I started this post a week ago

I. Jenny D on her new feline: "His name is Max, and he used to frequent a fruit stall in Brighton Beach."

II. Speaking of which: Over Xmas I reread—quite at random!—A Cricket in Times Square...and I just saw David Ulin's appreciation of it at the L.A. Times. I didn't know it was the book's 50th anniversary!

All in all, I enjoyed revisiting the book—though I did raise my eyebrows during the Chinatown scenes...

III. Dogs in New York: The New Yorker
on the NYC cult, ca. , around Charles Portis's great novel The Dog of the South

IV. Speaking of Portis: My friend in Little Rock, John Moran, alerted me to this tidbit in a local paper: one of its bloggers noticed that the film version of Portis's first novel, Norwood, is now streaming on Netflix!

Joe Namath and Dom DeLuise are in it...

Here's what I said about it in a footnote to my 2003 Portis piece in The Believer:

If the film of True Grit somewhat revises the book, the less-known screen adaptation of Norwood (Jack Haley, Jr., 1970), also scripted by Marguerite Roberts, scrambles both Norwood and True Grit. Glen Campbell (Grit’s LaBoeuf) here plays Norwood, and Kim Darby (Mattie) is Rita Lee Chipman; Mattie’s unacknowledged teenage longing for LaBoeuf (“If he is still alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be happy to hear from him,” Mattie writes at the novel’s close) becomes consummated in Norwood, or just about. Roberts’s Grit script shunted Mattie in favor of the bigger-than-life Rooster; for this film the screenwriter dilutes some of Norwood’s cool by revealing that Rita Lee has been made pregnant by another man before they meet—a significant, possibly feminist tweak of the original plot. (Incidentally, the contra-hippie theme that runs through Portis, made more explicit in Gringos, is elaborated in this film, most notably when Campbell-as-Norwood takes the stage after a numbing sitar exhibition. He sings a good-timey country number presciently called “Repo Man” to the uncomprehending, wigged-out crowd, until a more lysergically inclined combo unseats him.) As it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to write about this film again, let it be noted that the date of Norwood’s theatrical release, a year after Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for Best Picture, lends Campbell-as-Norwood a certain Voightian frisson during the scenes in New York, where he sticks out like a Stetsoned sore thumb. Which makes the bit in Cowboy where Voight regards himself in the mirror and says approvingly, “John Wayne,” a sort of anticipatory gloss on Wayne co-star Campbell’s future appearance in Gotham. (The celluloid True Grit also spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.)

V. Speaking of New York: Doree Shafrir put together a list of her favorite New York fiction...Personal Days is in there between Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Richard Price's Lush Life!

Nine tails

For my latest Astral Weeks column at the L.A. Times, I look at Girl in the Arena, a very good YA novel by Lise Haines about modern gladiators. I quote from the start of Haines's book:

Ned was a serious asthmatic whose condition became aggravated by any small contact with cats. So he borrowed nine of his friends' tabbies and minxes and Persians and drove around in his VW Bug with the windows rolled up. The cats laced in and out of Ned's lap, moved along the back of his seat. . . . The plan was to drive around the city and pull right up to an emergency room, and then 4F all the way. He just couldn't find a hospital in time. The coroner said that Ned miscalculated the number of cats he needed in the car.

(I wound up borrowing some of the dire "prologue" that I concocted here for the story that I wound up reading at "Impossible Geometries" last night!)

The tawny cat's master plan

The evolutionary journey of the Barque Cats continues as the refugee cats seek asylum on Pshaw-Ra's planet, Mau, a world of ancient secrets and advanced science that Pshaw-Ra declares will bring about his goal of feline domination of the universe! Can Jubal and Chester stop the tawny cat's master plan? Do they even want to? Wouldn't cats running the universe actually be a good thing? Watch for Catacombs, the next in the Barque Cats series, coming from Del Rey.

—from note at end of Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's Catalyst

Cat-antango

"Track 1b" of Dzyd B. Kite's Rivette opus is now up at Order of the Exile. Sample tantalizing footnote:

Since cats are such notoriously intractable, "undirectable," animals, filmmakers who clear a space for them, such as Rivette here or Vigo in L'Atatlante, are adopting a very particular posture toward the world, one which inherently abjures complete control and welcomes contingency as a collaborator. In this light, the cat-killing in Tarr's Satantango becomes significant indeed.

And Levi tips us off to some great Gorey reproductions at Caustic Cover Critic.



Googling uncovers that McGregor was a sleeptalker; with his permission, his roommate began recording his nighttime monologues, some of which are listenable online (though NSFW).

Too late to stop now

I can't remember how I came across this blog—but it's fun if you're a Van Morrison fan: Patrick Maginty runs down his favorite VM albums, starting (I think?) with #36...he's down to #3. And he isn't just listing them, but writing full-fledged appreciations...(Earlier, he ran down his top 100 VM songs.)

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Over at the Poetry Foundation, Ron Regé, Jr. has an electrifying version of a Kenneth Patchen poem. (Did you know that he's the drummer for the excellent Lavender Diamond?!)

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Get rich quick scheme:
1) Find the cutest kitten
2) Buy/acquire it
3) Turn it into a cat model (for cat food, etc.)
4) = $$!