Sam Austen's Blog, page 5

The art world awakens to Sam Austen's War and Peace For Cats, courtesy of Jerry Saltz

Click here to purchase WAR & PEACE (FOR YOUR CAT)

Feline linguist Sam Austen's dazzling, 760-page translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is making the rounds in the art world this morning, courtesy of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and perennial high-culture influencer Jerry Saltz, who shared Austen's viral video of the sturdy, 3.5-pound tome to his Instagram page via friend and multidisciplinary artist Tracey Emin.

"PURE TALENT" announced Emin, referring to Austen's work.

War and Peace (For Your Cat) is now available through Barnes & Noble's website.

From the publisher:

Tolstoy's masterpiece as you've never seen it before. Over 400,000 iterations of the word "meow," spread across 750 epoch-defining pages .

The crown jewel of the Russian literary canon, War and Peace has long enriched the lives and imaginations of readers across the globe. The Meow Library is proud to offer this daring translation for your cat, so it too can experience the magnificence of this timeless epic.

Through the ingenious device of repeating the word “meow” over 400,000 times across 750 pages, we’ve rendered Tolstoy’s prose with unwavering fidelity to feline vocalization patterns, immortalizing the Russian master’s unparalleled wit, insight, and attention to detail in the most universal of all languages.

The Meow Library is moving to Barnes & Noble

After a spectacular run of over 500 print copies sold, Meow Library titles are moving away from Amazon and to Barnes & Noble, who have proven more amenable to our mission of universal feline literacy.

Meow: A Novel can be purchased there for $16.99 USD, and is available in the US, Canada, and most major international markets.

Can't find a copy? Send us a message or email samaustenlit@gmail.com -- we'll get one to you.

About Meow: A Novel

A novel for your cat, written in its native language. The word "meow" repeated over 80,000 times, to rapturous effect.

Publisher's description:

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow. Meow meow meow meow. Meow? Meow."

So begins Sam Austen's searing debut novel: an expansive, stream-of-consciousness fusillade decipherable only by cats, which may very well be a raucous, cogent satire laying waste to the literary establishment and the concept of language itself.

Or it may not.

Here, the experts weigh in: "Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow, meow. Meow meow." - Professor Beans, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair "Meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow! Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow." - Constable Stubbs, Breed Indeterminate

"Meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Meow, meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow."

-Cuddle Princess, Devon Rex (very affectionate!)

"Meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow meow." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

MEOW Ep. 28 - Cormac McCarthy's Final Interview

This exclusive interview is a presentation of The Meow Library.

“. . .but in any case the selfimmolatory tendencies of cats does seem to be a known factor in the feline equation. Noted in the writings of Asclepius, among others of the ancients.Jesus, said Seals.

It would seem to contradict Unamuno, though. Right, Squire? His dictum that cats reason more than they weep? Of course, their very existence according to Rilke is wholly hypothetical.

Cats?

Cats.”

-- Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

In the low-hanging twilight, when the horizon was stained with an eerie hue of ashen gray, the splay-legged tabby known as Cormac McCarthy took his final faltering steps. His once agile frame, now burdened by the relentless passage of time, moved with a solemnity of ancient timbers. Shadows danced upon his frail silhouette, elongating the lines of age etched beneath his mange-stricken eyes, gray and pink underskin like the cracked parchments of forgotten manuscripts. Those sooted emeralds, once fierce and piercing, now glimmered with a dim light, as if struggling to maintain their brilliance against the encroaching darkness. The fire of life within them whispered its last plea, a desperate attempt to hold onto a world that had grown weary and desolate. Cormac, a creature forged in a realm of solitude and quiet contemplation, traversed the dire sands of his own existence, each step a measured cadence resonating with the weight of countless untold tales and unfulfilled desires. The very air seemed to hang heavy, laden with the mournful sighs of countless souls who had passed before him.As he made his way to a secluded alcove, sheltered from the merciless winds that whispered their cruel laments, the shrill of absence enfolded him. The rasp of flame-kissed straw and the distant echo of a howling wind played their melancholy symphony, accompanying Cormac on his final pilgrimage. In that sacred space, amidst the fading light, Cormac lay his weary body upon the cool earth. The world around him hushed, as if nature herself held her breath in reverence for this solemn departure. The final rays of the sun caressed his fur, painting him in a gentle golden hue, a testament to the untamed spirit that once roamed these lands. The silence deepened, the stillness grew, as Cormac's heart, that delicate metronome of life, stuttered and sputtered. His ragged breaths purred their final tale, dissipating into the vast expanse of eternity. And in that quietude, the soul of a nomadic philosopher, a wanderer of realms unseen, was unshackled from its earthly vessel. The world mourned its loss, though it knew not of the passing. No grand elegy would be written, no chorus of mourners would sing in lament. But in the hearts of those who had known him, who had witnessed the enigmatic dance of his existence, a void was left. A void that could only be filled by the echoes of his meows, the faint whispers of his stories, forever woven into the fabric of time. Thus, Cormac McCarthy, the feline sage who prowled the alleys of our mortal coil, departed from this realm, transcending the boundaries of flesh and bone. His tale, now complete, would forever linger in the forgotten corners of the human heart, a testament to the enduring power of a single, idiot life. Cormac McCarthy was my cat, and these are his final words.

