The world is a scintillant and fascinating place

Anticipation, when it occurs, often makes me animated and expansive, as if I am perhaps reviving and honing my senses in preparation for the awaited object: yes indeed, the world is a scintillant and fascinating place when a half-remembered mystery leans within reach.

(Her Japanese tapestries. My custom armchair. A former lover. An old book.)

I mostly read Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, at the spa, fitting I think because it's so meditative, nothing happens and nothing happens at the spa and it's a good place to contemplate minutiae. I'm not sure how I heard about this book, even though I try to keep track; it may have been in relation, somehow, to the Tournament of Books, possibly mentioned among the many excellent longlisted novels that failed to be shortlisted over the years, or it may have been some forum discussion somewhere regarding books about nothing, which I may have come across while googling something concerning some other book about nothing that I'm reading now (like, say, Orbital, or Ana Patova) or that I have read in the past several months (so many books where nothing happens). Even though I'm reading an ebook borrowed from the library, it thrills me to know Pond has been published as a Fitzcarraldo edition, gawd I love French flaps.

Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose of faint-hearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds aught not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a a hand which has just seen the light of day.

There's a thing I read, and I thought it was in Pond, about a feeling that's like the feeling of having a neighbourhood cat that you see regularly and then you don't for some time, but you know it's there — a kind of comfort in and familiarity with the rhythm of a place — until one day you wonder if it's ok, I haven't see Simone all winter because it's winter but the time before that it had been a while and I was so relieved to finally see her patrolling her usual stretch of sidewalk, I'd wondered if she'd moved away or some other fate befell her. I think the worry was entirely my own, and not in the passage I was looking for, the worry came to me because it reminded me of Simone (Rosie has never warmed to her, Simone is very friendly, a bit of a slut really, with the sweetest little mew). Of course when I went looking for this passage I couldn't find it, just this bit about the cat that walks up and down the drive with you, but I can't think what other thing I've been reading that would evoke this tangential thought.

I won't be able to write emails like that again you see — that's to say I won't be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting — using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I'd like my brains to be fucked right out.

It is fitting that this library ebook should expire today, on the last day covered by my spa passport. The passport was unknowingly the smartest recent purchase I made (excepting the custom armchair [the perfect reading nook at last!] since my formerly favourite chaise longue just didn't fit this corner of the room, and this corner was just crying out for a place to sit with a book and a cat; and maybe the porcelain clay), a Christmas gift to myself, I've been going to the spa two or three times a week since, just to relax, I need help relaxing, I didn't know I was going to be laid off, lucky thing too because I've been able to go to the spa any time of day. I'd never really appreciated the sauna until I went to Norway where I'd exit the sauna to plunge into the North Sea, and this was loosely replicated again this past fall in Denmark. My local is a weird little spa, not sure whom I'd recommend it to, it's in an unsuspecting block building, an industrial commercial zone, but I can walk to it from my house in six minutes, which means I can go after dinner or when I roll out of bed in the morning, which is priceless, even if it doesn't have a view over a river and I have to walk past the tracks through the dodgy backstreet with the loading dock for the grocery store to get there. Inside is quite cleverly designed, you have no sense of the traffic that lies just a few metres beyond the slatted wood. In fact I'll bring Pond with me today so I can search one last time for that passage about the cat (maybe it's a dog, and I'm not suggesting that just because the narrator remembers a cat instead of a dog in a book she'd read, the dog was named Lynx after all, I think she's harsh on herself for misremembering, I think that was a perfectly fine detail to stand out, it's more tangible than actions and behaviours, it's only natural for the brain to fill in memories around a keystone, whereas in my case, I'm not frustrated with focusing on the "wrong" detail but that I can't find the source of it at all, this passage I remember may even be about a person, it's just that it reminded me of Simone, who happens to be a cat. Was it another book entirely? But I associate it with this one, and also I feel like I felt this feeling of association while at the spa, because this is the book I've spent most of my time with, albeit relaxed and unfocused time, an environment that nurtures looseness (of muscle, mind), a loosening of hangups (and associations), the brain fog shifts into brain fuzziness (altogether softer, kinder, warmer). Or is it possible I hadn't read anything at all to prompt this "remembered feeling"? My mind simply wandered to thoughts of home and the nieghbourhood and I thought of Simone, and in a bit of reverse trickery my brain associated this sequence to a passage I'd read rather than freely admit my thoughts went to Simone (not even my own cat!) of their own accord.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.

One of the best things about reading Pond was that it led me to discover Claire-Louise Bennett's essay A Formal Feeling: Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois, which is stunning to me, stunningly weird as a review of a book or an exhibition or an experience, by which I mean beautiful, and it makes me think, for once, about how other people approach Louise Bourgeois and how art makes other people feel something completely different than what I feel, and sometimes it seems lesser and less valid, but sometimes it is more and deeper and I think my own thoughts are quite small by comparison. I think more reviews should be written that way.

