Dog Treads Lightly on the Day

Jewels in the trees
the asphalt glazed with ice

Dog treads lightly
on this world

Even his breath, soft
white cumulus huffs

is beautiful. Above,
four crows in one tree

squawk at seven crows
in the adjacent tree. Dog

gives them a look. “Chill,”
it says, “chill.” The day

is clear as ice, sharp
as glass.

Google Books vs Pierre Bourdieu

For anyone wishing to read an excellent description and forecast for Google Books (is it really going to evolve into the world's largest book business?) check out the article Google & Books by Robert Darnton, director of Harvard's Library, in the February 12 New York Review of Books.

Bail Out the Book Industry

Katha Pollitt's column makes a lot of sense, and good reading. Check it out.

Brave New World

Having just finished Huxley's disturbing dystopic masterpiece Brave New World, and then getting a moderate dose of Superbowl commercials, it seems we are devolving toward a similar future. Commercial (late capitalistic) America utilizes continual messaging (subliminal and not) that defines what a man and a woman in this culture should be. The picture is not pretty. Approved = young, perfectly formed/great looking (although remarkably similar in appearance), superficial, happy, consumptive, addicted to tactile pleasures; Disapproved = introspective/thoughtful, passionate, compassionate, diseased, frugal (or poor), different. While we are still a long way from the Contolled production of genotypes and slaves, there is a path blazed.

Dog and Space-Time

Dog intuitively understands Einstein’s concept
of space-time. There is a round

space contained by the hard plastic bowl
and it takes time before it is filled

with crunchies. Too much time, usually.
When a shadow passes over the bowl

the hole of it turns black, and if crunchies arrive
then they are swallowed up. Once a worm

was wriggling in the bowl, though it’s usually
slugs. Dog yawns and wonders fleetingly

how long it will take this event to reach Alpha
Centauri. He wonders if it will bend

along the way. But largely he wonders
when master will get his scrawny butt

home and fill the bowl again.

Dog and the New Day

Dog stands at the entrance of the new day.
Infinite it stretches.

Successive silent shivers ripple through his body
though he sits still as a statue.

Dog inhales deeply the rarified air, every fiber
of his body alert. The scent of so many things –

the little poodle, the fat beagle, automobile
exhaust, bacon frying, the cold pure mountains of the north,

the nether reaches of inner and outer
space. Dog’s body tenses – electrical stimuli sent

via his olfactory nerves through his mighty brain to triggers
in the soleus, quadricepts, gastrocnemius, intensifying,

swarming, starting to surge. Hunching
invisibly, Dog leaps forward, legs stretching

into the impossibly clear biting air,
legs flashing, pounding the asphalt, head

raised, open to the world until
GACK!!! the choke collar sets and stops him cold.

Dog flips head over tail
nearly taking the master (caught staring at clouds as usual)

out with him. Staring up from the pavement Dog
gags, tongue lolling out the side

of his mouth and thinks the day
does not look so infinite anymore.

Patrick McGoohan Dead

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My childhood robbed not only of Santa Clause, but now The Prisoner. Life is SO unfair.