My Life and Thoughts

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.”

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Today I would like to salute some of the diverse and accomplished commenters to My Life and Thoughts, for example Michelle of The Maltese Bacon (a recipe blog—check out this beautiful tomato confit); as well as Gregory Freidin of the Stanford Slavic department (who, in his latest blog entry, shrewdly observes that, even if you live in Gori, you probably don’t hang your portrait of George W. Bush over a sliding glass door). 

In this recent, admirably concise comment, Freidin expresses solidarity with my father on the subject of creeping desecularization. Those of you who were disappointed by the Times’s decision not to air my father’s thoughts about creeping desecularization will be relieved to learn that they did publish the very next letter he wrote them, the following week.  This letter was in response to “My Literary Malady,” in which novelist Geoff Nicholson mulls over his recent gout diagnosis.  

James Gillray, The GOUT (1799)

But I would like to pause here to share with you my all-time favorite gout anecdote…

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Today I will tell you the story of my bittersweet first experiences on MySpace.  Sometime last fall I got an email with the subject line “Secret MySpace Project,” from Sam Frank: former n+1 copyeditor and current editor of Triple Canopy.   Sam sent out a number of  photographs of “defaced faces” by the multimedia artist Jon Kessler.  The faces were exhibited in a Drawing Center show called: You Have 43 Friends.  Sam, who had copyedited the catalogue of Kessler’s The Palace at 4 A.M. (the text of which includes ”a fictionalized interview between Jon, a four-star general, and the general’s youngest son, a Bard curatorial student“), decided it would be cool if he could get 33 of his friends to make MySpace profiles for 33 of the defaced faces. 

You Have 43 Friends	dissidentguy15

By disposition I am naturally quite sympathetic to secret art projects, and I was particularly happy to be assigned my ”first-choice” defaced face, for whom I set up a profile under the name of dissidentguy15. 

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I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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Despite my mixed feelings about music reviews, I encourage you all to read my piece on Vampire Weekend in today’s UK Guardian.

My first step in researching this piece was to enter “Vampire Weekend” on the Guardian search form, and see what had already been published. In this way, I learned that the Guardian had in previous months published several items on the subject in question, including, but not limited to: an audio interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a print interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a review of a Vampire Weekend concert at the Hoxton Bar & Grill; and a review of Vampire Weekend, the album by Vampire Weekend.

I was reminded of a certain P. G. Wodehouse story, in which Jeeves extricates Wooster’s friend from a romantic entanglement with an opera singer, by arranging for the opera singer to be the fourth consecutive performer of the song “Sonny Boy” at a “clean, bright entertainment” in the East End. The costermongers are so enraged that they throw potatoes at her, and she breaks off the engagement.

“Just whom are these guys trying to get me not to marry?” I found myself wondering.

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