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:

(more…)

The last time I was in New York, I went to a movie about sad young literary men, in the company of some sad young literary men, including the Danish novelist Christian Jungersen, with whom I was not previously acquainted. At drinks afterwards, someone mentioned that I have a blog, and Jungersen’s first question was whether I wrote about my cat: “Today my cat ate this, yesterday my cat did that,” he helpfully supplied.

I had to disappoint these generic expectations, because at that time I didn’t have a cat, and had no plans of acquiring any cats. I didn’t especially like cats. People who were really into cats freaked me out. I always wanted a dog. But who can predict the twistings of human fate? I can’t keep a dog in my apartment, so I recently adopted a kitten.  Now I am really, really into cats. So sit back and enjoy, Jungersen: this post is gonna be about how I tried to teach my cat to dance.

One day I noticed that if you wave a feather duster at my cat, he will run around and leap in the air. My first natural thought was: “I have to teach this cat how to dance.” Luckily I happen to own a copy of Dancing With Cats, which caught my eye some years ago at the discount table in the Stanford bookstore, because even if you don’t particularly care for cats, how can you fail to be impressed by pictures like this?:

Ralph and his cat Petipa, photo by Heather Busch
Petipa’s favorite kinds of music are cha-cha and “Handel’s oratorios.”

(more…)