towards a feminist poetics of catblogging

It has come to our attention at the View that there are absolutely no catblogging categories in this year's Australian Homecoming Blog-Queen Awards.

To discuss this absence, we asked several famous cat bloggers to contribute to our regular Friday Cat Salon.  The cats met in Paris in the wintergarden of l'Ecole Feline Freudienne at Sorbonne 19.  First to arrive was Lulu Irigarati, eminent psycho-catanalyst and writer of Je, Tu, Miaou: Towards a Feminist Poetics of Cat-blogging and I Lick Myself: Voyages in Feline Jouissance. She looked fresh and chic after a morning of scrabbling between the stairs in search of imaginary mites.

She was soon joined by Leonard Bloom, a raffish, older gent in a pin-striped suit with a black-spotted yellow underbelly.  Bloom is Professor of the Center for Contemporary Comparative Cat Studies at Catskills University. He is also the veteran of a thousand undergraduate cat-on-a-hot-tin-rootaramas, and is renowned for his incisive close readings of Dogs in Love and the discovery and publication of the fourth version of Lady Catterly's Lover.

The discussion opened with a debate about the definition of cat-blogging.

Lulu Irigarati:  Cat-blogging...it's impossible to say what it is.  One goes to say...that's it...and then it's that...only to find it's not that at all.

Leonard Bloom:  Personally, I'd like to make a distinction between the classical essay post and trivia such as posts that consist of a series of links to cat-zines.  Or like when someone just puts up a photograph of a cat's poo-hole and calls it a post!

Though once again, it's difficult to speak of cat-blogging and the traditional essay in one breath.  At its best, the cat-blog post evokes the letter form of old or maybe the political pamphlet.

Irigarati: Oui!  My point, exactement.  Cat-blogging -- it cannot be defined.  It resists all definitions and attempts at categorisation.  It is important to realise this, if one is to capitalise on the medium.

The cat bloggeur -- c'est une flanneur!  She wanders from one blog to the next, weaving a web of intertextualities so intricate no one possibly follow them, marking yet not marking her territory in cyberspace in a host of infinitesimal ways...

Bloom: Aren't you talking about dogs?

They were joined by a late arrival, Otto von ffurenburger, badboy of political cat-blogging, who hosts a collaborative blog by the name of lavalamps pawsduo, a mangulated Latin motto so obscure that no one else knows what the hell it means and no one really cares.

von ffurenburger appears to be slightly pissed; his chest-fur is dishevelled and shows the beginning of dreads.

von ffurenburger: The problem with most of these pussies who keep whinging on about how no one ever nominates their blog for anything is that they just don't have the numbers.  They've got to get where the strength is, into collaborative blogging.  At the end of the day, it's all political: it's all a numbers game.

Irigarati: But the cat-bloggeur... she has been in exile.  For centuries, she has foundered on the shores of Western phallocatry. She needs her own feline-to-feline interspace.  As well as the possibility of moving, within the interstices of hyper-reality, from space to space.

von ffurenburger: Man, we gave those pussies space but all they want to do is talk about their twats.  And how veterinary surgeons keep on pressuring them to have reconstructive surgery after every litter.

I mean, those pussies just need to get their pussies into gear!

Bloom: I'm interested in your definition of cat-bloggerie as a public, political sphere.  This relates to some of my own attempts to define the classic blog-post form and my fears about the invasion of what is essentially a public space by a first person, intimate, personal mode.

von ffurenburger: Yeah, I mean, fuck it.  Who wants to read all that emo-blog, purrstory shit anyway?  What's it got to do with Palestine?  Or Iraq?  Stuff I have absolutely no firsthand connection with but about which I have absolutely no compunction in offering my own personal analysis.

They were interrupted by a further late arrival, Jessie Wilful Cat-hair, a small, highly-strung silver tabby.  Cat-hair is renowned for her blog's focus on the small things of everyday life -- the crunch of cat-litter between claws, the delicate spray of vomit on a donah-cover, the twitch of a dropped gecko's tail, and also her photographs of 'furrlings' -- things she's made for her kittens from old cat-fur about the house.

She ignored the discussion totally and turned instead to face the facilitator.

Cat-hair: Why have you changed the balcony round again? You know I don’t like it when you change things. Like bringing more cats into the house and then [sob] the bedroom. You know I want things always to be the same -- for you always to feed us at the same time, go to bed at the same time, let me sleep in the same position, for Nothing Ever to Change!

And that's another thing -- where's my feed-bowl gone to?

von ffurenburger: And mine!

All: Yeah, where's the food, bitch?

Comments

[Laura]

GOLD

[ThirdCat]

What Laura said. And again.

[Pavlov's Cat]

And again, and again.

[nick cetacean]

Wow. What can I say but 'wow'.

And that you're putting me out of business.

Wow.

[elsewhere]

There was no mention of sushi.

[Laura]

Or catamites....probably for the best, really (although could you have worked in something about Eve Kosfluksy Catnip and The Epistemology of Sleeping in the Closet?

(Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery)

[Pavlov's Cat]

I feel there would also perhaps have been room for Cathairine McKitten on purrnography.

(What Laura said about flattery.)

[Pavlov's Cat]

To say nothing of McKitten's snaky sometime fiance My Cat Jeoffry Miaou Masson, and his controversial book 'In The Food Archives'.

Okay, stopping now. Not a moment too soon, either.

[Pavlov's Cat]

Erratum: 'In the Food Archives' was actually written by Janet Grimalkin. Sorry.

[elsewhere]

heh heh heh.

Even I don't have enough cats to branch out that far.

Wasn't Grimalkin a Harry Potter character?

PC -- you're lucky I never finished that campus novel I started.

In Sydney now for Guiltmas...blogging shall now move into the slow lane.

[Zoe]

I that post.
I my cat.

Words are not enough to express my admiration for that post.

[elsewhere]

Ta!

I'm impressed with what you can do with those little card suit things, but you spade your cat?

[Zoe]

*cough*spayed*cough*

[slithy toad]

Heh! I think this is brilliance, especially the catty group blog references.

[M-H]

Thanks for this, and thanks to Laura for the link. Pure gold indeed.

[helen]

I condemn the felocentric catblogging claque and their unexamined miscaninery. Where, where are the dogbloggers? Are they not, too, bloggers of small and furry nuisance animals who are too cute to eat, or shoot? I demand respect for the dogbloggers.

[redcap]

That is simply purrfect. I've often wondered what to do with those little hanks of moggy wool that gather in corners and float about the house. We had thought to make a spare cat from them, but our Mr Furpants wasn't keen on the idea.

[elsewhere]

No, a spare cat never goes down well!

[Pavlov's Cat]

"PC -- you're lucky I never finished that campus novel I started."

Why? Was I in it? Cripes.

Whew.

*Wipes brow*

[TimT]

Great, another blog to read.

[TimT]

I mean, it's not everyday you read a post which so comprehensively shows up one's own writing style!

Glorious stuff. I mean, it's early on in the year, but I really think this post needs an award.

[elsewhere]

Thanks, that's most kind.

(PC -- erm, there may have been one or two quotable quotes.)