Kitty Angels

I compose this entry with a cat on my lap. I'm not even doing anything to Pippin, but he just sits there, purring loudly. If I poke at him, he purrs even louder. If I shoot him with water in the morning because he's been meowing loudly outside our door, a few minutes later he'll be rubbing himself up against me and purring loudly. For Pippin, complete and utter bliss is kind of like that line from the Rubaiyat--"a jug of punch, a loaf of bread, and thou," except for him, it's cat food. It's pretty easy to get him to purr--just touch him. One day, he was snoring, and when I started petting him, he emitted a purr snore. I wish I had it on tape. It amazes me how easily he becomes completely blissful. Most people need the assistance of drugs for that sort of thing.

Well, in my last entry, I suggested the possibility of kitty angels, and right now, my wife and I are going through the last season of Angel. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Angel is a "vampire with a soul." Most vampires do not have a soul, and Angel is always in danger of losing his if he has a moment of "perfect happiness." The first time he loses it is because he had sex. As the creators refine their formulation, it becomes clear that he does not lose his soul if he has sex with a really skanky evil vampire, and in the fifth season, we learn that he does not lose his soul if he has sex with a really nice girl who is hot but whom he doesn't really love.

It's important for Angel to know what would constitute "perfect happiness," because every time he does lose his soul, people have to try to get it back for him again, some of whom he kills as "Angelus," the vampire without a soul. I am glad that the writers on the show made it not quite so easy for him to achieve "perfect happiness" as simply having sex.

But then, I started musing, what if Pippin became a kitty Angel vampire with a soul, who would turn evil if he had a moment of perfect happiness? For Angel, it must be sex with a hot girl whom he actually loves; for Pippin, it is the merest touch, or the sound of food in his foodbowl. Every time at morning when he was fed, he would become "Pippinus," and start trying to kill us until we had his soul restored. He'd then start purring and rubbing up against us in gratitude for restoring his soul, at which it would depart, and he'd start trying to kill us again in a perpetual cycle. All in all, we're better off that cats don't have souls, since then they'd try to kill us.

The Usual Haunts

Since we were on spring break last week, my wife and I decided to go to a haunted bed and breakfast. Now you might be wondering (as one friend asked), is the bed AND the breakfast haunted, or just the bed? Well, according to the staff, the ghost does make its presence felt at meal-times, so presumably sometimes the breakfast is haunted too. Although not the banana walnut pancakes. Although they did taste awfully good ... perhaps the secret ingredient is apparition. Anyway, the B & B is part of an old ghost town (no pun intended), and the owners bought the adjoining land to prevent some historic buildings from being demolished. It was rather odd driving through the countryside--at first, I thought everybody was dirt poor and on the verge of death (and perhaps some were), but I discovered when we went to the run-down looking haunted B & B that the dilapidated look was actually supposed to be charming and rustic. Who knew? The house was replete with stairs that were slightly tilted and almost made me fall down, along with a ceiling that ever threatened to make contact with my head. I saw they had a Jane Austen novel out--I started laughing to myself, "Ha ha, they have _Northanger Abbey_ out, Austen's satire on Gothic novels and ghost stories, how clever," only to look and see that it was _Mansfield Park_. Well, after feeling cheated and hollow inside, we went into our room. However, when the time came to leave our room, I discovered I could not find my key; my wife picked it up. Now, it is customary in a haunted house for objects mysteriously to move or disappear, so it seems awfully suspicious that the key disappeared. Clearly, the ghost was trying to keep us out of the room! Or--and perhaps even more sinisterly--it wanted to lock us in so we couldn't get it out! Of course, those skeptics amongst you who are knowledgable about my pants might point out that there's a hole in my pocket, but that's just a red herring.

My sagest piece of advice for anyone who visits a haunted bed and breakfast is not to read books about demonic possession while you are there. My wife thought it would be a great idea if, before we left, we got a nonfictional book offering a "Christian" perspective on ghosts. (It's about a couple named the Warrens; the wife claims to be clairvoyant, and they visit a lot of haunted houses.) You'd think that a title like _The Demonologist_ would signal, "high times and ghouly frolics lie not ahead," and you'd be right. The book was one of the scariest things I have ever read! One of the more cheerful passages remarked that people rarely need to fear overt demonic activity unless they have done something to "invite" that activity, like ... going to a haunted house and trying to communicate with ghosts!

