Here's the setup:
S**t My Cats Read is a regular feature in which Uni and Chloe Zola Volcano — two erudite kittens from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn — engage in dialogues with some of the sharpest minds of our times. Conversations are facilitated by their tireless helpmate, Scott Indrisek.
and parts of the interview.
[Uni and Chloe]:
The narrator of “Lurid & Cute” is, in many ways, exceedingly feline: he spends his days in a sort of cloud of irresponsibility .....
[Adam Thirlwell]
[Adam Thirlwell]
..I think it’s possible to argue that this narrator of mine — kooky, sure — is more like a machine for trying to resist the usual categories of time and space and how to organize your time and space. He has this terror of wasting time, which means he in fact spends all his time wondering how best to be spending his time — which I guess you could see as a waste of time itself, from another perspective… But then, this isn’t new. Marcel Proust loved cats and he has another narrator who’s confused by how far time lost is also time wasted.
[cats]
[cats]
In many ways this is also a story of boredom, and of what can be done to eliminate boredom — how to generate excitement. But is there anything wrong with boredom? It seems like you humans are engaged in a constant, and somewhat pathetic, struggle to become unbored. It rarely ends well.
[Thirlwell]
[Thirlwell]
The basic problem is the everyday, and this is something I do think cats are onto. There’s some Blanchot line: “The everyday escapes you. That’s its definition.” And I think that kind of listlessness of the everyday which he’s describing is the basic human condition. And sure it might be better to be more feline and just sit around chasing laser dots, but is it wrong to wish for something grander in your distractions from the everyday? Just because something doesn’t end well, after all, isn’t a reason not to do it.....
[cats]
[cats]
Your narrator is an odd bird — somewhat appallingly detached from the real emotional meat of life (or at least the real feelings of others), and yet simultaneously possessed of an almost painful empathy (“When I step into the world, all I hear is a catalogue of sighs”). We kept thinking of him as a kind of highly empathetic sociopath, which of course is a colossal oxymoron…
[Thirlwell]
[Thirlwell]
Yes, yes! And in fact I don’t think that’s so unusual. There’s a moment in Kafka’s diary where he’s reading Dickens and notes the “heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style,” and that oxymoronic psychopathy gets exaggerated in Kafka’s own writing, where people are suddenly bursting into tears, but not caring about large violence. It’s comic but also tragic: that no one can be as meticulous as they might like in their compassion. This narrator of mine is just a blown-up version of that difficult condition.
[cats]
[cats]
What are three other novels you would recommend we read after “Lurid & Cute,” that might have some sort of rhyming resonance with what you were aiming for in this book?
[Thirlwell]
Marcel Proust, “A la recherche du temps perdu”; Knut Hamsun, “Hunger”; Italo Svevo, “The Confessions of Zeno.”....
[cats]
.... Can you tell us a bit about the animal companions in your own life, ...
[Thirlwell]
[Thirlwell]
We live with a blameless whippet. I know, I know, he’s a dog: but the whippet is the most cat-like of the world’s dogs, I think. He is pure indolence and self-cleaning..... [T]here’s something that fascinates me about humans and their animal companions. It’s such a strange relationship, a little like the relationship between a human and his therapist, in its mixture of blankness and deep feeling. A human’s moral education is much more obvious against the silhouette of their animal-relations — much more than how they are among other guilty humans. All animals are innocent and perfect.
Well, at least this blog makes mine look moderate.
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