Quipu Read Online Free PDF

indigenous hikes. Ray Finlay finds this strikingly apt.
    “We’re still having a bit of bother with the O.B. van,” the director tells him soothingly. “I do apologize for not getting you chappies a little drinkie, but we don’t want you sloshed before the actual event.” She laughs and holds Ray’s biceps.
    “Isn’t it going to be rather contrasty? I was expecting something indoors, to tell you the—”
    “Relaxed and outdoorsy is what we’re aiming at. We’ve had a fair bit of experience with sporting functions.”
    “Quite.
    The ABC crew stagger about with wires, cables, conduits, television cameras and make-up kits. His own face has been lightly powdered. Joseph shambles out of the lavatory, looking like a clown.
    “I’m starving.”
    “What a stroke of luck that you find yourself in a restaurant.” Ray stares at his watch. “I suppose Professor Eysenck and Dr. Rose will arrive before the pudding.”
    “Ah, they’ve had to cancel,” the director says over her shoulder. “Hans ate a bad oyster and it’s given him collywobbles. Steven had a prior engagement, our slip-up. You’ll have to do all the work by yourselves. Think you’re up to it?”
    “Oh shit, no,” Joseph says and Ray tells her at the same moment, “We’ll manage, Shirley.”
    Grant Moore, his macho moustache bristling, steps from the kitchen into the bistro’s patio, face tanned from forays to Queensland and points farther north and retanned by artful cosmetics. “Okay, blokes, the tucker’s just about edible. Let’s siddown.”
    Ray is already seated under the merrily striped bistro umbrella. Joseph is placed at his right hand, Grant at his left. A camera takes the fourth place, with another off to one side. By artful editing it will be made to appear that they sit in the customary arrangement.
    “Everyone’s sick of the usual talking-head bullshit. It’s 1975, for Christ’s sake, not 1965,” Grant Moore tells them. “And what’s the fall-back alternative? How much guts does it take to slam your audience from one walk-in jumpcut to another? Listen, Ray, we’re really climbing out on a limb here.”
    “Really? In discussing intelligence intelligently?”
    “By going for conversation, period, for fuck’s sake. If a point’s worth hammering, we’ll linger on it. We’re not scared of a bit of abstract conceptualization if that’s what it takes. With me?”
    “Won’t our chewing-tend to…well, muffle our conversation?”
    “We can cut. We can dub. That’s technical shit.”
    “Jean-Pierre’s ready,” Shirley tells him.
    But it takes three false starts before the mood relaxes sufficiently for their lemon sorbet to be broached.
     
    A DOG’S WIFE
    …nine
     
    I was not wholly without sympathy for Fiona’s qualms, though I’d have died before admitting so. On the other hand I judged her objections fundamentally reactionary. In this age of moonshots and dime-store calculators, it seemed to me not merely ignoble but rather trite to find some course of action offensive simply because it was not hallowed by family tradition.
    The fact is, Spot was the brightest dog I had ever met. He entered college under a special program, endowed by the Chomsky Institution, and was a wild fellow, mad for poetry and drinking all night and the theater. He swiftly discerned that culture as such is problematical, overdetermined, quixotic, that its appeal is essentially to the intellectually lightweight. He dabbled in painting for a time, creating a small stir with his innovative brush stroke. But it was the endless wonder of science that spoke to Spot’s heart of hearts, and led to his specializing first in chemistry and finally in the application of Sophus Lie’s theory of continuous transformation groups to that previously intractable poser, the ‘periodic table’ of elementary particles and their resonances.
    Much of his work was awfully abstruse and beyond my modest attainments, yet Spot retained a sense of primal joy in