Downward, Dog!
A cat leads a housepet into the grimy life, in a children's classic that's even better than I remembered
Creatures, furry-faces, Cats of Cats, welcome! In this brief outburst: a children’s book, and links losers like.
Babas au Rhum
I’ve been doing my prayer and reading cycle for years now, I’ve hit that early ’80s stretch where I read children’s books so many times that last time I gave up on revisiting old favorites, and yet somehow I never got around to picking up George Selden’s Irma and Jerry (action-packed illustrations by Leslie H. Morrill). I had fond, vague memories of this 1982 tale about the friendship between an anxious dog and a high-spirited cat in Greenwich Village. My memories underestimated things! Irma and Jerry is a real grimy gem.
The voice of Jerry, our narrator and cocker spaniel, is missish and high-romantic. Selden’s prose is intensely heterosexual (you will thrill to the many descriptions of Irma Cat’s opal eyes) and unmistakably camp. Selden’s use of dashes is masterful: dashes stand in for verbs, for causal connections between events, and for thoughts Jerry is too delicate to speak aloud. Irma is a cat who wants to “find herself”: “Well, she looked in some very strange places, is all this cocker spaniel can say.” Her quest leads her and Jerry to a police station (“A Terrible and Modern Place”), an abandoned building inhabited by an old woman and her faithful, tough-guy canary, an amateur theater, and many more places this sheltered pooch of a Yale philosophy professor never intended or desired to go.
Jerry muses: “What madness there is in despairing dogs!”
Jerry philosophizes:
The chairs, tables, sofas, the old faithful chaise longue—they gave out a silence and a still sorrow. Unbought furniture, like unlived lives, can be very depressing. You just know that each item feels personally rejected. But also, like lives, they all still have a chance. Destruction is absolutely out!
Jerry listens to the wisdom of cats, canaries, goldfish and garter snakes (but not humans, among whose many charms wisdom is rarely included):
“No. No! This will all end in tears!”
“What doesn’t?” said [the canary] Mike.
There’s a lot of pleasure in this book, but also a deep respect for loss and heartbreak. The scene where cat, dog, and canary get drunk together in the old bag lady’s squat—well, I wonder if Irma and Jerry isn’t the children’s library answer to “Fairytale of New York.”
Disco Purgatorio
I loved this essay by Garth Greenwell on Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, which I wrote very briefly about here.
Disco Paradiso
Also recommend Harrison Lemke’s Advent songs—an indie tradition. (He’s done it at least three years, I think, and three is all you need to be a tradition!) Consider purchasing one of his albums: the seasonal Technicolor Nativity, maybe, or his melancholic midrash on Genesis, or my favorite of his full-length albums aka Music to Violate Your Parole Conditions By.
The Last Word
I don’t know that I will post on Twitter again (with the exception of links to writing and other projects), but whatever else can be said about that decaying platform, it gave us this. Mimi speaks for us all, I think.
Cat’s eye (not quite as beautiful as Irma’s) photographed by Guylaine Brunet, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.