20141027.0718

A thought has nagged at me for some time.

There is an association of writers and writerly activities such as the study and teaching of language and literature with cat ownership--if "ownership" is the right term to use with pets, generally, and cats in particular. I suffer from it ("suffer" because of the, ahem, "commentaries" they leave). So do many others who write or who are engaged with writing. And I have to wonder why it is so. For cats are notoriously independent and all too uncaring, doing such things as knocking over plates or eating underwear (as happens to one colleague), or pissing on carpets or books (the last particularly grievous to those who, like me, study writing). They do not come when called, they act dismissively in many cases (the three with which I live are somewhat exceptional, as visitors have noted). In short, they treat the writer and scholar as the rest of the world tends to treat the writer and scholar--and the writer and scholar complains of how the rest of the world acts.

Why, then, the association with cats?

I admit that the idea is not terribly well-formed in my mind. Part of me wants to put together a paper, which may or may not be serious, on the depiction of cats in association with writers and scholars; I am sure that there is material to consider. Pangur Bán is one example, certainly, and there are doubtlessly others to examine. That part of me, though, may merely be my scholarly bent coming to the fore; always, I want to do the work of putting together a paper, even though I have many others to which I need to attend already and insufficient time to attend to them all. It makes me something of a caricature of a scholar that with each encounter I think first of "How can I make that a paper?" rather than some other kind of engagement that many would suggest is more fulfilling than the purportedly distant and abstract, rarefied and perhaps reified treatment offered by an academic paper of whatever length. And they may well be right who would say such things.

The point is getting lost.

Perhaps it is the kind of topic that I could suggest to those students in my literature classes who search for topics on which to write, the treatment of cats in association with scholarship. Such a tactic is one I have seen deployed in classes I have taken; one of my own professors flatly admitted to me that he uses one assignment he gives his graduate students as a way to stay current in the scholarship in his field. It is something I do with my own students, albeit with less success, undergraduates being what they are. Still, if I want to tease out what is going on in anything that resembles a prevailing association of writers/scholars and cats, it is a thing I ought to consider. For if and when I see sufficient to support the idea that there *is* an association in popular culture, then I can work to plumb what it means that the association is present. It will help me to understand better, even if I never do write the paper that suggests itself...