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.

(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:

(more…)

The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing!   Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark.  It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).

Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog.  Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!).  So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am? 

(more…)

In my capacity as a D-list writer, people sometimes mail me books of poetry.  I don’t always know why this happens.  Usually there is some form of an advance warning, like, “Heads up!  I’m gonna send you the first English translation of the works of the twentieth-century Chuvash national poet!”  On the other hand, I recently received, out of the clear blue sky, with no note or anything, a fiftieth anniversary edition of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind—I am still confused about this, but of course very grateful. 

Well, a couple of months ago I got an email from a certain Preeti Majumdar, suggesting that I might enjoy a book called Kamal: Book One: “a novel in verse of five cantos, in structured, mostly iambic tetrameter or pentameter rhyme, totaling 5,472 lines,” written by a New Zealand poet called Zireaux, and edited by “Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., New York City.”  (You can read an excerpt here.)

The Turkish people have a very wise saying: “Free vinegar is sweeter than honey.”  In fact it is very rare that I say “no” to free anything.  So I sent along my mailing address, and it was a matter of time before I received the volume in question, generously shrink-wrapped in some 300 layers of shrink wrap, which I eventually penetrated in order to reveal an interesting cover illustration, depicting what appears to be some kind of human piano-hammer (right).

(more…)