Goats with Torches on Their Horns Walk Down a Hillside

I was down in Campbell today (for work) and finished up at the very moment when traffic was the worst. As is my habit when traffic-stranded in communities I rarely visit, I took advantage of the area and found the downtown - which, in this case, was kind of cute and historical - and have dinner. IF I am lucky, there's a used bookstore somewhere nearby, which, in this case, there was. (In the last two weeks, I've discovered three fantastic used bookstores, from San Jose to Santa Rosa, doing this very same thing).

I always carry a New Yorker with me, as Emergency Solo Dining Material, and this evening, while enjoying my Cuban enchiladas with plantains al fresco, one of the articles struck me. It was one of the short mini-articles ("Talk of the Town") about the avant-garde Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis, whose "music" (I gather it's atonal or noise-based) is re-created, like dancers recreate great Balanchine dances, by avant-garde up & comers.

This particular article was about the Make Music New York festival, and the difficulty of putting on this particular percussion piece which is required to be performed on the water, meaning all of the six drummers would need individual floats or boats or whatever, and the audience themselves would need to arrive early to be rowed out to the center of the whatever body of water was used. It's one of those things that sounds kinda of complicated, but then once you start trying to arrange it, you realize it's way more complicated to do than it seems. The article was about the perseverance of the founder & president of the festival, and his dedication to the artist.

At the end of the article, he says this (and I quote):

I've learned a lot more about Xenakis's other projects...He has another one involving goats that walk down a hillside, and the goats have torches on their horns....So, if this goes well, we want to do the goats with torches on the Great Lawn next year."

Well, that is something I'd like to see, because I can't even really visualize it. How do you get the goats to walk in a particular direction? Won't they be freaked by the torches on their horns? If they run amok, isn't that dangerous for audience members and the other goats? And HOW is this a music piece, by a composer? The entire thing sounds very suspicious to me. But...it provides me with a strange sort of comfort - like, I'm glad someone is out there, doing things like this, making it weird for the rest of us.

The next "Talk of the Town" bit was about a librarian at the NY Public Library, whose specialty is marginalia. I've always associated that word with metaphorical marginalia - as when we say "it's marginal," like trivia - we say "that's trivial" but I don't associate it with actual trivia. But this women actually studies what famous people have written in the margins of their books. It's no joke. It's a field of serious study.

And what DO famous people write in the margins of books? Mostly criticism, as it turns out. Mark Twain was apparently a prolific marginaliaest (?), commenting so much sometimes, he had to turn corners and continue upside down. Nabokov, who was not just a writer but a professor of literature, actually gave grades - in his copy of a New Yorker short story anthology, he wrote each grade in the table of contents, next to the story title. I guess he was pretty tough, because he only gave two stories an A+, a J.D. Salinger story, and one by...well, Nabokov.

After all these literary ramblings, I went over to the used bookstore I had just discovered, and was baffled by the bizarre preponderance of cat-related signs, all about this cat named Bob. Please don't pet Bob. Don't feed Bob. Don't eat food around Bob. Do not drink near Bob. These signs were everywhere - not just in one place, and this was a really large used bookstore, not one of those nooks & cranny affairs. Apparently, Bob was not a shy cat. He gets around.

I went to the bathroom, and was confronted with a whole new host of signs: "Don't leave the bathroom door open because Bob will stick his big fat head in the toilet." That is exactly what it said. Signs on the stereo explained that Bob had sprayed here. Shut all the doors. Keep away from Bob.

As I left the bathroom, I saw Bob, crouching near his bowl. His head was proportionate to his body, and not especially fat. He didn't look nearly as neurotic or threatening as I'd been led to believe. He came up to me, practically begging to be petted, but I was intimidated by the "Don't touch Bob!" signs. I left, and seconds later when I rounded the corner farthest from the bathroom, there, inexplicably, was Bob, laying the sun, as though he had been napping.

I got the hell out of there.