I'm going to check out Checkout 19 now.

I think I liked sitting there actually; I think I felt as if I'd just come home from school on a Thursday. Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.

Excerpts
From Morning, Noon & Night 

Reviews 
Fiction That Will Make You Feel Pleasantly Insane (The New Yorker) 
Hmmmm, Stylish (London Review of Books) 

I think my cat is dying and I'm losing my mind

I've been grieving for my cat for six weeks now. She's alive, but we don't know what her future looks like. Every 8 hours I put drops in her right eye. It looks unchanged (except for that one day I was convinced it was clearing up), a puddle of dried blood clouding her iris. I worry that she's not eating enough, I check her litter obsessively. She's clearly depressed, adjusting to limited vision, and she's wasting away. Most days I cry, away from my daughter, away from my cat, because I need to stay positive for them. I've always cried to Rosie about everything. But not this. It's exhausting.

We'd been to emergency (that day I came home and she was yowling), and we follow up with a regular vet within the week. Did the emergency clinic give us a prognosis, he asks. You understand? They'd told us she was old. It's probably chronic kidney disease. It's probably a heart condition. It's probably a tumour that burst into her eye, she's probably riddled with cancer. But nothing definite. She's old. (She's only 14.)

We agree to do bloodwork to give us an indication of Rosie's overall health. It comes back mostly normal. Strange, he says. Nothing a little dietary adjustment couldn't improve. Still, he tells us to give her all our love and prepare for the worst. (He also tells us about the best Polish restaurant in Mexico City.)

A couple of weeks later, I call about a prescription refill. I send photos so the vet can better gauge the progress of Rosie's condition. He calls while I'm sitting with my mother in the ER, who's suffering a bout of UTI delirium. Her appetite is good, regular bowel movements, sleeping a bit more. (My mother interrupts to say she's not sleeping at all. Not you, mom; the cat.) Strange, he says. Normally, he sees a cat in this condition, it's dead in three, maybe five days.

Twice there have been issues with prescription refills. As if there's a note on her file: Don't bother, expected to die. (I think there may be a similar note on my mother's file.)

Every morning when I wake my first thought is of her. If I sense her in my bed, I reach out to check that she's breathing, and I pet her till the purr comes. Those mornings she's not in my bed, I panic. Has she slunk off to die? I'm crying again.

I am more distraught, or so I tell myself, at the prospect of losing my cat than of losing my mother. It occurs to me that I'm channeling all the stress of recent months (ailing mother, job change, general dissatisfaction) into my worry for Rosie. I'm depressed like I don't think I ever have been. I'm crying again.

I've been reading You Are a Cat!, a pick-a-plot book. In one thread, feline protagonist Holden visits a bookstore, whose previous denizen, Rosie, died. I'm crying again.

We're to see a veterinary ophthalmologist Friday. For two weeks I've considered calling, wavering between begging them to move up the appointment because she might die before then, and putting off the appointment for another week or two to relieve us all of the stress because she might die before then. Certainly, I can't face hearing a medical professional tell us that it's time. 

If she dies in her sleep, I'll bury her under the lilac tree outside my bedroom window, maybe plant a rose for her. I'm crying again. I don't know if this is legal. I ponder how I'll execute this plan without attracting the neighbours' attention.

Something's got to give. My mom's ok, she turns 91 this weekend. The houseplants are still ok. The outdoor garden boxes are beyond all hope. (What god can keep everything alive?)

Update (24.07.29): The ophthalmologist confirms that vision in Rosie's right eye is gone. But the anti-hypertensive medication is working. Rosie's not dying, she's been through a lot and she's tired; she'll be fine. And I'm crying again.

Techniques for calming a fearful mind

There are little signs everywhere in the library now that say BREATHE! BREATHE! How did everyone get so good at this breathing thing? I feel like it all happened while I was away.

Today nothing much happened. I feel outside of time.

I burst into tears while making my morning cappuccino. The coffee was so much better at the office. Maybe it's the hormonal flood of PMS, or the onset of menopause, one or the other, I can't tell which. Maybe it's because I didn't sleep well.

I'd read an article before going to sleep about a study of coronavirus in cats and whether they could carry the virus from human to human. Apparently cats can become infected from a human and can pass the disease to other cats, and if you are sick, you should protect your pet by keeping your distance. Yesterday I'd noticed Rosie sneezing more than usual, so I drifted off to sleep thinking I must've picked up the virus on my grocery excursion, I must be asymptomatic, and Helena's simply lucky, or immune, and while I've been wallowing in the company of my cat and relishing our early mornings together when she burrows into my right hip, the whole time I have in fact been killing her, and this preoccupied my dream life last night.

