MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

An ordinary guy, ordinary in every way, except one… he is susceptible to catnip.  Is it a blessing or a curse?  Did God make him that way, or was he conditioned by his time?  Who is in the right—him or society? Dear readers, I really have a feeling about this one.  It might just be my foothold to the B-minus list…

more soon…

As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things.  (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise?  I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.)  So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!

I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers.  David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).

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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. (more…)

Well, yes, OK, this might not be the last time I ever write about cats. Still, I definitely promise at least a moderate cat hiatus—right after this post, which is about modern-day cat literature classic Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics.

The existence of Why Cats Paint was first revealed to me early in 2007, when I happened to attend a calendar sale at Kepler’s Books in the company of n+1 editor Mark Greif, who purchased a Why Cats Paint calendar, as a gift for the mother of a certain young person. “The genius of the thing,” Greif later observed, of the Why Cats Paint calendar,

is that they never tell you why cats paint—they just show you that cats paint. Which they don’t. But there is this further horizon of promise that distracts you from the original problem.

I remember thinking that this was an ingenious formulation, and that I could be the calendar girl for a Why People Dissertate calendar… but would it successfully distract my committee from the “original problem”? My committee of course was made up entirely of benevolent schnauzers:

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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:

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