Monthly Archives: August 2022

Cats in Space

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Those of you who follow my blog know of my enduring love for cats – and not just my own. Last week my blog post was about cats in mysteries (https://butidigress.blog/2022/08/21/mysterious-cats/), so this week I’m going to tackle cats in another genre – science fiction and fantasy. Because science fiction books aren’t as predominant as they once were, I’ve expanded my source material to include various other media.

Let’s start with books, though. The most famous cat in a work of fantasy fiction is undoubtedly the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (who shared the stage for a brief appearance of Alice’s cat Dinah). Notable for appearing suddenly then disappearing slowly starting at its tail until only its grin was left, the Cheshire Cat is sometimes considered a guiding spirit for Alice, directing her to various destinations around Wonderland.

(The Cheshire Cat is prominently featured on t-shirts and other Alice memorabilia, including a coffee mug that pictures the cat’s scene with Alice. When a hot liquid is poured into the mug, the cat vanishes, leaving only its grin. This is, I think, much more entertaining than the mugs that feature ladies who shed their clothes under the same circumstances. But I digress.)

Superstar writer and opinionated curmudgeon Robert A. Heinlein had a soft spot for cats, which appeared in a number of his works. A cat named Pete appeared in his novel A Door Into Summer, which was inspired by an actual cat that Heinlein once owned. (Or that owned him. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.) Another book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (shades of Lilian Jackson Braun!) featured a cat named Pixel that mysteriously appeared wherever the narrator happened to be. Cats played minor roles in some of his other books, including one named Mr. Underfoot, which I have been known to call all my cats at various times.

Perhaps best known to modern readers are Hermione’s ginger cat Crookshanks and Argus Filch’s cat Mrs. Norris in the Harry Potter series of books. Mrs. Norris was somehow able to detect student misbehavior at Hogwarts School, which happened a lot. Crookshanks comes to no harm, but Mrs. Norris is temporarily frozen by the gaze of the basilisk in Chamber of Secrets, though she first appeared in Sorceror’s Stone. (She gets unfrozen and suffers no permanent harm.) In the book, Mrs. Norris is described as bony and dust-colored, but in the films she was portrayed by three much more impressive Maine Coons.

Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series of fantasy books features a feline character, Tybalt, King of Cats, a fairy (Cait Sidhe, technically) who can transform from cat to human size and shape, in which form he woos and weds October after an on-again-off-again semi-adversarial relationship. (The character Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet is referred to as “prince of cats” for his sleek and violent nature. But I digress again.)

When it comes to cats in SF&F film and TV, we have Ripley’s cat Jonesy, who along with her manages to survive in Alien. There is Pyewacket in Bell, Book, and Candle, a film about witches that ought to be a Halloween movie but is instead a Christmas film, much the way Die Hard is, because it takes place during the winter holiday. And then there is Orion, the cat in Men in Black, whose collar proves to contain an important plot point.

The overwhelming winner for cats in media, however, is Star Trek. In the original series (or The Original Series as it’s now known), there are two different episodes that feature cats. One is “Assignment Earth,” which features a cat named Isis who may or may not be a human being, and “Catspaw,” featuring Sylvia, a woman who may or may not be a cat.

There are two other Star Trek cats of note. One is Data’s cat Spot in the TV series The Next Generation and the movies Star Trek Generations and Star Trek Nemesis. Spot is an orange tabby, but that’s about all the continuity it has. It has been portrayed as a Somali cat and as an American shorthair. It (I use the term advisedly) has been identified as male or female on different episodes, though I think we have to settle on female, as Spot gets pregnant at one point. In one episode, Data writes and recites an “Ode to Spot,” the first stanza of which is:

“Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses,
contribute to your hunting skills, and natural defenses.”

In the series Star Trek: Discovery, the character Booker has a Maine Coon cat named Grudge, which was meant to make a one-episode guest appearance but became a more featured player in a number of episodes. We know Booker has left the ship for good when he leaves Grudge with Captain Burnham. Grudge is described by various characters as “fat,” possibly due to a thyroid condition, but more likely attributable to the fact that Grudge is portrayed by two Maine Coons that are, at 18 pounds, at the top end of the range for that breed.

There’s more that could be said about cats in science fiction and fantasy, from the Tom & Jerry movie Blast Off to Mars to one Simpsons hyper-violent “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoon called “Flay Me to the Moon.” (Scratchy is the cat. I always have trouble remembering that.)

I’m sure there are others I’ve missed, and I’m equally sure that outraged cat-fen will point this out to me. My husband wanted me to include the 1935 cartoon “Dancing on the Moon,” which featured a number of animal pairs including two cats. And now I have.

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Mysterious Cats

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Books and cats. Cats and books. They go together like a hot dog and mustard. Well, no they don’t. And I don’t like mustard on my hot dogs anyway.

What I meant was that cats appear in a lot of books (and poems, songs, paintings and other forms of art, probably including architecture). They’re just so adorable and full of personality (I didn’t say “purr-sonality” – you’re welcome) that authors can’t resist them.