I tried to work, but that didn't go very well. I'm mad at myself for having taken on work I shouldn't have to do. I'm mad at myself for not initially understanding the extent of another job. And I'm mad at myself for not being able to pay attention.

At least I had a yoga break (via Zoom, with coworkers), difficult as I find it to breathe these days. I zoned out through my other two meetings today.

I did spend some downtime deliberating over which jigsaw puzzle to purchase. My current puzzle is 2000 pieces and slow going, it's fucking hard actually, a veritable tsunami of puzzle, everything is blue. I bought it for myself at Christmas because I like to have a puzzle to get me through the cold, but this winter I went to Morocco instead, as if I knew I wouldn't have the opportunity to travel again anytime soon, as if I knew I should save that puzzle for a metaphorical rainy day. Ordinarily when I start a puzzle, I have to finish it — I forgo sleep and showers and spend all my time on it. But this is no Christmas vacation. There's no deadline — it's not as if I have to clear the table before the dinner party. So I've been pacing myself. But someday in the not-too-distant future I will finish it. I have my eye on a couple 4000-piece more-conventional landscapes, and I should pick one while shipping is still available.

I wonder if I were reading something other than Weather right now, would I also find it profoundly appropriate?

Q: What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?

A: You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build. Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.

Redolent of coffee

When he got home he found in the mailbox a postcard from Claire that had been sent from Bonifacio the preceding week. The news was out of date but the thoughtfulness pleased him. In fact it was this time lag that made the card valuable, as if the words had mellowed in the space of a few days. The e-mails were precious because they provided almost instantaneous reports, but they would never have that slightly aged flavor. On a postcard, the words had been weighed while staring into space and chewing on the pen. They were laid down with care and measure, since there was limited room. The cards were redolent of coffee and fruit juice drunk on a terrace, the perfume of flowers in the shade of a public park. The e-mails smelled of a dirty keyboard and a poorly ventilated office.

Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored. This has got to be one of my favourite titles ever. Because cats! In summertime!

The story itself, a mystery set in Southern France, is somewhat quiet. Methodical, both in laying out the crime and investigating it. It's credible, not gratuitous in the slightest. Which makes it nice and easy. This novel succeeded in gently easing me back into reading fiction.

Inspector Gilles Sebag is a very ordinary cop who enjoys spending time with his family, lounging by the pool, eating, making love, sleeping. He is a coffee connoisseur. He finds time for work, but has the best work-life balance of any investigator I can recollect. He doubts his abilities.

And he is drawn into a game of cat and mouse. Somebody's life is at stake, and this finds the right priority amid office politics and potential marital troubles.

I am these days somewhat preoccupied with the phenomenon of the midlife crisis. "Where did adultery begin?"

When you know each other by heart, you can read your partner's body language, smiles and grimaces. You start by no longer needing to look at each other and end up not seeing each other at all. You no longer even bother to look up.

The subject is treated here in a mature and altogether French way.

There is only one actual cat in this book, belonging to Gilles' neighbour, whom he lures over to his side with bowls of milk. The other cats must be metaphorical. I guess they're bored.

I am pleased to note that Philippe Georget has written more novels, and some are available in English. I'll be watching out for them.

A sentence about cats

I read this great sentence the other day, about cats, but I can't find it. And I don't even know if I read it yesterday or if it was days ago, it can't be that hard to track down, I haven't read that much in the last few days. I've been reviewing sections of The Passion According to G.H., but I can be fairly confident that's not where the sentence is from, there are no cats in it, just the cockroach, and the drawing of the dog on the wall, it was a dog, wasn't it? So maybe the new book I started, Salki, fortunately I'm not very far along, I can just skim back to the beginning, but no cats, just that fabulous description of Krakow — they might've been Polish cats — and I already don't recognize so much of this book, how can I say I'm reading it if I can't even remember five pages ago?, but the tone, the listiness of it, feels a little like my cat sentence, maybe it comes from a part of the book I haven't read yet, so I check the review that spurred me to acquire this book, but the sentence isn't there either. The review notes a similarity to Perec, and I recall having looked at some of my notes on Life: A User's Manual, and though I don't recall any cats in the text — no, I don't think they were French cats — just that great picture of Perec with a cat on his shoulder — I check my notes again to be sure, but no cat sentence. The only other things I've read in recent days are a few articles, some reviews, nothing noteworthy, nothing I saved or bookmarked, how could I have let such a great sentence pass me by, unmarked, I fear it may be lost forever.

