My Life and Thoughts

The reason for the cat moratorium is, I’m worried that if I keep going about my cat, and saying nothing about my life as a relatively obscure writer, people will assume that I have stopped writing, or even that I have run out of money. This would be a really incorrect assumption since in fact what I have stopped doing is getting published, and let me take this moment to assign blame where it is due, viz.: the mortgage crisis, the war in Georgia, the 2008 elections, and the Wall Street meltdown, all of which have been no joke for our nation’s more junior producers of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism.

“Someday, the world will be ready for the story of comedy traffic school.”

Personally I can tell you that nothing I wrote for the past 6 months is going to be published until after the elections—at which point, however, I am told that the presses will be flooded with interesting pieces about barrel-making and the feuding grandchildren of minor Symbolists. Therefore my message to you today, esteemed readers, is a message of change, and a message of hope. In America’s troubled times, you might not always see my footprints in the sand, but later you’ll see I was there, carrying somebody, or at least doing something, I think. In the meantime, there are book reviews, whose regular production will apparently be one of the last things to stop in our declining economy. Recently, for example, the New York Sun assigned me a review of Verses and Versions: an anthology of Russian (and some French) poetry selected and translated by Vladimir Nabokov, and co-edited and introduced by the indefatigable Brian Boyd, author of an ingenious but weird book on Pale Fire. (The part I think is weird is about Nabokov’s “generosity,” in providing wonderful hidden rewards for those readers diligent enough to penetrate his Hobbit riddles.) Boyd is, I believe, a native of New Zealand.

Verses and Versions arrived on September 5, with a note from the books editor, scrawled on Sun letterhead, in black permanent marker. “HERE IS THIS,” said the note. I looked at it for a long time. Had I somehow misread it? Didn’t it perhaps say: “HERE IT IS”? Well… no. What it said was, “HERE IS THIS.” Slightly concerned, I emailed the books editor and asked about the word limit. There was no reply. This was very uncharacteristic of the books editor, who usually wrote such prompt and courteous emails. Nearly three weeks later, on September 23, I wrote to him again. Again, no answer. “HERE IS THIS,” I thought to myself. I was starting to get a bad feeling about that note.

As a testament to how I really have my finger on the pulse of America’s literary marketplace, let me tell you that it was a mere two days after the fact when I learned that the Sun went out of business! Sure, OK, there were some premonitory signs, like I think a front-page editorial on September 4, and periodic doom-filled prognoses all month in the Times, none of which I read. Then I got an email from my friend, the film critic Nic Rapold, formerly of the Sun, in which he mentioned being somehow out of a job. Now I’m embarrassed that I wrote those emails to the books editor, asking about the word limit. He must have thought I was totally insensitive and out-of-touch!

Many people, it seems, were not surprised by the “setting of the Sun.” “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” these people seem to say, meaning that the Sun was a neoconservative paper which emerged from 9/11 and supported the tax cuts, and now look what came from 9/11 and tax cuts. On which subject there is an interesting statement in the paper’s last editorial:

We are struck with each crisis—including the one that has beset our markets, when the temptation is running strong for so many to take the statist bait, though not once did we consider asking Washington to bail out the Sun—of the importance of guiding principles.

I read that sentence several times, without being able to figure out whether it’s a joke about how they didn’t consider asking Washington to bail them out. If so, it’s pretty funny, and almost noble… except that, for it to be noble, they would have to be saying something like, “This era has ended, the great experiment has failed, at least for now—so adieu friends, or is it only au revoir…?” Whereas that is not what the editorial says. What the editorial says is that they were right all along (”The Bush tax cuts did unleash tremendous economic growth. Iraqis are building a better country in freedom”).

That’s one reason why I’m confused. The second, maybe pedantic, reason, is that, when you remove the part between the em-dashes, what does it mean that they are “struck with each crisis of the importance of guiding principles”? Could it be a typo, and they were really struck by the importance (or by the crisis of the importance)? When I hear “struck with,” I think of someone being physically hit with some object: “Man Struck with Toilet Tank Lid Dies.” Surely in the case of an intellectual/ emotional, rather than physical, blow, the headline would say, Man Struck by [Statist Principles of] Toilet Tank Lid? On the other hand, I’ve been reading French psychoanalytic philosophy for the past 3 days—more book-reviewing, no joke—so frankly, my English-language intuitions are in such a state that they might as well have been struck with a toilet tank lid.

In any case, all I wanted to say about the “eclipse of the Sun” is that it’s really unfortunate for the books and film sections, because they weren’t living by that sword. Personally I’m also bummed, because I had even already read the introduction to that Nabokov book, which included his views on the twentieth-century Russian poets: Mayakovsky was “fatally corrupted,” Pasternak was “marred by clumsy lapses,” Tsvetaeva was “compromised in her relationship to Stalin’s Soviet Union,” and Akhmatova was “definitely B-grade.” That’s why Nabokov left them all out of Verses and Versions, in which the twentieth century is represented instead by Mandelstam and… Bulat Okudzhava.

But I’ll stop myself here before I get too excited and start doing any actual reviewing. No way am I participating in the statist bail-out by writing pro bono reviews, so those capitalist fat-cats can learn my opinions for free!

Speaking of cats: thank you, dear readers, for last week’s wonderful comments. I really enjoyed the video of Christian the lion and, although I always knew Harrod’s was a great store, I was really interested to learn that they also sell lion cubs (I wonder if that vicar was somehow involved?). One was also so edified by the illustration of both sides of the cat-painting question: on the one hand, Erin’s tie-dyed cat looking so peaceful and content; on the other, the far more sinister slumber of LK’s mother’s cat which had been painted blue—which actually really reminded me, re: Nabokov, of the end of Bend Sinister (”The murdered child had a crimson and gold turban around its head; its face was skillfully painted and powdered: a mauve blanket, exquisitely smooth, came up to its chin”). It’s so hard to have a beloved! Was it Bulat Okudzhava who once said: the price of love in our times just keeps going up?

Tags: cats, current events, d-list, hope, money, New Zealand, poetry, politics, publications, reviews, Russian literature, translation

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