{"id":29012,"date":"2012-04-05T15:32:59","date_gmt":"2012-04-05T19:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=29012"},"modified":"2012-04-05T15:47:35","modified_gmt":"2012-04-05T19:47:35","slug":"lol-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/05\/lol-cats\/","title":{"rendered":"LOL Cats"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Out of Print is a new series in which we feature our favorite library discards, used-bookstore finds, and family hand-me-downs. <\/em><\/p>\n

Circa 2002, I forced my eighteen-year-old brother to drive me to a church basement in the outer suburbs of Chicago to watch a community-theater production of a play about the life of poet Stevie Smith. As I recall, we got into a screaming fight on the way there, and he further enraged me by falling asleep during both acts and leaving the theater several times for cigarette breaks.\u00a0In truth, the show was abysmal, and in retrospect\u2013given the number of soliloquies by a lead with a highly unconvincing British accent and very distracting Dutch-boy wig\u2013his behavior was downright saintly.<\/p>\n

All of which is to say, I was obsessed with Stevie Smith.\u00a0I liked her idiosyncratic verse and her strange novels; I was interested in her latter-day career as a beatnik cult figure; I loved the book of her collected sketches, Some Are More Human than Others<\/em>. But the root of my obsession was a little-known text I\u2019d picked up in a London charity shop, 1959\u2019s Cats in Colour.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u201cThere\u2019s true lordship here, and pride and government. \u2018I wear the purple and the laurels. I am Caesar.\u2019 (But not one of the brainy ones, I fancy.) The trouble with Blue Persian, and all Persians and long-haired cats, is that they eat their fur and get sick.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

Cats in Colour <\/em>(or, Color<\/em>, if you have the Viking edition) was part of a series of picture volumes published by Batsford, a press dedicated to genteel subjects like horticulture.\u00a0It was doubtless intended as a pleasant gift book for cat fanciers: pretty pictures of fluffy kitties such as one might find nowadays on a wall calendar. Why Stevie Smith was approached about writing the book\u2019s texts is one of the great publishing mysteries of the twentieth century, but the result is nothing short of brilliance. The introduction alone is worthy of cult status.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Here, the \u201cgame,\u201d though not to my mind entirely removed from a hidden tartiness, is the game that human beings have been playing with the animal world since the first dog owned a human master and the first cat settled down upon a human hearth. It is we who have made these little catsy-watsies so sweet, have dressed them<\/a> and set them up, in their cultivated coats and many markings, and thrown our own human love upon them and with it our own egocentricity and ambition.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This barely concealed contempt\u2014for humanity, for the cats themselves\u2014is present throughout the book, although the captions themselves range from the whimsical to the surreal to the unambiguously bizarre. What Smith has created here is really a hyperliterate form of proto\u2013LOL Cat, playing perversely with notions of animal agency, ownership, and human identity. And ultimately, she is benign: as she ends her introduction, \u201cIt is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u201c\u2018Smoke\u2019 is this cat\u2019s breed. He is an animal with a disgusted look.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

\"\"<\/a>

\u201c\u2018Angela has passed out. I said Angela has passed out.\u2019 \u2018Somebody will have to tell Lady Catte-Beer.\u2019 \u2018Lady Catte-Beer. Ha ha. Pity Angela doesn\u2019t stick to the family brew. I said, Pity Angela doesn\u2019t stick ...\u2019 (et cetera.)\u201d<\/p><\/div>

\"\"<\/a>

\u201cI was saying something to myself. Sotto voce, of course.\u201d<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Out of Print is a new series in which we feature our favorite library discards, used-bookstore finds, and family hand-me-downs. Circa 2002, I forced my eighteen-year-old brother to drive me to a church basement in the outer suburbs of Chicago to watch a community-theater production of a play about the life of poet Stevie Smith. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7032],"tags":[7031,7030],"class_list":["post-29012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-out-of-print","tag-cats-in-color","tag-stevie-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLOL Cats by Sadie Stein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 5, 2012 \u2013 Out of Print is a new series in which we feature our favorite library discards, used-bookstore finds, and family hand-me-downs. 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