The sentence went something like this, about the change of season transpiring over their alley world, and how the outdoor cats were noting the changes and somehow plotting, and the indoor/outdoor cats feel unprepared, caught between two worlds, while the indoor cats watch the outdoor cats and can afford to feel smug but are also a little bit jealous, or wistful, all the cats in their alley, I can picture it, definitely they feel like Montreal cats.

Interesting

When I was seventeen, I had a very good year. In fact, it may even have started when I was sixteen. I developed a crush on an older man. Even if it started with a crush on his cat.

Clive (the cat) would sit in the middle of the sidewalk outside his shop, beside the bakery I frequented. Soon enough, I was frequenting his shop, pretending to be in the market for retro clothing. Pretending to have the guts to be in the market for retro clothing. Pretending to be the kind of cool I hoped to one day actually be. You know, university student cool.

He gave me a poem he'd written about his cat.

Some friends and I took to cutting class, the period after lunch, to hang out at the shop, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

We talked about what I was reading (he asked; I guess even then I always carried a book with me). That was my Somerset Maugham phase. He knew them all. My crush deepened. He told me to read Butler's The Way of All Flesh; I did.

He asked what I thought about one book or other, I honestly forget which, and I said it was interesting, and he berated me for lazy thinking. And I've never used the word since, unless I was prepared to expand on an argument.

(He also taught me that when someone is lighting your cigarette, you must look him in the eye.)

As an editor, I've been telling this story to my writers for years. You write "interesting," and I will delete it. Tell me why it's interesting, or if you need to build up to a full explanation, at least give me a flavour: unexpected, playful, nostalgic, frightening.

So when I came across the following passage in Dexter Palmer's Version Control, I had some rethinking to do.

If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was "false," the best thing he could say is that it was "interesting." This was different from saying it was true: most true things were, in fact, uninteresting. Interesting statements lived on the twilit boundary between fact and question; they held the promise of revealing something unexpected and new about the world, and thus were to be treated with respect. The physicists Rebecca met always seemed to be on the lookout for something interesting, a claim or proposition that seemed to possess some kind of rare interior light.

Rebecca came to understand that Philip's constant repetition of the word "interesting" meant that he was offering what he saw as the most precious of compliments.

Most of my writers are engineers. I am trying to understand "interesting" from their perspective.

But my crush was not a physicist. And I've been hardwired over thirty years to think "interesting" was boring.

See also
The word "interesting"
"Interesting" is a Boring, Overused, and Lifeless Word

This book is like any other book

I was feeling torn about what to read next, so I let the cat decide.

Rosie says, quite emphatically, paws down: The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector.

It opens with a note "To Possible Readers":

This book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed.

This concerns me a little. I hope I'll be OK.

Lispector again blipped across my radar this week in a bookclub discussion of Pola Oloixarac's Savage Theories, when someone speculated whether there might be an intentional reference to The Passion in this passage:

A cockroach scuttled along the edge of the room. [...] I gave the order for Montaigne Michelle to set her ambush . . . Now! She purred toothily. The individual in question (a Blatella germanica) came forward a meter or so: Montaigne put it down with a single swipe of her paw. Flat on its back, its abdomen contracted in pain, the cockroach bent its antennae toward us. I believe that it sensed the formidable presence of its motionless adversary — perhaps, too, that of the impromptu Thucydides who sat nearby taking notes. Finally it managed to get back on its feet. And here is where this domestic tableau takes on transcendental dimensions: it was at this moment that, overawed by such brutality, irresistibly attracted to a power far superior to her own, the scene's victim advanced voluntarily toward the Predator, and bowed down to her, in a sign of Reverence.

Fittingly, it seems Lispector's novel offered itself up to the beast to be devoured in a similar way.

The Narcon

As the old Narcons put it: "There is not space in the universe to tell the universe to the universe. Therein lies the peculiar beauty and sadness of stories: to tell it all without all at all."

The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, by Mark Z. Danielewski. Yeah. I don't know how to talk about this book. I don't even know what this book is about.

I can tell you:

• This book is beautiful as an object.
• The experience of reading this book is somewhat otherworldly.
• I fucking love this book.
• I wish there were more books like this in the world.

Book as object
This book is heavy. It's printed on art-catalogue-quality glossy paper, 880 pages of it. The binding is such (with pink thread) that if you open the book to any page, it will lay open.

There are full-colour plates between chapters, with epigraphs quoting the likes of Emily Dickinson, Lady Gaga, and Norm Schryer, or featuring lines from movies like Moonrise Kingdom, Blade Runner, and Chinatown.

The top corners are dipped in colour, each chapter colour-coded according to the character perspective (of which there are 9). The beginning and end of each chapter also include a timestamp, place, and date to help orient the reader.

