The real cat woman...

Fifth Life of the Cat Woman
by Kathleen Dexter



Here we go again. Romantic fantasy? Not my sort of thing. I picked this up in Borders one day and started reading. Thirty pages later I was hooked. Bizarre, but extremely well written, a compelling tale.

Temptation: leaving Eden leads to disaster. The Catwoman is hiding out on a mirage, surrounded by 50 cats, her orchards and fear. Gifted with nine lives by her first mother, Kat has lived through witch hunts, ignorance, and dire poverty. Now in her fifth life, she only wants refuge . . . until Angelo convinces her to teach. She teaches the "latrine version" of history - that lived by real people. She teaches about fear, violence, ignorance, poverty, and hunger, mesmerizing her students with her (real-life) stories. But when tragedy strikes, will the witch hunts begin again for the woman who is "too well-liked by cats?"

Kathleen Dexter self-published this book, which won a national self-publishing award and was then republished nationally. Apparently she has not written anything else of note. I couldn't even find a picture of her.

Know your muse...

Athena visits Apollo and the Muses by Bartholomeus Spranger (16th century)


Here you can find a wonderful essay "Love and Longing: The World of Poets and Muses" by Robin Frederick. An excerpt:

Perhaps the best way to describe an encounter with the muse is this: somewhere in your past there is a person who comes back to you in dreams. Maybe you barely knew them, perhaps it was only a brief encounter but you have never forgotten the face, the moment, the sudden sense of recognition. The image of this person is surrounded with a special quality of light - a luminous glow that is not present in other memories. There is something magical and transformative about it. This is the face of the muse. The image lives on in your memory, evoking a sense of yearning and the desire to be worthy of this luminous being. The statement that truly reveals the presence of a muse is: "Everything I did, I did for you."

She's a singer/songwriter, so there's some nice mp3 stuff here too.

Go to: Robin Frederick

Love beyond love...

Lolita
by Vladimir nabokov

Just reread this. One of the most important novels of the 20th century.

“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have."

Humbert Humbert in Lolita


Vladimir Nabokov

Delicious skulduggery...

The Debt to Pleasure
by John Lanchester

Right from the start we know that the narrator is a snob & a gourmand. Gradually we learn that he is also the epitome of evil. Hilarious and brilliant!!!





















John Lanchester

Getting all wound up...

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murkami


Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician. Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century. If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight.

Haruki Murakami

Chasing after dad...

Summer in the Land of Skin
by Jody Gehrman


Yet another search for a dead parent. Anna Medina, 25, leaves her empty life in California and goes to Bellingham, Washington to find her dead (suicide) father's former best friend and fellow luthier, Bender. There she falls into an orgy of gin, music and general craziness in the company of Lucinda and Arlan, who allow her to sleep on their couch.

Bender is a drunk and hasn't made a guitar in years. But at one point he gives Anna a package of her father's letters to him, which begin at about the same age that she is in the present. At first, she is repulsed by her father's accounts of his wanderings and love affairs in Europe and elsewhere, but she soon discovers that the only way to save herself is to immerse herself in her and her father's past.

I am told that this, like some of the others below, is a "chick book." Not the sort of thing I would normally be into. But I think it is well written, with some good characters, and it addresses something that is important for most humans.

Jody Gehrman is an award winning playwright. She teaches at Mendocino College.


Jody Gehrman