Joanna here: Just a small blog today, about writers and cats.
Writers and cats are rather ham and eggs, Laurel and Hardy, beans and franks partners. Obvious buddies.
There must be a reason for it. Some cats are obviously born with printers' ink under their claws.
I think it’s because writers sit for long periods of time not doing anything exciting like pounding in nails or cutting hair or making fine adjustment to the sniper scopes on precision rifles. They go typetypetypetype typetypetypetype typetypetypetype typetypetypetype and then sit for several minutes staring into the middle distance.
This is pretty much what cats do, allowing for an absence of tapetty tap tap.
“If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering, outspoken fellow, but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”
Mark Twain
That's a high compliment from Twain there. A good writer never says a word too much.
“The cat is the best anarchist.”
Ernest Hemingway
My cat is a very good anarchist, except she’s a lazy anarchist.
We can learn a lot from cats, I have always said.
“I believe that cats, descended from semi-social or asocial wild cats and having lived domestically with humans for probably less than 3,000 years, have no concept whatever of a rightful hierarchy of social or moral authority. It does not occur to a cat that any other being has any right, other than might, to its obedience, which is offered only out of immediate self-interest or personal affection. Cats are intensely opportunistic, practical anarchists.”
Ursula Le Guin
Some authors keep (and are kept by) cats. Some also write books about them.
That's best of all.
Come around sometime when your face is clean and we shall discuss the state of the world, the foolishness of humans, the prevalence of horsemeat, although we prefer the tenderloin side of a porterhouse, and our common difficulty in getting doors opened at the right time and meals served at more frequent intervals. I have got my staff up to five a day, but there is still room for improvement.
Raymond Chandler, in a letter, writing as his cat to another cat
Who among us has not assumed the identity of a cat in our correspondence?
"They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature.”
James Joyce
As with the rest of James Joyce, I have no idea what this means.
But he liked cats, so that is in his favor
“Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”
Colette
We just finished a post on travel and not one of us discussed how to pack your cat. This was an oversight on our part.
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, there never was a cat of such deceitfulness and sauvity.
T.S. Eliot
I have had a cat like that, (jo says darkly.)
So. In whatever path you take in life, do your pets make you more creative or do they just sit on your face at sunrise and demand to be fed?