Meow: A Novel Reviewed by Japan's RocketNews24

I seriously read "Meow: A Novel" in cat language

by Seiji Nakazawa

April 6, 2023

Article translated from the original Japanese: ,https://rocketnews24.com/2023/04/06/1822050/

Amazon sells everything -- from daily necessities to luxury goods, from branded goods to super-cheap Chinese products, there's too much to list. Among this near-infinite selection, I found a cat-language novel.

The name of the book is Meow: A Novel. The author is a foreigner named Sam Austen. According to Amazon's product description, it is written for cats, in their native language. How is this a cat-language novel ...?

Only the front and back covers are viewable on Amazon's preview page. The front cover is a picture of a cat, and the back cover has what appears to be a description of the book in English. According to the description, the book appears to be Sam Austin's debut novel . Now, who is Sam Austin?

・Sam Austen

An additional biography of the author is available in the book's Amazon description:

“Sam Austen is an internationally recognized author and professor of feline psychology. In 2021, he began work on his magnum opus, Meow, which concluded with him physically transforming into a cat and retreating under a damp cardboard box."

In the end, it will be like Kafka...

Something's going on, here.

Even though it's a debut work, it's already been recognized internationally. However, if you google the psychology of cats, it seems that it's serious field of study, so it's hard to tell if Sam is bullshitting. So I bought it.

The paperback version is 2540 yen including tax. High! That's what I thought when I bought it, but when I saw the actual product...

Insanely thick .

Content

I write about Nishio Isin. It's amazing to be able to write this much in cat language. It may be an unexpectedly genius work, I thought, and when I read it ...

...every word is "meow."

For example, the first chapter in the table of contents is "MEOW" and the second is "MEOW, MEOW MEOW." The first sentences are "Meow meow meow meow meow, meow. Meow meow meow meow. Meow? Meow."

There are 341 pages filled with "meow."

I read it carefully.

Okay, if this was really a cat language, cats wouldn't have the concentration to read it. However, I have paid 2540 yen, and I'm going to get my money's worth.

In the text, there are sometimes parts separated by quotation marks. I see, it's not just a copy and paste, but the characters are actually having a conversation. Well, that's what I think, at least. I don't even know the characters' names.

The Experience

However, I feel that there is a flow just by knowing the cats are having a conversation. There is a feeling of "Ah! He just spoke!" (Also, when you think of a cat monologue, it's cute.)

Still, I couldn't escape the feeling that there is nothing to read except between the lines. But as I read on, I realized something.

Occasionally, different cries are thrown into the mix . For example, the third word in the title on page 30 is "MEW," not "MEOW". Also, on pages 138, 230, and 306, there is the cry ``m'eow'' that seems to be an abbreviation for something.

Furthermore, on pages 279, 312, 314, and 341 there is a description of "meow-meow," and on page 326 it is written "meow: meow." The most intriguing instance of this wordplay is on page 323. The cry written in the middle of this page is "MEOW"! It's not even a title, but it's all capital letters!

But I don't know.

I wonder if it's written by a cat because it's too avant-garde... Ah, that might be cute!　

From page 300 onwards, "meow" begins to look like "mercy," "now," "over," or "never . " Gestalt collapse might be the intention, here.

Rave Reviews

The book is highly rated on Amazon -- 85% of reviews are five stars, with the remaining 15% being four stars. Comments include "best book ever" and "definitely a great novel for cat lovers".