I studied some cat literature when I was an English major in college. There’s the cat in Kipling’s Just So Stories: “I am the cat who walks by himself and all places are alike to me.” And, maybe the best-known of all, T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the source material for the Broadway musical Cats. Perhaps the most famous lines are “The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter/It isn’t just one of your holiday games/You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter/When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.”

(Our cat Toby has at least three names. In addition to Toby, I may or may not have referred to him as “Toto-Booboo Baby,” and we also call him “Green-Eyed Monster.” But I digress.)

But contemporary books are populated by cats as well. Primary among the genres that feature them are mysteries and fantasy/science fiction. This week I’ll tackle mysteries and next week I’ll go on to F&SF, as it’s known.

Probably the best-known series of mysteries featuring cats is the “The Cat Who…” books by Lilian Jackson Braun. This was a series that started back in the 60s, took a break for a couple of decades, and eventually racked up 29 books with titles like The Cat Who Could Read Backwards and The Cat Who Read Shakespeare through The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers in 2007, the last one before the author died at the age of 97.

I was a devotee of the series, which featured cat-sleuths Koko and Yum Yum, until The Cat Who Moved a Mountain (1992), when the plot was an idiotic one featuring two rival clans, the Taters and the Spuds, which was (I think) meant to offer biting social commentary but fell beyond flat. Later there was a satire called The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun, by Robert Kaplow, featuring cats named Ying-Tong and Poon-Tang solving the murder of Braun herself.

Rita Mae Brown, the author of the sensational autobiographical novel Rubyfruit Jungle, credited her cat Sneaky Pie Brown as co-author of the Mrs. Murphy series, which included titles such as Murder She Meowed and Claws and Effect. The feline Mrs. Murphy shared the stage with a postmistress sleuth named Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen, a dog named Tee Tucker, and another cat named Pewter, all of whom were definitely second bananas.

Another series is the Midnight Louie books by Carole Nelson Douglas, which started with Catnap and continued through titles including Cat in an Indigo Mood and Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit. Las Vegas PR specialist Temple Barr and Louie (who was based on an actual cat) have adventures that include “wacky friends and sexy guys.” I read this series for a while, too, but quit not because of any flaw in the writing, but the endless failure to resolve any given plot line.

Cozy mysteries are rife with cat detectives as well. One series takes place in the Cat Cafe, a small establishment in Massachusetts. Writer Cate Conte uses the setting for a series of mysteries including Purrder She Wrote (don’t blame me) and The Tell Tail Heart (still not my fault). (There is a cat cafe in Dayton, Ohio, called The Catfe, where there are many cats up for adoption. I’ve never been there, though I’ve meant to go. I just know I’d come home with one or more of them. But I digress again.)

Another cozy cat mystery series with special appeal to me is the Cat in the Stacks series, which features a librarian named Charlie and a cat named Diesel. Titles are a plethora of puns, including Hiss Me Deadly, Cat Me If You Can, Careless Whiskers, and The Pawful Truth. I guess the author, Miranda James, just couldn’t help herself.

I’ve left out a bunch of other series, mostly cozies (for those of you who don’t know, these are mysteries where the sleuth is an amateur and all the violence happens offstage). But you get the idea. The cat usually uncovers some clue that helps solve the murder, or even has telepathic powers or internal speech. (We have a cat that has demonstrated telepathic powers, though not in the context of solving a mystery, unless “Why is my water dish empty?” is a mystery, which I guess it is to her. More digression.)

If you have any cat mysteries to recommend, please do. My TBR pile is threatening to topple over and crush me, but there’s always room for one more cat.

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Things I Know Too Much About

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If you thought I was going to say, “my neighbors’ sex life,” prepare to be disappointed. No, what I’m talking about is those Facebook memes that say, “What could you give a TED talk on right now?” or “What could you talk on for 20 minutes without preparation?”

I have at times compared my brain to a steel sieve. At other times, I’ve said it’s like a steel trap, one that’s unhinged and rusty. But actually, what I think my brain most resembles is a dusty old closet with a sticky door. I don’t know how I’ll get it open and I don’t know exactly what’s in there, but I’m fairly certain there are some things in there that I don’t even remember I knew.

I have friends who have epic knowledge about various and assorted topics, from video games (and their creators) to evolution to dairy farming to the Irish language. If I were ever on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, I would have plenty of “phone-a-friends” to use as lifelines (if I could remember their phone numbers, which I can’t).

I have all sorts of useless trivia stuffed in the corners of my brain: Armadillos are the only animals besides humans that can get leprosy. Henry Heimlich (he of the eponymous Maneuver) was a drum major at my alma mater and was married to Jane Murray, daughter of Arthur Murray, of dance lesson fame. Pear Ripple wine actually tastes pretty good. John Milton invented the word “pandemonium.” A “cenotaph” is a gravestone with no body buried under it. Some of these facts would not even be useful on Jeopardy, or even at a bar trivia night.

But when it comes to things I actually could give a 20-minute talk on, I have a choice of subjects.

