Sam Austen's Blog, page 4
December 9, 2024
Concern Over the "Disappearance of Literary Men" Is Feline Erasure: A Response to David J. Morris: MEOW Literary Podcast Ep. 36
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library .
On December 7th, 2024, New York Times contributor David J. Morris published a controversial essay entitled "The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone." In today's podcast, our editor issues his rebuttal, bringing to light an unsung voice in the American literary sphere, one which transcends well-trod gender binaries and raises a more urgent question about interspecies cooperation in the world of contemporary letters. David J. Morris.
Books as Status Symbols: A Path to Saving Literacy (Ft. Mia Khalifa) - MEOW Literary Podcast Ep. 35
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library .
Tolstoy enthusiast, Oxford guest lecturer, and cat fancier Mia Khalifa recently made the following comment regarding the state of the publishing industry:
At best: it becomes trendy to read and people inadvertently also learn. At worst: morons buy books to showcase as a status symbol, inadvertently supporting publishers, writers, and print media in general.
The Meow Library applauds this insight as absolutely critical to the preservation and advancement of our literary heritage. One can scoff at those who buy books solely for algorithmic brownie points, but the publishing industry is laughing all the way to the bank -- and financing new authors, projects, and editions of classic texts along the way.
On that note, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (For Your Cat), which features nothing but 300,000+ repetitions of the word "meow" and retails in excess of $30 USD, may seem like a frivolous novelty, but that's only if you're human. Since its release in July of 2023, it has made Tolstoy's work available to between 600,000,000 and one billion readers -- all domestic felines, the largest untapped literary market in the world. (Mia's cats, of course, have long cherished Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky's English translations of Tolstoy, but they're built different).
For those still unconvinced of the power of Meow, we now present an 30-minute excerpt of War and Peace (For Your Cat) recorded by a professional audiobook narrator. It may not improve your understanding of Tolstoy -- especially if you consider books mere fashion accessories -- but your cat might pick up some French if they're patient enough to make it to the Napoleon scene.
October 11, 2024
Han Kang's Nobel Prize Controversy: A Translator's Perspective: MEOW Literary Podcast Ep. 34
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library .
Han Kang's The Vegetarian can be purchased here .
The basis of Nobel laureate Han Kang's The Vegetarian is a line by Korean poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants."
But some, like today's interviewee, believe that humans should be cats.
A Meow Library translator has taken exception to Han Kang being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, citing the many errors in the English editions of The Vegetarian and her other, lesser-known works. Certain that the Nobel committee is unfamiliar with her books in their original Korean, and that the translated work is not truly of Kan's authorship, he feels that the award should be revoked.
"Any English translation of Han Kang is bound to mislead. The tonal properties of Korean are totally lost to the Anglophone world. Meows are the only language that could possibly convey the melancholy and gravitas of Kang's original prose -- and perhaps even surpass it," he remarks.
After a brief introductory statement, our translator recites a 27-minute passage of The Vegetarian, translated his way. It is his wish that the Nobel committee take note of his improvements and distribute the 2024 Literature prize accordingly.
This podcast is made possible by sales of our first translation for cats, Meow: A Novel .
September 26, 2024
Sally Rooney's Intermezzo: Love Under the Specter of Marx - MEOW Literary Podcast Ep. 33
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library .
Sally Rooney's Intermezzo is available here .
Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product,one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.
-- Andrea Long Chu for Vulture
While much has been written in praise of Sally Rooney's frank Millenial realism, its Marxist underpinnings are only beginning to be explored. Theory, as ever, can only be thinly illustrative of the market forces propelling Rooney's work into the academic and popular spotlight. The Meow Library believes that the magnitude of Intermezzo's impact can only be understood through praxis, so our analysis takes the form of thousands of undifferentiated "meows," thereby converting it, like Rooney's subversions-as-Harlequin-Romance, into an eminently viral force with potential to destabilize and transform its very means of propagation: a force as great as Love itself, if not greater.
Meow: A Literary Podcast for Cats is supported by sales of Meow: A Novel and other Meow Library titles.
August 22, 2024
Matthew Davis, Let Me Try Again, and the Gen Z Superego - MEOW Literary Podcast, Ep. 32
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.
Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again can be purchased here.
Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again is a hilarious, deeply human look Gen Z's calamitous superego. It opens on a suicidal fantasy, quickly giving way to a dense and dizzying edifice of self-recrimination — centered, in true Zoomer fashion, on the singular, cosmic theme of much “alt-lit” — a twentysomething breakup. But this time, it’s done with class.
Davis’s dire, uproarious idiom evokes an atmosphere of mortifying regret (the very quiddity of Zoomer being), riding the inexorable crests and valleys of the on-again, off-again “situationship” to Oblivion and back. And somehow, he makes sure you enjoy every second of it.
There exists no better analog to the book's central refrain than the fraught, tenuous, but always rewarding bond between human and cat, so we will now meow at you for 30 minutes, giving you time to think about all you’ve loved and lost, drop the pathos, and laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Sales of Meow: A Novel help fund The Meow Library's continuing research into the art and science of meowing.
Matthew Davis's Let Me Try Again is available through Amazon and wherever books are sold.
August 13, 2024
Caroline Calloway, Scammer, and Feline Virality - MEOW Literary Podcast Ep. 31
Known as the original social media provocateur, Caroline Calloway has spun a staggering media empire from her controversial Instagram presence. Praised and reviled in equal measure, her long-awaited Scammer belongs to the emerging canon of the "Paper Internet" -- reifications of Internet fame, printed, bound, and re-ingested into cyberspace in the form of "BookTok" content.