Each chapter picks up at the second the previous one left off — the story covers 08:03:05 to 23:32:09 on May 10, 2014. It spans Los Angeles, Singapore, and towns in Texas and Mexico.

Each character perspective also has its own font (these are detailed in the credits). The text includes Russian, Chinese, and Arabic script, and lines in a few other languages.

There is a design element along the centre seam, which varies from character to character. These are fractal-like, and many forum pages are devoted to theorizing about them: they likely indicate static or frequency, functioning as a narrative ECG.

There is a lot of white space. Some pages have just a single word. On some pages, the text seems to fall away. One chapter has extremely wide margins; the text is focused in a tight block. In another chapter, the text wraps around a circular whitespace; if these pages were flippable, the orb might appear to move across the page.

On other pages, text scatters and runs sideways. This happens consistently with one character, indicating a cognitive break, or sensory overload, or the onset of one of her seizures.

So none of these design elements is arbitrary. Form reflects content.

Pages 563-578 are whiter than white, blank of many of the elements mentioned above. They are distinct from the creamy pages of the rest of the story. These are the pages of a Narrative Construct, or Narcon for short.

Book as story

This is the first volume of a planned 27-volume series. I've heard this book described as the story of a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten. That's mostly accurate. Even though for the first several hundred pages, she's on her way to pick up a dog.

Xanther has her own thread, and her mother and stepfather each have one too, so it's easy to feel that the story centres on her. As for the other character threads, I have no idea what they have to do with anything.

And I'm fine with that.

Around the world, it's raining.

There was this moment in writing when I realized that every character was in the rain. If Kubrick was the patron saint of House of Leaves, Akira Kurasawa was sort of the patron saint of The Familiar.

The Narcon chapter helps explain things. It describes some of the formulas used to create narrative and develop character, and defines its parameters. It is self-aware but only so far as it's been programmed to be. Well, this chapter may or may not explain things.

Book as experience
This is a puzzle of a book. I love puzzles.

The discovery of all those elements noted above is a pure joy. It makes this a very visual and tactile read.

The Familiar is also full of nested parentheticals, so reading is a bit like diagramming sentences, but on a more psychosemantic level than a mere grammatical one.

Danielewski has spoken about how The Familiar is conceptualized like a ("quality," modern) TV series, like The Wire or Mad Men, in how it develops character over long-form narrative. The way it shifts character focus, the way individual character stories intersect; how small events play into a season-long story arc.

This volume includes season previews (which don't (yet) appear to be linked to the novel proper), and pages of credits at the end.

It's highly conducive to binge reading. Just one more chapter.

The formatting helps pull the reader along. It feels a little like a graphic novel in this way, like where text spans frames and physically leads you where you're supposed to go.

If the text of this novel were conventionally laid out, it would be a standard 300-page novel. I believe I read it at a slightly faster rate than my usual, because the design factors were so compelling. The only hindrance was the weight, making it a bitch to commute with, which led me to plan my reading time a little more carefully.

The future of publishing
As soon as I finished reading volume 1, I rushed out to buy volume 2. I have a couple other things to read first, but I needed to ensure that I have it, for whenever I'm ready. I need to do a little catch-up, but I expect I'll be lined up to get volume 4 the day it's released.

It would be easy to dismiss this book as gimmicky if it weren't so goddamn beautiful and narratively compelling. It must be very expensive to produce; someone must have a lot of faith in this project.

I've showed off this book to a lot of people. This book is coveted. It has been fondled.

What if publishers made books beautiful? Good book design can be more than just a pretty cover. It's the paper, it's judicious use of colour, it's white space (white space is so underrated).

So 27 volumes of 800 pages may be a bit ambitious. Books don't have to be oversized to capture attention. But there are shorter stories. There are short stories, for example. Many texts could lend themselves not just to illustration but to design-sensitive interpretation. Or serialization. Graphic novels do this to a degree, but as mainstream as they are, they're not for everybody.

I happen to love ebooks, and in general I believe that the content of a book is more important than its form(at). But there is a market for beautiful books. People appreciate fine detail.

Make people want to turn pages.

One thing I admire about The Familiar is that it never becomes a graphic novel, can never be a television show. It does not resort to incorporating artefacts or referring to complementary online material; there are no fussy envelopes or reproduced postcards; there is no CD included. This is not amultimedia production, but it is fully immersive.

It's stretching our idea of a novel, but remains contained, remains very definitely a book.

In which my daughter is traumatized by a classic

My daughter came home ranting about her English exam earlier this week. Grade 7. Given that she's in the French system, even though she's been placed in an "advanced" English class, I still don't expect it to be too terribly challenging for her. But it wasn't that. It wasn't hard. It was traumatizing. I know, because she called me as soon as she got home to tell me all about it.

