Birds, husbands, photocopiers
Hey all, hope you’re doing okay! Today I have a great bird to show you, plus a weird camel and some very neat photocopier art.
KINDLE DAILY DEAL
But first, just quickly: The Husbands is today’s Kindle Daily Deal in the UK, which means it’s 99p till midnight. If you’ve been thinking about getting the ebook now would be an AMAZING time! If you have friends you think might like the book it would be incredible if you could tell them - it’s currently the second-ranking book in the UK kindle store(!!!!) and it would be so neat to keep that going for as many hours in this weird deal day as possible:
BIRD REPORT
Okay, onto general business! Yesterday I went to the zoo for a bit of research (maybe it’ll turn into a project, maybe not, we’ll see). And an adolescent scarlet ibis in one of the walk-through aviaries took a real liking to my shoelaces and leaf-patterned jacket. “It’s okay,” a zookeeper told me as his long beak arced towards me, “it’s just like someone prodding you with chopsticks,” and she was right. He kept it up for a good few minutes, admittedly, which is longer than people usually spend prodding me with chopsticks.
I loved being pecked by the weird bird, obviously. It’s great, isn’t it, how an animal’s momentary attention can make you feel special. A friend’s cat rubs your leg instead of someone else’s. A horse ambles towards you and looks at you over the fence. After the bird pecked me I thought about Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s piece at the Barbican back in 2010, where finches filled the Curve gallery, perching on guitars and plucking at the strings and sometimes landing on a visitor’s hat. As I recall that was all anyone talked about, really, did one of the birds land on you, who did they land on instead, how close did they get, were you one of the chosen. When I went I wore a straw hat with the secret hope that the finches would view it as nesting material, but it didn’t interest them.
If a finch lands on you or a teenage scarlet ibis tries to eat your skirt that means, really, that you have the most enticing hat and/or skirt in its immediate vicinity but it feels like it means something special. A ringing endorsement of you as a person. The animals don’t know your job, your relationship status, do other people consider you successful or charming or attractive or thoughtful, did you spill a coffee on yourself this morning, were you late meeting your friend, are you behind on your Duolingo. Surely, then, they chose you because they saw through to your essential self and in some way deemed you worthy. Dogs can always tell. No they can’t! Of course they can’t! We all know they can’t! Plenty of cruel and malicious people have dogs that love them! But a dog’s system of judgement is so askew from the standard social systems that it feels like they must be seeing through to some sort of essential self. Anyway, good ibis, good pecking experience.
SIGNS
Another thing that’s always interesting to me in zoos is the signs they put up to stop people worrying about the animals. It’s often camels. Don’t worry, I’m meant to look like this! A wilting hump, a moulting coat. It’s normal. It’s okay!
READING REPORT
Okay, here’s some stuff I’ve enjoyed reading so far this week:
Sarah Brin on what to do about museums (“we need to let some organizations die and build something new”)
This metafilter post on “Consider the Consequences”, a 1930(!!) forerunner of Choose Your Own Adventure books (now playable online)
Bruno Munari’s 1970 Xerografia: Documentazione sull’uso creativo delle macchine Rank Xerox (pdf) - basically a visual essay about messing around with a photocopier and figuring out what you can do with it creatively. In Italian, but mostly pictures, and really neat.
Right, have a nice day! And maybe buy my book for a pound!
Holly