What is it, exactly, that makes a physical book like Scammer resonate so well with the algorithm? While accusations of uncredited ghostwriting promulgated by her former friend and collaborator, Natalie Beach, have helped propel Scammer to infamy, The Meow Library's team of forensic linguists have detected an unmistakably feline rhythm to the book's opening chapters, leading us to question whether Calloway's cat, Matisse, may have imparted the intrinsic virality of cat-language to Scammer's pages. After nearly a year of analysis, we are presenting the book's first twenty pages in feline translation. Could Scammer's singular tone and self-published success be attributed to an invisible paw? Listen and judge for yourselves.
Closing comments supplied by BBC presenter Emma Millen's cat, Delia.
Meow: A Literary Podcast For Cats is supported by sales of our debut cat-language tome, Meow: A Novel .
May 30, 2024
MEOW Literary Podcast Ep. 30 - Gabi Abrão (@sighswoon), Notes on Shapeshifting, and the Poetics of Feline Vocalization
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.
Gabi Abrão's Notes on Shapeshifting can be purchased here.
In a meditation class in high school, our teacher told us to pick our place. This teacher, who did past life regression on dogs and had created a secret holistic elective under the guise of what she told her superiors would be a course on "the history of alternative medicine," said to us, "Pick a place to be in. Just sit there and listen. Make room for visits from animals, insects, spirits."
- Gabi Abrão, Notes on Shapeshifting
This is the place to be in. Take a deep breath, and make room for a visit from a cat.
In this week's podcast, The Meow Library has translated passages from Gabi Abrão's bestselling poetry collection into cat language. After noticing that cats seemed inexorably drawn to copies of the book (a phenomenon experimentally verified by Abrão via a Discord post), we solicited field recordings of their vocalizations and assembled them, with the help of a professional narrator, into this 30-minute compendium of feline resonances found within the text.
For more, visit Gabi and The Meow Library on Instagram:
Gabi Abrão: @sighswoon
The Meow Library: @meowliterature
May 22, 2024
The Meow Library Now Ships To The UK - Meow: A Novel Can Finally Be Yours
Buying direct can save our UK fans 20% or more over retail prices. The humiliation and financial burden of buying copies of Meow: A Novel, War and Peace (For Your Cat), and other paradigm-shifting Meow titles from lesser suppliers is now a thing of the past. Start sending those quid this way.
September 22, 2023
MEOW Ep. 30 - Millie Bobby Brown, Nineteen Steps, and the Role of the Ghostwriter
Today's podcast covers Stranger Things actress-turned-literary wunderkind Millie Bobby Brown's breathtakingly ghostwritten Nineteen Steps, which is being unfairly panned as an exploitative, juvenile cash-in. Find out why it's anything but in this eloquent, 3000-word apologia, ghostwritten by my cat.
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This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library: https://meowlibrary.com
September 20, 2023
MEOW Ep. 29 - Costin Alamariu (AKA Bronze Age Pervert), Selective Breeding, and Persian Show Cats
“I want to show, among other things, why this question, the problem of breeding, is in many respects identical to philosophy, or at least identical to political philosophy.”
— Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy
“Dembeck, in a conjectural reconstruction of the history of the Persian cat, suggests that it was Cambyses who brought from Egypt the strain that was later developed into the furry Persian cat. Because of its association with evil, the cat was taboo in Sassanian Persia.
“To the Zoroastrians the cat was treacherous and one of the 'noxious creatures' (xrafstra), in contrast to the dog, which they praised for its loyalty.”
— Mahmud Omidsalar, Encyclopedia Iranica
“Tabula rasa is the essence of the [Persian] breed… the ideal Persian is a cypher, regarding its surroundings with the alacrity of a Sumerian votive, eager to witness and obey.”
— International Cat Fancier’s Association, Persian Show Standard (2023)
Released only three days ago, ideas put forth in Costin Alamariu’s Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy are already being applied by judges at the International Cat Fancier’s Association, the world's leading feline eugenicists. Their newly updated Persian show standard is prefaced by a cryptic and disturbing note:
The Abbé Sieyès proposed during the French Revolution the creation of half-human worker castes, bred from unions between humans and various apes, which would take care of different types of manual labor and free mankind from this necessity. Lesser-known are summoning rituals conducted by the Zoroastrian priests of the Sassanian Empire, which sought to create an inexhaustible, hyper-agile, and relatively compliant "demislave" by fusing Ifrit with a prototypical version of the modern Persian cat. This project was never brought to fruition, but only due to the insufficient purity of the available feline biomass. For nearly a century, our efforts to bring forth the "immaculate Persian" have been thwarted, but Alamariu has finally given us the key. This year, we will attain the perfect specimen. The restoration of Ardeshir will soon follow: His servants will ascend, and the structures of this fallen world will be condensed into the ultimate and universal Tower of Silence.
In this week’s episode, we provide translations of select passages from Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy and, along with an anonymous representative of the International Cat Fancier’s Association, attempt to get to the bottom of Costin Alamiru’s influence upon their new organizational goals.
The Cat Fanciers’ Association’s new Persian standards can be found here: https://cfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/persian-standard.pdf
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This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library: https://meowlibrary.com