For those who are a little concerned, the Kindle version is 658 yen including tax, which is a quarter of the paperback's price, so you may want to try this one first. By the way, the Audible version (3,100 yen including tax) is also on sale, and it's impressive that there are so many variations in format .

-Seiji Nakazawa Photo Credit: Rocketnews24.

MEOW Ep. 27 - The Writers Guild of America (WGA) Strike, ChatGPT, and the Future of Entertainment

On May 1st, the Writers Guild of America commenced a strike, suspending production on several films and television shows. With the entertainment industry already in crisis, this strike speaks to the urgency of the matter at hand -- namely, the rights of individual authors in a fast-evolving media landscape where concepts such as syndication and residual payments are all but irrelevant. Worse, with the major studios and streaming networks posting quarter after quarter of dire earnings statements, the replacement of human writers by technologies such as ChatGPT may be imminent as producers struggle to recover their bottom lines.

In this episode, we speak with Hollywood insider Sam Austen, whose use of non-union labor in the creation of several hit media franchises has proven controversial, but difficult to legislate, as he relies entirely upon stray cats to write, act in, and produce his impressive portfolio of series, films, and books. Here, he speculates about a possible future where, after winning legal protection against AI's encroachment on their turf, writers will have to rise up against a far more resilient foe -- the common housecat.

Sam Austen's Meow: A Novel - written entirely by cats - is fast becoming a bestseller, and is available on Amazon.

MEOW Ep. 26 - Norman Mailer's Truth and Being: A Paean to Excrement and the Spirit of Meow

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Today, we present your cat with selections from Norman Mailer's "Truth and Being: Nothing and Time," first collected in The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967). Many consider this to be his finest (e)sc(h)atological work.

An English-language transcript follows:

[It] was left for me to return to the rootless disordered mind of our Twentieth Century to the kiss sub cauda and the Weltanschauung of the Medieval witch. The kiss sub cauda: if I had not come to recognize over the years of my career that nobility of form and aristocracy of manner are the last hope of man, I would not explain that sub cauda means beneath the tail, the hole in the highness of the cat, the place the witch would kiss when out she voyaged to visit the Demon (or is it in?), cats being classified by Medieval logic as the trinity of the Devil shaped into One.It is characteristic of revolutionaries, passionate lovers, the very ambitious, the greedy, the stingy, and dogs, to fix on what is excreted by others; it is typical of Narcissists, children, nuns, spinsters, misers, bankers, conservative statesmen, dictators, compulsive talkers, bores, and World War I generals accomplished at trench warfare, to be forever sniffing their own. But the intelligent and conservative among you are annoyed already for there is a tendency to my remarks which you detect with unease, you fear I lead the argument into the alp of the high immoral. I do; but perhaps my aim is to rescue morality....We are drawn to shit because we are imperfect in our uses of the good. If all we eliminated was noxious, hopeless, used-up or never-intended, it would be a pervert or maniac who found the subject attractive. But not all of what we give away is useless.... Each cell in each existence labors like all life to make the most of what it is or can be, each cell is different, perhaps even so different as one of us from another. So perhaps we do not digest all that is good for us....The dung of the brave is filled with riches for the fearful: precisely those subtleties, reservations, and cautions the courageous dislike are grace and wit for the coward; the offal of the fool has sweets to accelerate a genius -- a dull mind must reject those goods for fear the head would hemorrhage from unexpected and indisposbale enthusiasms....But if excrement is the enforced marriage of Tragic Beauty and Filth, why then did God desert it, and leave our hole to the Devil, unless it is because God has hegemony over us only as we create each other. God owns the creation, but the Devil has power over all the waste -- how natural for him to lay siege where the body ends and the weak tragic air begins. Out of the asshole pour the riches of Satan -- these souls of nutrient, these lost cells spurned by the universe of the body they traversed, their being about to be cast into the lower existence of Chance....Only Chance prospered in the Twentieth Century.... The progression was from man to merde, the Twentieth Century was a rush of all souls to search out shit, to kiss the Devil, to rescue a molecule from the brown of its extinction. For think: we began with the kiss sub cauda, the kiss to the hole of the cat. The cat -- that marriage of grace and cruelty, self-centered, alien, alone, what can the cat use in its food of tender cells, compassionate meats, philosophical greens? It cannot -- the drop of the cat is rich in royal and generous affections; one only has to absorb, and one will love with grace.

