Accommodatingly

funny hat

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve

This is my favorite picture of LaBelle. She came to us by way of Helene, a petite French lady who lived downstairs from us in New York. When Helene died, she left us LaBelle in her will, along with a small stipend for her care.

LaBelle took a while to adjust to her new home: three other cats competing for territory and attention made for a tough transition. But she eventually established herself as alpha cat (particularly after Cleo passed), and her hostility towards us abated. She would sit in laps at inopportune times (at the dinner table, while we were on the computer) and purr at decibels high enough to be heard across the room.

LaBelle lost a lot of weight earlier this year, and after many trips to the vet and trying lots of avenues of treatment, we decided today that she’d grown so thin and lethargic that it was time for us to let her go.

So long, LaBelle. I always felt badly that I couldn’t sing to you in French like Helene did. I hope that you find each other in the beyond.

The Movers Who Pack have just left. Tomorrow morning the Cat Movers and the Movers Who Load All Our Stuff Into a Truck arrive. Our house– that is, the one we’re losing leaving– has all its furniture intact but all our smaller belongings packed and sealed in durable cardboard, except for the stuff I’m taking in our car and the stuff I’ll be using (tomorrow, when the house is truly empty) to clean it. It’s a truly melancholy feeling to sit in an empty-but-not-empty house and blog. I miss Jessie and Nathan. Our cats are confused and restless, but they’ll survive. (Geno and LaBelle spent the hours of packing, as intended, locked uneasily into the spacious laundry room; Cosmo escaped and cowered under furniture upstairs– the combination of tension and roundness in his body when he’s freaked out and hiding reminds me of those enormous, solid balls of rubber bands.) It’s like Thom Gunn’s 1960s poem about cats exploring an empty house, except in reverse. I’m glad we’re using a Cat Mover.

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Unexpected literary discovery occasioned by our move, part xliv: the ninth issue (from 2001) of Mark Nowak’s journal Cross Cultural Poetics. I regularly disagree with his approach to literature-in-general– though I always admire his labor activism– but this issue is a gem: part of a long poem that ended up in Mark’s good first book; Elizabeth Willis with a smart essay about folk culture, the Thirties, the Sixties and Niedecker; Eric’s articulately admiring review of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You; and a striking, sharp-tongued, convincing personal essay by Tisa Bryant, of whom I had never before heard, about her early life of blue- and pink-collar jobs.

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Bryant appears to be part of a Bay Area circle of queer-positive youngish women writers– sort of a next-generation Kelsey Street Press crew?– who like fragmentation and “experiment” but also like passionate lyricism: it’s the same scene that seems to have welcomed Liz Waldner, whose poetry I like an awful lot, and Elizabeth Treadwell, whose poetry I sometimes like (and, of course, some other writers whose work I don’t like).

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Here’s a set of Bryant’s prose poems. And here’s a neat interview conducted this year.

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UPDATE: our grief and condolences to Mrs Coulter and Lee on the loss of their, and our, favorite Moo Cat. You can’t play with her anymore, but you can still look at the sweet photograph.
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As I type, Cosmo has emerged, warily, from his hiding place under the futon. Good for him. Hey, Jordan has a blog!

he thinks he’s still the baby

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

Geno in the bouncy seat.

friday cat blogging

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

this is the closest la belle and cosmo have ever been to each other without a fight erupting. thank the sunbeam, i guess.

Nathan in the Boppy

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

Cosmo in the Boppy

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

Nathan and Cosmo both have found that the Boppy is great for chilling out in.

geno meets nathan

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

we’re home. the cats are happy to see me and steve, but skeptical of their new human.

In the wide world of poetry, there’s good stuff over at Silliman’s this weekend: a prose poem Xmas card from the poet Sheila E. Murphy, with whose work I am otherwise unfamiliar; a long think-piece about the sociology of poetry, including speculation as to “why, in 2005, poetry is flourishing and theory is not”; and amusing hate mail from Mr. Wright, who has probably sent more such poison-pen letters by now than Robert Pollard has written songs.

