Overnight it began to rain, and now what's falling is a mix of rain and snow: was I cold because humidity was on the rise? Could I ever manage New England damp heat and moist cold again? Why, if humidity makes heat feel hotter, does it also make cold feel colder, and what is the middle point of humidity and temperature when the former doesn't exacerbate the latter? (Whee! This shows the relation in warmer temperatures, and this site claims that the midpoint is 53F.)
Lovely, lovely spring snow, with higher water content than winter snow. Big flakes, though, and the ground is far too warm for any accumulation. But I've been awake for about three years now and the precipitation has been steady for several hours: a good drink for the trees, I hope.
Louis Menand is a learned pleasure to listen to, like John Leonard; in the audiobook's favor is that the difficulty of rereading passages and taking notes means that I do not feel obliged to, unlike Leonard (whom I am reading on paper). Menand discusses The New Yorker, Hustler, Rolling Stone, Laurie Anderson, Oliver Wendell Homes, Richard Wright, and godfuckingdamnit, when I just checked the table of contents at Amazon, I discovered that, contrary to Audible.com's claim, their production is abridged, even though it's listed as not: I didn't get chapters on William James, Pauline Kael, or Christopher Lasch, not that I know who the latter two are but that's why I listen to and read books, to learn who they are. Also missing: T.S. Eliot, William Paley, Al Gore, and Maya Angelou.
I am really pissed at Audible.com right now, because earlier today I downloaded the first half of Nancy Mitford's biography The Sun King, available in the 2nd best format, and got an obviously lesser quality production of someone else's brief biography of Louis XIV. Its customer support sucks donkey balls too.
Which has nothing to do with Menand. The reason I like him and John Leonard is that they are cultural as well as literary critics, putting people and books into context (Arthur Koestler slept with Mary McCarthy? Laurie Anderson majored in sculpture?) and drawing (what would have seemed to me) unlikely but (now, in their hands) insightful parallels.
Blake is far too wise to expend effort on flapping when perching on a hand that suddenly drops from over the head to below the waist, so I have introduced a wobble to the descending hand. A wobble is the one physical correction with which one is allowed to discipline a parrot: a wobble distracts the bird from its naughtiness by forcing it to focus instead on its balance. A wobble forces a flap, and a flap is the beginning of flapping, but I don't want Blake to think being flapped is a punishment just because being wobbled is a correction. I don't expect him to enjoy it much, and there are other things he submits to without reacting to them as a punishment, like having his sticky beak wiped before he feaks corn niblets onto a sleeve, or having his talons clipped, or being wrapped in a paper towel after a shower and before the blow-drying. His corrections are minor, like wobbling or a sharp noise (a clap to startle him out of nibbling something he shouldn't), or major, like time-outs either in the cage or in the cage covered up in the bathroom in the dark.
Flapped he must be, whether or not he enjoys it. Currently, after flappage and half a segment of orange and shoelace destruction, he is on my foot (I am stretched out on the recliner) and while I cannot (or choose not to) force him to cease the foot-worship, I can, by wiggling my foot, wobble him enough that he cannot indulge in the incestuous behavior he would prefer foot-worship to lead to.
I should just hire a surrogate: "Look, you're no relation to my bird, so if you just would sit in this chair for a quarter hour--want to call your family? read the paper? eat a sandwich?--and let my parrot court and seduce your feet, singing to them and, uh, rubbing them with his cloaca, I'll give you a sawbuck."
But bestiality is illegal.
He is also wise enough readily to distinguish between what he may nibble on and what he may not and to prefer the latter. I commonly will leave a blowcard sticking out of the pages of my book, or a Post-It clinging to its cover, so that Blake can shred allowable paper. Invariably, however, he prefers the book's actual pages, which unlike its dustjacket cannot be removed. This evening, for instance, we are in the chair with the tome Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and while it would be more comfortable for me to place the book in my lap, I am holding it in one hand because Blake clamored for it (rather than the temptingly crisp and substantial blowcard or the snappable catalog paper) when it was so readily accessible, and now that he has left my feet he is on my forearm, ready to snooze, and I would rather strain my wrist holding the book in an unnatural position than disturb his, he should pardon the term, catnap.
Between the flapping and the foot-serenading, he perched on my knee while I did bicycle crunches: more balancing for him. Perhaps there are human-parrot core-strength exercise classes, with a lot of focus on balance. That class I took at 24-Hour Fitness, wobbling on half a sphere while doing squats etc., was eleventy times harder than doing squats etc. on a stable surface. Surely flapping can be integrated into such exertions.
And now he is on my right shoulder, chewing his beak, tickling under my ear with his crest. I cannot quite conceive how I ever equated the sound of beak-grooming with that of nails on a chalkboard. Quite evidently, now my conversion to the cockatielside is compleat. Sic. Doesn't Darth Vader's crisp final t make the obsolete spelling seem appropriate?