My Life and Thoughts

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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Caroline Kennedy vs. Giant Russian Bell: similar, but not quite the same.

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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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As I was scrolling through headlines about the Istanbul bombing, I came across one potentially less depressing Turkish news item, from Sabah: “Mental Patient Beats Doctor in Elevator for Six Floors.” Tor the first time in ages, I found myself thinking of Grey’s Anatomy, a show I used to watch while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation. Grey’s Anatomy is so famous for its use of elevators that, even in the homeland of Genette, young girls are making video montages about it: in the words of Youtube user piluka6: “all happens in that elevator!”

The elevator in Grey’s Anatomy functions much like the inn in Part I of Don Quijote: all plot problems are resolved by dumping the relevant characters in there and letting them sort it out. The characters themselves openly acknowledge this formal property of the elevator, in metatextual remarks such as: “I don’t want any drama today, I’m taking the stairs”; or (meaningfully): “Anything can happen in the elevator.” This is an example of what Viktor Shklovsky called “laying bare the device,” and it always struck me as rather daring because, when you take a cold hard look at the formal narrative possibilities afforded by the device of the hospital elevator, “inexhaustible” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.

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I ‘ll tell you what’s wrong with academia.  I just got a letter from ProQuest, trying to sell me three copies of my own dissertation for $125.  Their PR people, no dummies, easily anticipated my first question, viz. what on earth would I do with three bound copies of my own dissertation.  Turns out, I could keep one copy for “my own use” (viz., doorstop), and give the other two as gifts to “colleagues” or “my family.” An interesting idea: vingt ans après, I could finally get my revenge on the great-aunts who knitted me all those peculiar sweaters when I was small.

Anyway, this amazing 40% discount off of ”regular academic pricing” was apparently already offered to me at the time of filing, but I didn’t take advantage of it—either out of sheer pigheadedness or, as ProQuest charitably suggests, because I was distracted by “the final rush of paperwork and completion of other degree requirements.”  Lucky for me, ”opportunity knocks again.”

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