Fun with Photos
Now with even more photos!
Silent Bob, on the left, as a wee kitten (pre becoming a wee adult) and Evil on the right, deigning to have her picture taken. This was taken sometime while I was still in FL.
A painting Maa did of Evil.
Twelve pounds of Alice in a six pound box.
Somewhere, there's a picture of mammoth Mooj doing the same thing. (The lure of the box, she is strong.)
P.S. Jonathan Franzen. I hate thee. You have written a book with thoroughly dislikeable characters, but made me read obsessively until I finished the last page.
Oooooozing hate for every single person in the damn thing, but reading like a fiend.
Bastard.
posted by Special Sauce @ 8:55 PM
8 Comments:
Evil was a very handsome kitty. Your maa really painted that? Color me impressed! I would have figured it for a poster that just happened to look like Evil.
Maa's painting? Awesome.
Kitties? Too precious for their own good.
Your Jonathan Franzen comment? Almost exactly my reaction to As I Lay Dying the Faulkner Novel I Hate...funny, because the Natron Bomb says JF is tooootally trying to be a Midwestern Faulkner, with the sentences that go on for days and all that good stuff.
MWN- thanks! Yep, Maa's a really good artist (and I'm not just genetically predisposed to say that). I'll have to put some of her other stuff up, maybe tonight.
And thanks :) Yep, Evil was a pretty cat, the picture doesn't show it, but she had little light blonde hairs mixed with the grey, really cool.
ET- Thanks again! And Alice is the one that licks all the fur off her belly, I'll have to see if I can find a picture of her expansive nakedness.
THAT would make sense, re: Franzen. Faulkner was a slow start for me (and I confess, I gave up), as was this, and the man is very, very fond of his similes and metaphors as well as ridiculousness for ridiculousness sake.
Sauce, how many kitties do you have? What's your opinion on the 'right' number of cats to have? I've got 2 of them and they're so cute. I've always wondered if adding a third would throw off their dynamic.
Parce, I hatehatehatehatehate 'As I Lay Dying'. Seriously, that is the only 'classic' that I have ever disliked that strongly. Partly it's because we had to read it in AP English and our response journal was expected to be longer than the actual book. Mostly, however, it's because it's an evil, terrible, awful book.
Remember the dead mule floating down the river? Yeah, the scene where they're taking Ma to bury her and the wagon tips over in the river and the mule dies. Well, apparently in Faulkner's world, we all go straight into rigor mortis...the damn mule was bobbing down the river with his legs stuck up in the air. I kept expecting the description to talk about one of the brothers being a bestial necrophiliac, too. WTF???
Sauce, now you're going to get hits by every perv who googles bestial necrophilia. Hee! Yummy!
Come, come...you can have dead animals and necrophilia in Southern Gothic, but not in the same chapter.
I have three, MWN, and we are a happy kitty family...an old cat, an almost-three cat, and a year-old cat.
Also, my mother is a fish. Ask me about that sometime, if you dare.
I'm the wrong person to ask about what number's normal, because right now we have 4, but have had as many as 13 cats. (Granted, the 13 were barn cats, but they were named, friendly, and loved our kibble, so pets they were.) I'd probably be a crazy cat lady, if not for the fact that my age, and living situation don't permit at the moment.
(but not a neglectful cat lady, never.)
ET, your mother... is a fish?
I want a fish story! I want a fish story! I want a fish story! I want a fish story! I want a fish story! I want a fish story! I want a fish story! I want a fish story!
Was that daring enough?
OK. So. As I Lay Dying.
This book hath betrayed me thrice, like Peter.
When I was in high school, we were supposed to read it. But we were in AP English, we were literally covered up with work, and we voted unanimously that a.) we hated the book, b.) we didn't understand the book, and c.) the book sucked, and all of us were in other AP classes, and we had three other books going on in class right then and our teacher wasn't the one who had set the syllabus anyway, so he relented and gave us better, less head-banging-into-wall things to read, like The Sun Also Rises.
As it happened, I only read the first two pages before the thing was decided, because, hate, as Sars would say, and because I had AP Euro, American, English, plus physics, plus precal, plus a million other things going on. I put the book away and thought no more of it.
Until freshman year of college. Until Death & Dying In American Culture, one of the coolest classes ever and probably the only one in which I will ever get to write a serious paper on color symbolism in Heathers. But I'm supposed to read As I Lay Dying, and I'm supposed to be 200 pages in by Thursday night, and it's late Wednesday and I haven't started, because, hate. And college. And pot, and staying up all night and eating french fries and getting busted by a cop named Jerry Garcia, and working at the consolidated high school as a "bathroom girl". In other words, busy.
So I leave Iman's, the only late night hangout for people not old enough to drink, because it's still freshman year and I have Homework To Do because I'm not flunking out yet.
I go back to my dorm room, still a little high, settle down in my bed, and start trying to wend my way through the books' tortured sentences, the ones that go on and on all day. I keep trying to figure out something else about the characters than the facts that they are disgusting and inspiring hate in my heart. I really, really don't care about why you built the coffin on the bevel, dude. I don't.
Then I get to one of the Vardaman chapters, and it's one line.
The chapter heading, and one line, and then a blank page and another segment starting on the next page, and on that left page with all the blank space, it says, "My mother is a fish." That's it. That's all.
I closed the book. I looked around very carefully. My room still appeared to be as it had been when I had left it earlier that night. I open the book back up. The sentence has not gone away, or stopped sucking, or started to make sense.
I put the book down, said "Fuck this," and went back to Iman's. As I recall it, they hadn't even bussed my drink off the table when I got back, but that could be selective editing on the part of my memory, since that happened a lot with the "my people" table at that restaurant over the years.
Mama Debbie said later that it couldn't possibly be that bad, so we started to read it together, until the night we got drunk and she confided to me sloppily that she wasn't going to finish the book, that she hated everyone in it and that for her own peace of mind that book ended "And they all died and went to hell, the end."
One time when we were intoxicated on a particularly giggly drug, the Artist and I, as is our wont, started asking Jeeves ridiculous questions, one of which was "Should William Faulkner Die?" When it didn't produce a website to that effect, we vowed to one day rent www.williamfaulknershoulddie.com and simply load a scan of the offending page as our evidence.
My mother is a fish. Gaaaaaahhhhh.
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