She'd known it would be a comprehension-type test, and the text was about cats. Well, there were three texts, and they were about cats all right. The first two were just normal texts, but the third one! OMG (yes, she said O-M-G). It was horrible! It made her want to cry! How could anyone write something so disgusting?! She's traumatized (I know, because she said so). How could the teacher give them something so disgusting? Of course, I want to hear more.

So she starts telling me about the story. It's about a man who has a cat, only the cat loves him too much and it gets on his nerves and he starts to hate the cat and he becomes an alcoholic and now he's trying to hurt the cat. How could a cat love anyone too much, how is that even possible? Who would ever want to hurt a cat? She's choking back tears at this point, telling me how the cat loses an eye, and I'm thinking this text is a little severe, her English teacher sounded pretty cool, but assigning this text may have been a lapse in judgement. Then the man hangs the cat, kills it dead, and Helena is sobbing, how could anyone write something so horrible, why would the teacher make them read this, he doesn't like cats, does he?

And Helena goes on, in excruciating detail, not only about the story, but about her emotions, and, really, her entire value system. Now there's another cat, why would the man bring home another cat, and he tries to kill this cat too, only he kills his wife by accident. Wait a minute, I know this story. I've been listening to Helena cry into the phone for about 10 minutes now, but I'm at work and my attention is divided. But suddenly, now that we're at the end, I know this story. That's Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat, it's a classic. Yes, she confirms, that's it. It's disgusting.

Worst. Story. Ever.



Teacher says they'll be doing more stories by this writer this year. I can't wait.

Cat, book

Local street art, on the wall of a used book shop.

The rat, the cats, and the snake

Last night I dreamt there was a rat in my bed, but ultimately I expelled it from the Eden that is my home.

In my dream, I stirred from my sleep and felt a presence above my head, the cat perched on the headboard, I thought, as she used to sometimes do on the old bed, the one I shared with my other half when I had another half, and the old bed was where it used to be on the other wall. I thought it was the cat, but then I felt the cat nudge at my hand, which was hanging over the side. I glanced up, and in my half-sleep I thought it must be one of Helena's stuffed animals, though I didn't recognize it, but then it moved.

Then I realized it was a rat, and I slowly rose from the bed and grabbed it around its fat neck with both my hands. It tried to gnaw at my hands and wrists, but fruitlessly. I stuffed it in a paper gift bag, held it closed, carried it out onto the deck.

I was pissed off at the cat for not caring. I hoped to lure the neighbourhood cats into finishing the rat off. They were all there, in the yard, but the courtyard was swampy, like after the thaw, though it never puddles like that in this reality, and the cats sat on their individual island mounds. Curious about all the water but wanting to stay dry, they were not interested in the rat.

Then the construction workers came through the passageway into the courtyard and I wanted to show them the rat. I opened the bag and a silver snake was wrapped around the rat, trying to sink its fangs in. And the rat squirmed away and scampered off.

This is a true story, a true dream. I think it tells of how the rat that was my other half is expelled from my life. The cats are me, the feminine, safe, dry, and indifferent. The snake means the transformation is happening.

Sunday reading: Ursula K. Le Guin

Two terrific pieces in Brain Pickings, originating with Ursula K. LeGuin's The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination:

• Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man
• Ursula K. Le Guin on Aging and What Beauty Really Means

Maria Popova has selected some brilliant passages, many of which are laugh-out-loud funny. (I read a passage to my other half, and not ten seconds later I'm nudging him again, Listen to this.)

"On Being a Man" actually addresses a few topics — gender and sex, aging and spectator sports:

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren't. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.

"On Aging and What Beauty Really Means" also covers cats and dogs, dance and space-time.

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat's way of maintaining a relationship.

I expect I'll have downloaded Le Guin's book of essays before the hour is out... (not to mention digging out those as yet unread novels of hers).

All best, Margaret Atwood

What a remarkable lady!

Last night I saw Margaret Atwood at the Rialto. One can't always be sure what one is going to get when an author makes an appearance; expectations aren't always properly set*, and so much depends on the author's personality, the venue, the crowd's energy. Chances were good this would be good. But Atwood was brilliant. I think she must always be brilliant. (I have seen her before, and she's always been brilliant.)

*I made the trek last week to see Chris Hadfield, but was disappointed to find it was a signing only — no reading, no musical number, no magic tricks I mean science experiments, just some dumb astronaut signing your book, I mean oh my gawd I shook an astronaut's hand and his handshake is so firm and he signed my book! But you see my point, I hope.