Well, since there wasn't much else we could do at that point except drive home, we decided we'd stay at the room and just not "invite" the ghost. According to this particular B & B, the ghost tended to show up if you turned on the blue lamp to "invite" it, so we resolved not to turn on the blue lamp. Well, as soon as we entered our bedroom, the blue lamp was already on! So what should we do? Turn the light off? Well, according to _The Demonologist_, a doll became demon-possessed because people were paying too much attention to its ghost-related activities--so, if we were superstitious enough to turn the lamp off, that would be an invitation for the demon to possess the lamp! (A side note: the book is really interesting, but frankly, it does seem to give contradictory advice. If you notice a doll that seems to move around, you're supposed to ignore it, or else the demons come. However, another time, if you notice strange things happening but do nothing about it, the demons take that to be tacit permission and do more and more things. AAHHHHHH!!!!!) Finally, we decided that the least invitey thing would be to leave the lamp on and turn it off when it was time to go to bed.

When we went out for a night stroll, a cat joined us and followed us the whole way. According to _The Demonologist_, devils often gain an "invitation" by pretending to be something they're not (e.g. a cute little ghost girl who wants to inhabit a doll), and sometimes they pretend to be cats. So along the way, we were theorizing about how to treat the cat: it was cute, but what if it was Beelzebub, and if I said, "You're so cute, I'd like to take you home," it would say, "I have you now!" You think I'm joking, but this book is so spooky I have discovered superstitious parts of me I have never known! Finally, we decided to test the cat, and say things like, "If your delight is to serve the living God, you are cute, and we'd like to take you home," and that would keep us safe. After all, people have entertained angels unawares, and perhaps sometimes, they were guardian cats.

Eighteenth Century Cockroach Poetry and the Maggot Literary Tradition

Whine. I want to discover a new genre. A 2005 article by Michael McKeon says that Harold Love just discovered a new eighteenth-century genre called "Clandestine satire." I want to discover a new genre! Now! And in scholarly retrospect it will be seen to be just as important as the pastoral!After I spent some time looking at texts and failing to discover a genre, it struck me it would be easier just to invent the genre and then look for works to fit it. In Labyrinths, Borges comments that "every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future"--that is, we wouldn't see similarities between the precursors if not for the existence of the later writer who united them (in this case, Kafka). It seems that a natural implication is that every genre creates its practicioners, since you wouldn't know how to group these texts together together without already having a genre for grouping them. That means, if I am the person inventing the genre, I am also inventing all the people who wrote in it! Cool! The narcissism is wholly dizzying!

You might remember an earlier blog entry I did on the theological significance of eating dirt, which I was able to compose through the searchable database ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online). Well, I figured I'd do a search on the word "cockroach" and see what came up. Surprisingly, my search pulled up a blank-verse poem called "The Sugar Cane." The poet says in his preface that he was struck with the belief that the wonders of the West Indies, "however rude, could not fail to enrich poetry with many picturesque images." That is, he was intentionally trying to invent a new kind of imagery in poetry, and (let us not miss the significance of this) it involved picturesque images such as cockroaches! Of course, the poet's next words are, "I cannot, indeed, say I have satisfied my own ideas in this particular." Nevertheless, he insists, "I must be permitted to recommend the precepts contained in this poem."

Spanning across the ages, his clarion call to think about cockroaches challenges us to think of them not as pests, but as precepts, the very substance of poetic fancy.Here is his four-line poetic description of the cockroaches: "from their retreats/Cockroaches crawl displeasingly abroad:/These, without pity, let your slaves destroy;/(Like Harpies, they defile whate'er they touch)" (26). We have here a displacement of the epic: the harpies of myth have been replaced by the cockroaches of not myth. Rather than a danger of filthiness swooping down from above, the poem suggests that danger is really crawling slowly from below. "They defile whate'er they touch" has startling implications: the merest touch of the cockroach is full of transformative bug-indued power, forever changing whatever it touches, be it nature, be it poetry itself. Simply by being included in four lines of this poem, the cockroach has touched all of poetry and "defiled" it, permeating it and leaving a mark that not even all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten. The cockroach, far from being a marginal figure in the history of poetry, has become central to all poetic thought.

Given this centrality of the cockroach, we might expect that the cockroach, or at least other bugs, would make similarly important interventions into literary history. Well, I made an important discovery in this regard by reading the literary critic J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels. Hunter notes that Samuel Wesley (the father of Charles and John Wesley) wrote a collection of poems under the title Maggots: titles included "A Tame Snake left in a Box of Bran," "A Pindaricque, On the Grunting of a Hog," "An Anacreontique on a Pair of Breeches," "On a Supper of Stinking Ducks," etc. Wesley's work was comical, and the work was so influential that in the early eighteenth century, there were frequent references to "maggoty" writing. It even transformed the language: if you look at Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, you'll see that "maggotty" can mean "full of maggots" or mean "capricious; whimsical." Clearly, this Maggot tradition and The Sugar-Cane were compatriots in the creation of a new genre to which all other genres must be subordinate!