First, there’s bipolar disorder. I’ve got a lot of experience with that. I have bipolar disorder myself and have been diagnosed with it for decades now. I’ve seen countless therapists and a few psychiatrists and have been on medications for decades. I’ve written two books on the subject, based on my other blog, Bipolar Me (bipolarme.blog), which I’ve been writing weekly for almost nine years – 468 posts. In those posts, I’ve covered topics including depression and anxiety, self-harm and suicidal ideation, lobotomy and shock therapy, plus a lot of everyday symptoms and treatments for the disorder.

I’ve written about why you can’t say assorted famous people have (or had) bipolar or various other disorders. I’ve engaged in the debate over what causes bipolar disorder and whether psychiatric drugs are helpful. I’ve even written about why people with bipolar disorder sometimes aren’t able to take showers (one of my most popular posts, for some reason).

Another topic I can expound on extensively (and have, much to my husband’s chagrin) is country singers and songwriters. I can tell you why Willie Nelson’s Shotgun Willie album was so important; how The Sound in Your Mind prefigures Stardust; how “On the Road Again” was written; what movies he’s been in (and why one of them was called Honeysuckle Rose); how Django Reinhardt influenced his guitar style (and who Django Reinhardt was); and what other singers have recorded his songs (Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” for example, was one of his).

I can talk endlessly about Kris Kristofferson’s early encounters with Johnny Cash, his marriage to Rita Coolidge (and how it broke up) and his hot fling with Janis Joplin; his political activism; his military career; how he came to write “Why Me, Lord?”; and what the original lyrics to “Sunday Morning Coming Down” included. I can expound on his education and his fondness for the poetry of William Blake. I can even tell you the specific time he stopped drinking.

I know which country songs were written by Shel Silverstein (yes, that Shel Silverstein). I can talk about the Outlaw Country movement and underappreciated women songwriters like Gail Davies, Matraca Berg, and Gretchen Peters. I can even talk about alliteration and internal rhyme in the lyrics of Kinky Friedman and how his songs were reflected in the mystery novels he wrote. (Yes, I have two degrees in English and have never gotten over it entirely. But I digress. In fact, this whole post has been something of a digression.)

And that’s why I never get invited to parties.

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Adopt-a-Human

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As I may have mentioned before, most of our family cats have come from shelters. We’ve gone there looking for specific kinds of cats – calicos or torties, orange tabbies, or frequent talkers – and we’ve found them. But some of the best relationships we’ve had with cats have been the ones where they have chosen us rather than the other way around.

The first one that chose us was Maggie. Or rather she chose my husband. One night after work, he was walking across a dark, rainy parking lot when a small, wet, scraggly gray tabby accosted him. “Meow, meow,” she said, meaning “Take me home with you right now.” Dan said, “Yes, I understand. You’re coming home with me.” Then he scooped her up and put her in his car. We named her Maggie (really Magdalena, but it was too much name for her).

Maggie had to live in the garage for a little while. After all, we never introduce a new cat into the house until it’s had a vet check, de-worming, and all its shots. We don’t want to take the chance of exposing our other cats (and there are always other cats). Besides, she smelled terrible and wanted to rub herself all over Dan.

Even when she was allowed into the house, she was unnaturally devoted to Dan. At the sound of his voice cooing at her, she would instantly flop over on her side and begin writhing in ecstasy. I always said if they were the same species, I’d never have had a chance.

Django was another cat that chose our house as his home.

He was a big (but not fat), robust gray and white cat that appeared in our woods one day and came up to our front steps when we put out a snack for him. Then he hung around after chowing down. Soon he was one of the gang. (Django was named for Django Reinhardt, the famous guitarist who made Gypsy Swing popular. I figured if Dan could have a cat named Garcia, we could also have one named Django. But I digress.)

Django also had an unnatural relationship with Dan – or at least with his arm. Whenever Dan was working on his computer, Django would try to mount his arm and boink his elbow. I honestly thought he was going to drill a hole in it. (The vet said there was nothing wrong with the cat; he was just a horny bastard.) Django was, and remained, a sturdy cat, even after he developed cancer.

Yet another cat who decided to keep us is Dushenka, the calico pictured here. (“Dushenka” is Russian for “Little Soul.”) She was a stray who hung around the neighborhood for a while, scoping us out. Then we didn’t see her for a while. One day, there she was, ambling through the garden like she had just made up her mind. After all, there was a sign over our door, visible only to cats, that said, “Free food and pets here!”

Dushenka still remembers her days as a stray. Now and then she likes to go walkabout if we happen to leave the door open a slit. She never goes far and always walks right back in like she owned the place (which she does) after she satisfies her wanderlust. Nowadays, she sleeps by Dan’s head every night.

Perhaps the most stray of all the cats that adopted us is Toby, a gray tiger who hitched a ride to Dan’s workplace in a delivery truck, all the way from Michigan to Ohio. After a few days of living in the warehouse, he was eager to come home with Dan. Since then, Toby has turned into quite a mouser, leaving little half-carcasses around the house for us to find and aspiring to bite the little birdies that frequent the feeder outside the window cat perch.

I’m sure that Fate has another cat out there somewhere who needs us as much as we need it. It’s just a matter of waiting for it to choose us.

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