She started off singing, a hymn from The Year of the Flood. She is by no means an extraordinary singer, but she sings just fine, loud and proud. She actually sang! And cracked that some people really do tell her to keep her day job.

And she read, from MaddAddam, the recently released third book in the speculative trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake. I only started reading the book a few days ago, and in a happy coincidence, she read the section that I had just arrived at (she read pages 106 to 109).

And then she talked. With the very personable Sheila Heti (whose work I have not read, but I intend to someday). That's them in the picture above. (Really.) They chatted (well, mostly Peggy chatted, while Sheila prompted) about the power of storytelling, and what parts of the brain light up when engaging in narrative, indicating that it's a basic thing in humans, along with language, music, rhythm, not like algebra or reading for that matter.

Also edible body products (when the apocalypse comes, go to the spa), cats (everyone knows that one of the most useful things to do for a migraine is to put a purring cat on your head; science has yet to figure out how to keep it there), the future (and extrapolating toward it), Menippean satire (but the world is moving so fast, satire has to push farther to keep up), the Amazon drones (if she'd included that technology back in the day of Oryx and Crake, it would've been considered beyond belief), Archie comics, Northrop Frye, origin stories and the tendency to mythologize (which comic books and science fiction are particularly great at). And other stuff.

Oh, right, and a bit about the book: how God's Gardeners mix scripture, nature, and science with imperfect results; the nature of the Crakers (in their society there would never be a book by Sheila Heti called Women in Clothes); why Jimmy is reluctant to share his story — he cannot envisage a reader — contrasted with Toby, who can, which is hopeful.

She entertained questions from the audience: She advised against hallucinogens as a writing aid, affirmed that social media is good for literacy (citing Smarter Than You Think), commented on Rob Ford (Toronto is paying for its great sin of puffed-uppedness), and scoffed at the idea of writing exercises (you mean like summer camp? let's pretend to be a triangle).

Also she said some smart things about the control (or lack thereof) the author has over the reader. You never know who your readers are going to be. A reader doesn't want to see Austen pulling the puppet strings; the reader would much rather sit and listen to Mr. Darcy. As for authors connecting with their audiences, well, isn't that what the book is for?

And she signed my book! (Which I must hurry up and finish reading this week.)

Check out Margaret Atwood's website; it will lead you to new and interesting places. Also, know that there's a MaddAddam app, the game Intestinal Parasites (which I'm downloading this very minute).

I am I don't know

My daughter is under the weather and has stayed home from school yesterday and today (and I've stayed with her). She's relatively sedate, and enjoying the company of the cat.

She's been asking if I've written anything about her lately. No, I haven't.

But I recently found this note on my phone. (Allegedly an experiment in Siri dictation.)

Also, she is insisting that I post a photo of the cat.

Peonies

I brought home a bouquet of peonies last week,
deep raspberry pink, and I arranged them
in the living room, near the entranceway.
They are bombs exploding with perfume,
positively soporific.

Crossing the room or leaving the house
I feel like Dorothy in her opium field,
I just need to rest awhile.
(Though for some reason the cat is immune.)
Sweet relief, their exotic powers
are drying up now,
so I can wake up.

Catnap

One of the perks of working from home on a dreary damp day...

A cat's life

I've been working from home quite a bit over the last month, for various reasons. As with any situation, it has its pros and cons. The drawback that most perturbs me is the paranoid feeling that the second I leave my post — whether the chosen premium location of the day be the bed, the sofa, or the kitchen table — I am usurped.

***************

The feline section of this article on Literary Pets is slight, but I am delighted to learn that Alexandre Dumas had a cat who "each day greeted him in the street as he returned from work." I had a cat who used to do that.

***************

I'm currently reading The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje. It is enchanting, like your grandfather recounting his childhood adventures (or so I imagine). "What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power."

A girl and her cat

"No one has any idea, do they, until they have children, what it means. It's all I can do just to keep up with the rush of things, the meals one after another, the food, let alone giving the children the attention they should have. I know that Emily is ready for more than I have time to give her, but she is such a demanding child, so difficult, she always has taken a lot out of me, she want wants to be read to and played with all the time, but I'm cooking, I'm ordering food, I'm at it all day, well you know how it is, there isn't time for what there has to be done, I simply don't have time for the child. I did manage to get a girl for a time last year, but that was really more trouble than it was worth, really, all their problems and their crises and you have to deal with them, she took up as much of my time as Emily does, but I did get an hour to myself after lunch and I put my feet up for a bit, but I did not find I had the energy to read, let alone study, no one knows how it is, what it means, no, children do for you, they do you in, I'm not what I was, I know that only too well I am afraid."