And that’s not even counting the electronica Rob Pollard, a friend I don’t see enough anymore, whose music is worth checking out.

Speaking of friends we don’t see enough, Jenny has won a major award from Columbia, of the kind that normally go to full professors. Cool beans. Read her work.

And on the even-smaller scale of our household, Jessie and I get to stay home for Xmas, go out for Chinese food, and see a movie, for the first time ever, not because we have abandoned her family, but because we are too pregnant to get on a plane. She gave me, among many other extremely cool and eminently cherishable presents, the softest bathrobe ever, bizarre Southeast Asian candy (no durian fruit, though– not in season, I guess), and this record, and this record, and this record, and other cute things that I’m not going to tell you about, but which were certainly the right things to get me.

Jessie’s mom got me this record, which is also pretty great. How can folks admire the Hold Steady and not dig the Boss’s ’70s recordings? (This reviewer has the same idea.) Jessie’s sister Robin got me the snarky, charming new full-length from Nothing Painted Blue, whose songwriter has ceased blogging as of today.

Jessie also got me a goat. Give a goat yourself. Or a basketball backboard, or mosquito netting, or a fruit tree. Great idea.

Back in the quasi-public sphere, Josh Marshall puts it better than I could: “Merry Christmas, both to those for whom it is a central religious celebration and to those for whom it is a secular holiday of giving and togetherness.” And Happy Hannukah. And who could forget Saturnalia? Happy complete solstice holidays, everyone. And to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere: enjoy your summer break.

UPDATE: left-leaning holiday kittens! I’m told that the kittens in question are neutral between religion and irreligion, which makes them even cuter in my book.

Had a wonderful meal last night, am almost done (really!) with the scholarly book I am writing, but slept badly and woke up feeling unexpectedly icky. (So did Jessie, but she got back to sleep: in fact, she’s sleeping right now.)

Why icky? Not because I learned that I am guaranteed to miss the Lynx home opener against Connecticut, and that I am giving a reading in Washington, DC while the Mystics play Connecticut across town, meaning that the only way I get my Lindsay Whalen fix is if we can get ourselves to a Sun home game. That’s fine. It’s not like I won’t see other Lynx games, and it’s not like we won’t see Connecticut on TV. And it’s pretty great that the league can come up with a schedule so far in advance, especially since it includes an ESPN2 game every Tuesday night. Yay!

No, I’m feeling icky this morning because I haven’t seen enough pictures of cats on the Interwebs. Easy to solve, once it’s properly diagnosed: Cats in Sinks. The oddly competitive Kitten War. The ever-popular Infinite Cat Project. And Kitten’s Pyjamas. And in only distantly related, but somehow consoling, viewing, a nice cup of tea.

All better? Well, not quite, but the cats are cute. Back to chapter seven…

Anyone who reads us regularly may find this a little strange. I know I do.

So, do I hand out eviction notices to the furry members of the family? Let’s go over the pros and cons of cat ownership:

Cons:

1. They contribute to my wheeziness/sneeziness.
2. They attack each other with blood curdling screeches (think Diamanda Galas) at 2 in the morning.
3. They eat too fast and then barf up their food, often in inconvenient places. This sometimes results in one finding the pile with one’s stockinged feet.
4. They poop and pee in a plastic box (if you’re lucky and they haven’t found somewhere else to do it) which they then expect you to clean up for them.
5. They leave every piece of upholstered furniture in the house covered in a grayish cloud of fur.
6. Black clothes? Are you crazy?
7. You can’t enter the kitchen without one of them underfoot, begging as if he or she hasn’t had food in weeks and will hate you forever if you don’t immediately start handing out treats.
8. They cost a shit load of money to take care of (food, litter, vet appts, toys, extra vacuum cleaner bags).
9. You spend money on cute toys and instead they knock (often fragile) things off of shelves to amuse themselves.
10. Your bed? You think that’s your bed? You are just allowed to sleep in it because of the warmth you provide.

Pros:
1. They are cute and cuddly. When they feel like it.

And yet, here I am doing the equation in my brain, and the cats are coming out on top. I think it’s some primitive form of feline mind control.