My Life and Thoughts

OK dear readers, I don’t want you to think I’m evading the difficult subject of literary production in our times, but you’re going to have to sit through one more post about cats. Not counting this post, which is a response to the comments about the last post about cats. After that I promise, no more cats.

Dear Burcu! Yes, Friday is exactly what I named my cat. Thank you very much for the reference to Gürcan Yurt, whom I did not know. It’s funny, I reread Robinson Crusoe a couple of years ago, when I was working on sidekicks, and was so disappointed to realize how little there was about Friday! In my mind I had turned Friday into another Dr. Watson… but really he was in what, like three chapters?  In short you can imagine how delighted I was to discover that, in the comic books of my ancestral homeland, Friday has been elevated to a title character.

Although the only excerpts I found online were all illegibly small, I am already encouraged by what appears to be a remarkably equitable distribution of lines between Crusoe and Friday:

About George Eliot, yes, I definitely see her as more of a dog person, especially after that depressing quote (”Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation”). I mean clearly she thinks that cats are sitting in (disdainful) judgment on us. I believe this comes close to the issue of why people who don’t like cats, don’t like cats.

Dear LK: yes, “cat vocalization” is a great mystery. (I do however feel certain that the members of those cults must not have been giving their cats much eye ointment.) I remember reading in a cat care book that cats only meow to humans—not to other cats. If so, then maybe Eliot is right, and cats are making fun of us (”Meow meow meow I can talk too meow meow”). Some supporting evidence, from an article about Turkish Angoras:

[T]hose of us who own less resourceful cats are apt to be in awe of the deeds allegedly perpetrated by Turkish Angoras like Geordie. Five years ago Geordie made the news for dialing 911 and meowing at some length into the phone after his owner, Linda Anfuso, had left with her husband on a three-week vacation…. Police officer Eric Olesen, who responded to the 4:15 a.m. call… surmised that Geordie was the one who had made the 20-minute call to 911 because the cat was still meowing into the phone when Olesen entered the house…The conversation though had to be one-sided because Geordie, like many other odd-eyed white Turkish Angoras, is deaf.

Odd-eyed white Turkish Angora (probably deaf)

Tags: animals, cats, comparative literature, Friday, Robinson Crusoe, Turkey

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