Most of the time they'd start fights over a glance. In the land of the Camorra a look is a question of territory; it's an invasion of one's private space, like breaking down the door and violently entering someone's home. A look is something more than an insult. To stare someone in the face for too long is already somehow an open challenge.
The first 50 or so pages are pretty heavy on the "here's what happened last time, here's the rules for vampires in this world" stuff. But when Pitt's new mission is revealed, I found myself sitting deeper in the couch and settling in. Keen to see where this takes us.
Yerkes designed a multiple choice system in which different species could be challenged with the same task. This involved finding a food reward hidden in a line of identical stalls set up in a row. The object was to find the right stall in the least number of trials. The test was repeated 40 times, and went on each time until the reward was claimed.
All that was simple enough, but there were complications. The reward was put in a different stall at the end of each set of 10 tests, moving say from 'the first stall on the right' to 'the second stall on the left'. And one or more stalls were locked and taken out of play in a pattern which changed with every test, so that subjects had to make a mental shift from 'the second stall on the left' to 'the second available stall on the ...
There are, of course, wide variations in the degrees of shortening, broadening, flattening and tailoring, depending on the domestic stock. But there is one key feature that immediately identifies any given pig as domestic, something no wild pig or peccary ever has — a curly tail. If it is curly, it is man-made, a tell-tail.
The long tails of most wild pigs are expressive — in the warthog, very expressive. They can be twitched and curved or held out away from the body to express arousal or to punctuate sexual and threatening postures. Most wild pigs use them in this way, and some domestic pigs still retain some capacity to wag or stretch their apologetic remnants a little. But tails are now passé, behind the times. They are, in the words of veteran hog-watcher William Hedgepeth, "thin, shabby, disproportionate appendages which seem to be fixed to hogs only because hogs are animals ...
As if this [warts and tusks] were not insult enough, warthogs are also adorned with sets of long, stiff bristles on their cheeks and brows that make them look a little idiotic, like badly barbered country bumpkins. All of which would seem guaranteed to justify their description as "hideous", were it not for the fact that the hog itself looks out across this facial wasteland with bright, almost amused expression in its eyes that turns the whole grotesque effect into a carnival mask worn by a very pretty pig.
Carita is getting annoyed because I keep reading passages to her. It is a fascinating book, moving easily between biological and cultural explanations and a memoir. I'm hooked.
I'm re-reading Watchmen ahead of the film's release. This time I'm following along with The Annotated Watchmen.
Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.