I then started thinking ... "maggoty" ... "whimsical" ... my blog ... my blog that is often whimsical ... unawares, had I been participating in the whimsical maggot cockroach tradition without realizing it? All this time I thought I was inventing a genre ... had the genre really been inventing me? The cockroach-hunter had become the cockroach-hunted. It's like in the novel Sophie's World, when the main character discovers she is only a character in someone else's book. I sometimes wonder if Wibbity Wubbity feels that way.

Eighteenth-century Manipulative Advertising

A few days ago, I was reading old eighteenth-century newspapers on microfilm. Literary scholars aren't just supposed to write on "the major text," but to situate it within its broader historical context so you can understand what the major author is responding to. Sometimes, you can hit the jackpot: I was writing a chapter on a novel's response to French Catholicism, and I discovered (from reading contemporary English newspapers) a huge debate on French Catholicism going on at the same time! However, you can also not hit the jackpot, and feel like you have spent a day in the library with nothing to show for it. In order not to feel like I have completely wasted my time, I have decided to blog about the most interesting part of the newspapers--the advertisements.

Newspapers tend not to print the same articles over again. The same cannot be said about their printing of advertisements. Much as our own culture has certain infectious phrases like "Where's the beef?" or "He likes it! Hey Mikey," so too does 18th century culture, such as "WORMS Brought Away ALIVE in the Close-Stool, by Famous little Purging SUGAR PLUMS, 12 d. a dozen." There is even an accompanying little sketch of worms above the advertisement, so you could have a mental image of exactly what was being purged. Even if the 18th century had no tv personality or catchy voiceovers, they did have other printing tricks to get the phrases into your head. It's fun to picture the Sugar plum guy going to an advertising firm and saying, "No, this advertisement just doesn't grab me, I want to see more italics and letters being capitalized."

Perhaps the most manipulative advertisement I discovered in my research was the following on "TOOTHING Children": "A Mother would Never Forgive Herself, Whose Child should DIE purely for Want of so EASY, and so very CHEAP a Thing, Presently to EASE it, and bring it's TEETH Out, as the Little Cordial Pleasant Thing is, to Rub only it's Gums with." Admittedly, this is rather convoluted sentence structure, so I don't know if the typical 18th century consumer could recite the whole sentence from memory. But would he or she really need to? So long as you get the idea that a mother would never forgive herself if her child should DIE because she hasn't bought your product, that's enough. Frankly, this is much more attention-grabbing than the present-day boring advertisements for organ donation, where the cheerful dad says, "Just in case something ever happens to me, champ, I want my organs to help someone else, and maybe that person will like fishing." It would be cooler if the father said something like, "Frankly, champ, if I DIE, I would Never Forgive Myself if I were Contributing to ANOTHER PERSON'S DEATH and behaving like a HeartLESS Slob!"

In 21st century advertising, advertisers sometimes pick a time slot that will target an audience already interested in their product. For instance, an advertisement for Tuck Everlasting (starring an actress from the Gilmore Girls) will be advertised on, surprise, surprise, Gilmore Girls. So too, the teeth advertisement occurs in a newspaper in which people are already attentive to its message. This particular newspaper printed the mortality rate weekly, recounting that, in 31 cases that week, people had died of: teeth. (I don't know what it means to "die of teeth," but evidently, it is more common than you'd think.) It's kind of like a tag-team between the newspaper article and the advertisement: the article says, "Okay, I'll tell them that 31 people died of teeth, then you tell them it could be their babies!"

Despite 18th century advertisers' strengths in capitalization and italics, they had some weaknesses we don't see in modern-day advertising. For instance, consider this advertisement: "SHORT WRITING, Easy, and Useful for EVERY BODY, to Write Any Thing, in Infinite LESS TIME, than By Common Writing. By TWO Principles, which do, so in an INSTANT, Do it, That a great Deal of Time, and Trouble in Writing, is Saved by it." By two questions, which do, so in an INSTANT, ask, what the freak are you trying to say? Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to advertise short, presumably clear writing with writing which was itself unintelligible and circumlocutionary? Now, in the past, I have felt like chiding 21st century advertisers for using the word "lay" wrong or choosing the wrong form of "its," but after reading 18th century advertising, I am impressed by just how much our sentences make sense. It kind of puts the grammatical horrors of text-messaging into better perspective.

