I Love Their Sly Faces
Dear All,
First of all, welcome to all of you new subscribers!
This is the latest episode of Don’t Press That Button, a newsletter about books and music and movies and cats and baseball and whatnot. As the name would indicate, we are very cautious about buttons in these parts. We’re not about to encourage you to go pressing buttons willy-nilly. It’s true that everyone likes pressing novelty buttons: buttons that say “NO!” or “YES!” or “NO PROBLEM!” or that make gruesome fart noises when you press them. I may even own a few buttons like these myself. I may even own a plastic pickle with a button that you press to make it yodel. However, the presser of the novelty button knows that they are testing the patience and the sanity of all those around them. One or two presses will likely be permitted, but if you give into your darkest desires and just start pressing the shit out of that thing, people will come to kill your button, and maybe you.
However, I’ve investigated the button below, and all it does is subscribe you to this newsletter. There’s no funny saying or sound, but there’s no danger either. If you’re new here, and you’d like to stick around, you can safely do so by clicking on it.
About the Cats
The Curator, as its cover hints, features more than a few cats. If that didn’t give it away, I bet the epigraph from Charles Portis’s True Grit1 did:
As usual, I don’t want to give too much away, but in the unnamed city where the action of the novel takes place, many people worship cats, and even the strays that populate the streets and tenements are regarded as holy creatures. One specific cat, Talmadge XVII, plays a key role in the story. There are three famed hotels in the city, and each hotel has its own iconic cat, an official mascot. Talmadge XVII is the Metropole’s cat and, like all Talmadges, she is a big white pillow of an individual. As you might have surmised, she is also the seventeenth of her name.
Three or four months ago I saw a photograph going around that was reputed to be the oldest ever taken of a cat. It isn’t, but it’s a wonderful photo, and very like how I imagined Talmadge:
Some readers are strictly averse to anthropomorphism, and to an extent I get it: given that animals don’t share our language, for instance, it’s certainly an ask on the part of an author to get the audience to come along on a story that an animal is telling in a first-person voice. I don’t mind that particular suspension of disbelief in the slightest.2
Now, having said that, XVII and all the other cats in The Curator are not anthropomorphized. We follow XVII’s movements at times, and her behavior certainly affects the action, but I was careful to (I hope!) never make her feelings explicit. XVII mostly just does cat stuff — make herself extremely present, hunt, sleep, disappear to who-knows-where and reappear mysteriously — and the characters can only speculate about what her doings might mean, if anything.
I’ve been lucky to minister to the demands of several cats — in order: Django, Gibson, Boo, Barney, Frankie, Colby — in my life, and right now, we have those last three. Our oldest, Barney, would probably thrive in the position of luxury hotel cat. There is nothing that he seems to like better than being adored by visitors. He insists on it. Barney has made a cameo in this newsletter before, and here he is again:
Anyway, I love cats; they’re a comfort and a fascination.
The Latest
Publication day (3/7) for The Curator is fast approaching, but you still have time to enter the Goodreads contest to win a free copy.
If you’d like to order a signed copy, my friends at Oblong Books are always ready to set you up.
If you are interested in checking into one of my events, in-person or virtual, my previous newsletter has the info.
I don’t have plans to visit the UK, but I did sign some bookplates for the copies that the wonderful people at Princeps Books and The Broken Binding will be selling. I’m sure you if you contact them they can help you get order one of those. Here’s what some of the plates look like, stamp cats courtesy of Kathleen Jennings:
It was very nice of Kirkus to name The Curator to its list of Buzzworthy Books.
Recommendations
Like everyone else, I am hugely impressed by The Last of Us, and totally invested.
I’m a long time Elvis Costello fan, but I had mostly overlooked Punch the Clock, which is glorious. I’ve had it spinning nearly non-stop for weeks.
As always, my thanks for subscribing, and in case you ever have a question or a comment or just want to say hi, if you reply to the email, I will see it. I’m also over on Instagram if you want to follow along there.
All Best,
Owen
Off the top of my head, three novels with animal protagonists that I love are: Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, Scary Stories for Young Foxes by Christian McKay Heidicker, Animal Farm by George Orwell.