July 24, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: Moi is working all day today, and I’m working alone tonight. Decide to take Mway out in the morning, before the heat and possible thunderstorms of the afternoon. It’s 10:42. Yesterday Steve Gray Wolf came to the house to look at the possibility of painting the high part of the side of our house. He said he’s extremely allergic to poison ivy and that we’d have to pull all of it out of the flower beds (more properly called “weed” beds) before he could paint. Usually once a summer I pull down any poison ivy vines that have started creeping up the side of the house, and I clip the leaves of any poison ivy I see, but to pull it out, to dig down in the ground and pull out the root system, is a major undertaking, and Moi and I haven’t discussed the matter. While we’re out looking at the side of the house, I see two curly dock plants (Moi has to remind me of the name) that are each about 4 feet high. Steve has never seen curly dock (a common lawn weed) at that height. “All our plants grow to their maximum heights,” Moi boasts.
State of the Path: Out in the lawn I see a black-capped chickadee fly from the grass into the mulberry tree. I haven’t been mentioning birds too much lately, mainly because they’ve been usually hidden in trees. I call this bird a chickadee, but, after looking through Audubon, I think it looks more like a black-throated sparrow, and I would say it was a black-throated sparrow, except that Audubon says this is a bird of the arid Southwest. Near the walled garden, I spot another bull thistle along the path; the one deeper in the weeds has sprouted fuzzy seeds. Along the old orchard, I see a hollow in the trunk of a black walnut tree, and I poke the “pro-quality” stick into it. A monarch butterfly (though it could be a viceroy) sails by the back hedgerow. I didn’t bring along the clippers, but I pull up a goldenrod or three or four as I walk along; still have to wade through them at the end of the side path. Down at the wigwams, I spot one of the purple wildflowers I’ve been trying to identify, and along the creek, I see some new yellow flowers. I don’t feel like trying to identify them today, and, anyway, I think they might be St. johnswort. Some sort of mammal with bright brown fur scoots ahead of us along the creek – I don’t know what it is; Mway doesn’t see it, but catches its scent after it’s gone. Along the ridge, I go to look at the purple wildflowers again. It angers me that I don’t know what these are, because I remember seeing them in years past. Beyond what I described yesterday, I note that these plants have reddish stems, and reddish veins down the center of its leaves. Just before the strawberry patch, a bird in a maple tree scolds me with an obscene sucking sound. Is it a catbird? I don’t know what it is, and I can’t see any bird when I look up in the tree.
State of the Creek: The pools of water are shrinking; what water used to be lying below the big locusts is now gone; the rock beds are dry again. The fungus on the log at the log jam has fallen off or shriveled up.
The Fetch: No messing around today – just one fetch. (But, after all, Moi already took her out this morning.)
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James Joyce’s Ulysses: My Obsession – Why? by M.
Continued from July 23.
But again – it is the hunt that matters, not just its winnings. Remember that for a dog a word is a scent,* which promises the reward of an object, but is also a delight in itself, and a greater delight the longer the reward is delayed. In Dublin there is much the dog smells and doesn’t understand, passages that lead into clutching thorns, entire sections of the city she can’t enter because the ivy forms an impenetrable hedge. But she is used to this, and wallows in it, her snout to the ground wending through lush verbosity until what is this she sniffs an Oxtail? and now a skittish heifer? with beef to the heel? a platter of tripes? a Kerry cow to be butchered or slaughtered? brood beasts, springers, greasy hoggets and wether wools? a bull by the horns? a bull that’s Irish? an Irish bull in an English chinashop? a bullseye into the bargain? until, her hackles raised, blood pumping, barker in throat, she stands face to face with a plumper and portlier bull never shit on a shamrock, with horns galore and a coat of a gold, and’s so excited she hardly knows what to do but start circling him and circling him over and over again.
This is amazing. For as little as Dublin advertises itself as an amusement park for dogs, or advertises itself at all, the mysterious lama who never shows himself in the city has an unerring instinct for having buried within its tangles certain treasures such as this, certain things, or activities regardless of the creature who performs them, that dogs find especially appealing and intriguing. Consider the following passage, arguably the climax, the biggest booty, of the novel, which the ideal reader suddenly stumbles upon after traipsing around a shrubseized mound of boulders:
Were they indefinitely inactive?