My Faithful Achates

"Why don't you say anything good about Cricket in your blog?" my wife asked me after reading my last cat-oriented blog entry. My wife's criticism made me feel especially conscience-stricken, since after we got married, Cricket seems to have become "my cat," discovering within my lap a certain Je ne sais quoi that my wife's just did not have. Because Cricket grew up with my wife and established bonds with her, it is a special compliment to me, and a testimony to my superiority, that he has chosen to place his affections on me over her, and it is my responsibility to acknowledge his good taste. So here's to you, Cricket, my faithful Achates. This entry will be about how great you are, because you love me.

It is often touching when I'll be taking a bath, and Cricket pushes the bathroom door open so he can jump on the laundry basket and keep me company. However, the most touching moment of all was right after my wife and I returned from Christmas break, and it had been several weeks since we had last been able to see our cats. As all good things must come to an end, I was forced to retire from the reunion in order to visit the bathroom, where I was compelled to offer up some rather odoriferous incense to the porcelain gods. While I was engaging in the sacred ritual, Cricket pushed open the bathroom door. I was a little embarrassed about the olfactory component of my activity, but do you know what? Cricket didn't care. He tried to sit on my lap anyway. Not even wives would display this degree of loyalty!

Given that Cricket often can't bear to use his own litterbox because of the smell, it is really rather touching that he can bear the smell of my litterbox because there is something more important at stake, like the quality of our friendship. An old youth group leader defined a friend as "someone who can tell you when your breath stinks," and this might be true. Yet it seems to me that an even more loyal friend is one who can hang out with you while your breath is stinking (or, mutatis mutandis, when other bits are). It is someone who can look beyond superficial concerns like personal hygiene. It is someone who looks at what is on the inside, not at what has just been expelled.

Our society seems to place on a pedestal those animals who risk their lives for their loved ones. The Lassie who gets help for little Timmy down the well. The Old Yeller who heroically gets rabies and tries to kill his owners. But tell me, is it not more loving for an animal to perform a sacrifice that is ultimately unnecessary? If Lassie did not summon Timmy's parents, Timmy would have died; Lassie had to make this sacrifice if she ever wanted to see Timmy again in non-corpse form. However, if Cricket did not come into the smelly bathroom, I would not have died; I would have eventually come out and petted him anyway. The point is, my presence was so important to Cricket that he would make any sacrifice, however gratuitous and seemingly pointless, because he loved me and wanted to be with me at that exact moment. Whereas the juvenile response would be, "Smelly bathroom, icky!" Cricket responds with maturity and sensitivity, seeing the call of friendship as no less obligatory than the call of nature.

Ancient Extraterrestrial Vultures; or, X-Files season 10

Thanks to our membership with Blockbuster on-line, my wife and I recently finished the last season of X-Files, causing us to become rather sad. I have caught myself saying, "Honey, did the X-Files arrive?" when what I should have said was, "Did Angel season 5 arrive?" It's not as if Joss Whedon is anything other than genius, so I should not be sad that it is Angel season 5 that arrived, rather than nonexistent X-Files season 10. Nevertheless, I am pining. I miss the high times and frolics watching tales of governmental conspiracies and humans with alien DNA.

Well, I was reading Plutarch's Lives the other day, and behold, it was like watching X-Files season 10! Plutarch was remarking about a unique feature of vultures when contrasted with other birds: "all other birds are, so to say, never out of our eyes;...but a vulture is a very rare sight, and you can seldom meet with a man that has seen their young; their rarity and infrequency has raised a strange opinion in some, that they come to us from some other world" (italics mine). Now, Plutarch was working for "the man"; he received the insignia of a consul and a post as Procurator of Greece under the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Given these governmental affiliations, it's awfully suspicious that he would go out of his way to mention this belief in extraterrestrial life only in order to to dismiss it as a "strange opinion." Now, Plutarch's Lives is a big book, so it's not as if he was stuck for material. He must have mentioned it because the matter was of grave importance. Therefore, the only explanation that makes sense for why he mentioned this observation in an already big book is that a large number of people claimed to have seen vultures transform into aliens, and it was imperative that he discredit them. Admittedly, we rarely hear mention of just how much of Plutarch's work was dedicated to perpetuating the governmental denial of extraterrestrial life, which confirms the effectiveness of the governmental authorities in conducting the cover-up.

