by a predator, the hen is more likely to abandon a clutch than fight. This is in contrast to the Canada geese, who mate for life (except in the case of the death of one or the other) and confront any potential predators that approach. They begin with hissing, which increases in vigor as they become more alarmed, and they will charge or rush an opponent if necessary. Generally the geese I’ve been playing with are friendly and will take food out of my hand—that is, if they happen to be a non-breeding pair. The pairs with goslings are much more wary, often hissing and eating the food I’ve just given them all at the same time. Jerks. I’m surprised at how close they’ve allowed me to come to the goslings, all of which look and sound like tiny peeping fuzzdinosaurs. The goslings seem to stay more close to the female, while the male (at least the one I take to be the male—in spite of there being no difference in appearance between the sexes, one bird always seems a bit larger to me) stands at a slight distance, watching. He will charge and attack other pairs of geese; on Monday, a friend and I watched as an attack took place in the water. The assailant sat ‘piggyback’ on top of the other goose, which remained under the water for about 15-20 seconds before breaking the surface much farther away. Goose submarine. But back to the mallards. I happened to read, probably on wikipedia, that the breed has a higher incidence of homosexuality than other species, and that forced couplings, both within a breeding pair and without, are not uncommon. Which was interesting to me, in light of an article I read a week or so ago in the New York Times about the sexual anatomy of waterfowl. According to the article, in species where forced couplings are more prevalent, the female has often developed an intricate multi-chamber oviduct in order to ward off unwanted sperm. In response to this biological development, the gander has developed a phallus shaped something like a corkscrew, which waxes as breeding season comes on and then disappears when not needed, all so that he has a better chance of getting round the twists and turns of the hen’s oviduct. Everything, all of it, in the pursuit of—see earlier, ‘silliness of it all.’