At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition…
Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
Or consider all the peripatetic movement, the many sheer noseprodded noseprodding stirrings:
I’m ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door….Turning, he scanned the south shore, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets….Lord, is he going to attack me?....He crossed Townsend street, passed the frowning face of Bethel….He turned Combridge’s corner….He came out into the clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!....You’re in Dawson street, Mr. Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite. Do you want to cross?.....Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles Street, past Sewell’s yard. Behind him Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell with stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith’s house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square….Tap. Tap. Tap….Waaaaaaalk….Rrr….Rrrrrrsss….Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap…..Rrrrrr….Prrprr. Must be the bur. Fff. Oo. Pprrpffrrppfff….After him, Garry! After him, boy! And the last we saw of him was the bloody car rounding the corner and old sheepface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb….
*And a sentence a patch of weeds, a paragraph an area of scrub, a chapter an entire field left to the raccoons, and a novel about seven acres of property reverting to a wondrous fecund Edenland.
Or consider, after all this stirring, this so eventful day of looking probing searching exploring, the wonderful repose that comes at night, when Bloom and Molly lie together in bed, heads at opposite ends – exactly in a manner more likely for a dog and her mistress – and reflect at length upon the joys of eating the next morning several roc’s auk’s eggs:
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan…. [etc. etc. etc.]
Even the most baffling artifacts of Dublin -- Stephen’s spooky discussion of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the National Library, the windy wit in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal and Evening Telegraph, Bloom’s explanation to Molly of the meaning of “metempsychosis,” the conversations and contraptions attendant upon Paddy Dignam’s funeral and Mina Purefoy’s labor, the hoopla behind the letters from Blazes Boylan and Martha Clifford – what are these things to a dog but, along with the apparitions of hags in Nighttown, the appearances of things a dog doesn’t quite understand, the shadow of a hawk flying overhead, a distant rumble in the middle of the night, the crack of a tree branch when there’s no animal around – unimportant unreal things which the dog gets quite excited about anyhow? M.
Continued to July 25.
Heat wave roasts East Coast, cooler temps on way
By CHRIS HAWLEY - Associated Press | AP – 7 hrs ago
NEW YORK (AP) — A heat wave scorched the East Coast with another day of triple-digit temperatures on Saturday, forcing power authorities to throttle back the voltage to protect straining electrical grids as residents cranked up the air.
Temperatures reached 105 degrees in Atlantic City, N.J.; 104 in Trenton, N.J.; 103 in Norfolk, Va.; 102 in Baltimore, Newark, N.J., and at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and New York's Kennedy Airport; and 101 in Philadelphia, but humidity made it feel hotter most places across the region….
In south-central Pennsylvania, authorities said a 63-year-old man in York died Friday of hyperthermia, or overheating, in an unventilated apartment where the temperature had reached 110 degrees. A 94-year-old man in Carroll Township also died after his air conditioner stopped working because of a tripped circuit breaker.
On Saturday morning, commuter trains were packed as thousands of New Yorkers headed to beaches on Long Island or New Jersey. Four city beaches were under a pollution warning after a fire earlier in the week at a wastewater plant forced officials to dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Hudson River.
About 10,000 customers remained without power in New York City and its suburbs, and about 9,000 in New Jersey, after parts of the region's electrical network failed. Power utility Con Edison said it was reducing the voltage in 69 other New York neighborhoods to ease the load caused by thousands of air conditioners.
City officials said water usage had soared as New Yorkers tried to keep cool. On Saturday, it hovered around 1.5 billion gallons a day, about 50 percent higher than normal, said Environmental Protection Commissioner Cas Holloway.
In Manhattan, taxi driver Egor Targon said his business was booming because people didn't want to walk in the heat. Still, he took Friday off, when temperatures crept up to 104, and went to the beach in New Jersey….
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