The child on her knee, two or three years old, a heavy passive child dressed in white wool that smelled damp, was being jogged faster now; his eyes were glazing as the world bounced up and down around him, his adenoidal mouth was open and slack, the full cheeks quivering.

The husband, passive but really tense with irritation — with guilt — smoked on, listening, frowning.

"But what can you give out when you get nothing in? I am empty, drained; I am exhausted by lunchtime and all I want is to sleep by then. And when you think of what I used to be, what I was capable of! I never thought of being tired, I never imagined I could become the sort of woman who would never have time to open a book. But there it is."

She sighed, quite unselfconsciously. She was like a child, that tall, solid, confident woman; she needed understanding as a child does. She sat looking inward into the demands of her days and her nights. No one else was there for her, because she felt she was talking to herself: they could not hear, or would not. She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children were what she personally had wanted and had aimed for — what society had chosen for her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared her for what she did in fact feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing that she might perhaps be ill in some way.

— from The Memoirs of a Survivor, by Doris Lessing.

This is a very weird little book. The Memoirs of a Survivor is described as a dystopia, and by Doris Lessing herself as "an attempt at autobiography." It reads like part fairy tale, part tract, a report from another time and place, not quite like a confessional diary as one might expect from the title.

It is never entirely clear what it is that's being survived, or who is surviving it. There's the girl, Emily, and the woman, the narrator, on whose doorstep she turned up, charged with being responsible for her. And Emily's cat.

While it's the girl who thrives in the outside world, the anarchic, back-to-basics conditions where she establishes herself as a kind of leader (or, at least, a leader's girlfriend), it's clearly the woman who's a survivor of Emily's puberty, teenage years, sexual awakening.

The girl and the woman are incomprehensible to each other, yet also the same. They're at a bit of a standoff. The narrator very sagely recognizes that we too were once children, once young and in love. Yet it's somewhat unsettling, however reasonable, for her to stand back, so detached, and watch Emily grow up, let her grow up all by herself.

Meanwhile, there's the world falling apart outside, we know not why, and the walls of the woman's apartment melting away to show her other realities, past and future. (We know Emily's mother, as excerpted above, only through these glimpses through the wall.)

If you've never read Doris Lessing, I don't recommend this novel as an introduction to her. But even though this novel is kind of all over the place, there are some lovely thought-provoking bits, about children, about growing up, gender politics, etc.

New York Times review, 1975.

I almost think this book's really about the bond between a girl and her cat. Which makes for a pretty remarkable story, really. (I say this as someone who has lately enjoyed a good deal of quality time with her cat; it feels like she's finally chosen me to be hers — we have an understanding, she and I.)

Our Shangri-la of sound

The Cat Piano, poem written by Eddie White, narrated by Nick Cave.

Killer kitty

It continues to astound me how perfect the cat is.

She hears us coming up the street and jumps onto the windowsill as we approach. She mrowrs on the other side of the glass. Seconds later Rosie's at the door to greet us.

She likes to be near us. On top of the fridge when I'm making coffee or supper. On her own chair when we're at the table. On the arm of the sofa if we're watching tv.

Morning and evening she stages stealth attacks, hiding around corners or behind a bag till someone goes by and she pounces.

Most touchingly, when it's time for Helena to get ready for bed, she follows us round the bend in the stairs, pawing at us through the banister, and secures the perimeters of the bathroom and bedroom areas. When Helena is finally settled into bed, Rosie hops up and makes herself comfortable. She stays there an hour or two — to make sure the kid is sound asleep — before joining J-F and me.

She's the perfect blend of affectionate, playful, protective, independent.

[Insert gratuitous cat photo here.]

So it came as a surprise to me to find that she is less than gentle with others of her species.

We've been letting her wander out onto the balcony, and I'm willing to let her explore the courtyard. She seemed shocked to discover a cat on the balcony just up from us, and another staring out the window of the unit to the left.

She was standoffish for a day or two after that. Her expression told me she felt betrayed: "Why didn't you tell me there were others of my kind, and so close?!"

Henri is the cat upstairs. Rosie has it in for him. Henri's leash lets him come down the fire escape to our balcony. That's too far for Rosie's liking. A couple times she's chased him up, swatted him across the nose. Usually, a hiss from her through the screen door is enough to send him home.

Last week she chased him, into his apartment, his own kitchen — Henri cowering in his own territory. Rosie puffed up, with the upper paw, and a quick one-two. Henri's owner could only stand back and wait for it to be over. Rosie owns that kitchen now. Henri took advantage of the distraction of J-F's entrance to make a break for it, under the bed. A gash across the eyebrow. He wasn't seen for days.

Who knew Rosie had a viscious killer inside her? Secretly, of course, we're all a little bit proud.