It is somewhat sad that, with all of Mulder's desperate searching for confirmation in his belief in aliens, he never considered what was right in front of his face: vultures. Or rather, he never considered that vultures were not right in front of his face, because they were, in fact, from another world! To the best of my knowledge, vultures do not show up frequently in the X-Files, which should have been a clue to Mulder. In one episode, Mulder came to suspect that alien colonizers had taken the form of the everyday cockroaches (season 3, I think?), but this plotline was dropped--largely, I think, because that was never the aliens' plan at all. They were going to be vultures! What better way to get human tissue to experiment on than by pretending to be a carrion bird? So simple. So subtle. So avian.

Now, I am not saying that modern-day vultures are the same as their alien prototypes. The aliens are far too crafty to be using the same animals for several millennia. However (and don't miss the significance of this) their strategy is still the same, because they are still alien strategists. The ancient Greek and Roman humans were able to recognize an animal was an alien on the basis of their rarely ever seeing it. That is, the proof that something is an alien is that it appears to be an endangered species. That is how they trick you: they make you think that they are endangered ... when they are really endangering you!

Recognizing this connection between "endangered species" and alien colonization is paramount to stopping the alien threat and to calling the Bush administration to accountability. For too long, environmentalists have played right into the government's hands, saying things like, "We need to preserve these endangered animals from extinction." Instead, we need to say things like, "the government must destroy even more rain forests so that we can annihilate these aliens and preserve humanity from extinction!" Please, we need everyone to get involved. Do it. For Scully's baby.

I Just Can't Reach Them

On the car radio the other day, Bill O'Reilly referred to his old days as a teacher. He mentioned that, as a result of facing especially recalcitrant students, he learned to be satisfied with reaching 85% of the students and just giving up on the rest. As a teacher myself, I find there is a certain appeal in giving up on 15% of the youth under my charge and leaving them to their doom, especially those who do not laugh at my jokes. But it struck me that that "At least I can reach 85% of them" doesn't work as well when you're talking about smaller quantities, like cats.

We have two cats. 85% of two is a rather weird number. After doing the number-crunching, I determined that if we mess up with one of the cats, we are complete failures, or at least 50% failures. Admittedly, we might have extenuating circumstances, such as if one cat is a "special needs" cat (even though I really don't know how to determine whether a cat suffers from mental retardation, clinical depression, etc.); however, I'm guessing those are rare, so statistically, I'm probably the one to blame. Sometimes, when we have problems like one of them not using the litter, I consider giving one of them to the SPCA, which essentially means sending them off to kitty heaven. (What prospective cat owner is going to go to the SPCA and say, "Hey, I don't want a cute kitten, I want that old-looking cat, the one whose card says that he poops on the carpet!") Regardless of where one falls on the issue of capital punishment, few would be so extreme as to advocate the death penalty for inappropriate pooping.

Now, I'm sure there might be parents out there who would say, "Look how silly it is for this Leopoldtulip guy to worry about cats--have some kids, and then you'll see some real problems!" Such an argument is fallacious. Should the owners of a nuclear warhead say to the third world country, "Man, I face dilemmas every day about whether I should blow other countries up and destroy billions of people, whereas all you have to worry about is petty internal human rights violations?" The nuclear warhead dilemma makes the human rights dilemma no less real or significant. In the case of cats pooping, it is arguably more of a problem than having kids--parents can take for granted that their children will learn to control their waste product disperal, but the owners of cats are not so lucky. Parents can take for granted that their children will learn to talk and will understand sentences like, "Pooping auf dem floor ist verboten," whereas cats will not.

Parents can take for granted that, if they ask, "Why aren't you using the litterbox?" the child will respond intelligibly, "Because I am not a cat." Now, we have two litterboxes: one litterbox is stinky because our cat Pippin doesn't cover up his messes, and the other litterbox is always clean because neither cat uses it. Our cat Cricket invented a third waste dispersal area in the corner near the exercise bike. There is no way of asking, "Cricket, why is the clean litterbox not meeting your needs? What does the exercise bike corner have that the clean litter does not?" I have spent literally several minutes analyzing the granules in the unused litterbox, pondering, "These granules sure look to be above average in quality. What does he see that I do not?" In teaching, we're taught that there are different types of learners: those who learn visually, those who learn by writing something down, by hearing something spoken, etc. Having cats has taught me that there are also different types of poopers, but I do not know how to reach them. The apostle Paul wrote of being "all things to all men, that I might by all means save some." Daily I am learning what it means to be "all things to all kitties, that I might by all means save some from using the exercise bike corner."