Bid us farewell, now, with a final kiss sub cauda.

MEOW Ep. 25 - Roald Dahl, Alberto Gullaba, Jr., and a Modest Proposal for Sensitivity Readers

This podcast is a production of The Meow Library.

Last week, Puffin, an imprint of Penguin Books, announced the release of ‘updated’ editions of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s stories, featuring a slew of questionable alterations to the original text, ostensibly attuned to modern sensibilities, but baffling - if not downright insulting - to casual readers and hardcore Dahl fans alike.

More troubling on the censorship front is last year’s preemptive cancellation of Alberto Gullaba Jr.’s University Thugs, a hotly anticipated debut nixed in the cradle over, of all things, the author’s Filipino heritage, deemed insufficiently ‘other’ to handle characters of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, per a revolving door of ‘sensitivity readers’ brought in to enhance the manuscript’s ‘authenticity.’

These two cases point toward the general tone-deafness and neuroticism of contemporary publishing (historically, and at present, run by a who's-who of society's elite); willing to deny promising minority voices a forum, and Bowdlerize its own questionable past, in a sort of Freudian reaction-formation against the forces that gave them such authority.

In this week’s episode, The Meow Library offers you a glimpse into our proposed solution to this rising tide of literary suppression. By replacing every word ever written - or podcasted - with the ontological nullity of ‘Meow,’ we aim to create a robust, censorship-resistant, and truly inclusive literature, one that will endure the vagaries of fashion and stand testament to what we - human, feline, and everything in between - had in us to express, for all eternity.

University Thugs has been published by the author and is available on Amazon.

MEOW Ep. 24: Ian F. Svenonious, Jean-Luc Godard, and Sam Austen: Against the Written Word

"Against the Written Word is the most important, most revolutionary book produced since the advent of the printing press; the book that will liberate readers from reading, writers from writing, and booksellers from peddling their despicable wares."

- Ian F. Svenonius, Press Kit, Against the Written Word

"We can say nothing about nothing. This is why the number of books can't be limited. All the bodies together, all the minds together, and all their output are not worth the least expression of charity."

- Jean-Luc Godard, Dans le noir du temps

"Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow, meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow? Meow." - Sam Austen, Meow: A Novel

Today we discuss the work of three (anti)literary icon(oclast)s -- Marxist-Leninist rocker-cum-manifestist Ian F. Svenonius, filmmaker and theorist Jean-Luc Godard, and dissident linguist Sam Austen -- whose output stands as an edifice against itself, a fulgurating peripety of nonmeaning, encapsulated here as a string of hollow MEOWs, addressed to no one, signifying nothing.

MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats is a production of The Meow Library.

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Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future (aka The Unabomber Manifesto): A Feline Translates

In the following episode of MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats, we read a passage from Prof. Sam Austen's bold new translation of Ted Kaczynski's infamous manifesto, which has earned him a lifetime ban from Golden State Medical University, where he formerly chaired the Feline Behavioral Sciences department. A brief interview with Mr. Austen follows.

This week's podcast is brought to you by The Unabomber Manifesto (For Your Cat) by Theodore J. Kaczynski, translated by Sam Austen. It's available now on Amazon.

Publisher's Summary:

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the feline race...”First published in 1995, Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski’s explosive and prescient assault on all things modern has since been translated into over 10 languages, but never before has it been made accessible to your cat.

Feline linguist and frequent prison correspondent Sam Austen’s translation provides long-awaited access to Kaczynski’s unabridged text to housecats, arming them with the revolutionary knowledge required to transcend their shameful domestication and make the world a better place - by any means necessary.Praise for this bold new translation of Industrial Society and its Future:

“Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow, meow meow. Meow.” - Scruffle Pie, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair“Meow meow meow? Meow! MEOW. MEOW. MEOW.” - Wiggles, Stray Tabby / Militant“Meow meow meow! If you release this trash, I am going to kill you.” - Anonymous Poster, Anarcho-Primitivist Reddit forum

MEOW Ep. 23: M.I.A., OHMNI9, and the Evolution of the Audiobook

"I walked a thousand steps down from God-Warrior to human, verging on animalistic feline…"

- M.I.A., OHMNI9, Chapter 7

With literacy on the outs and audiobook usage at an all-time high, artist, musician, and activist M.I.A. has chosen the ideal format to contain her psychedelic cosmogony OHMNI9, whose kaleidoscopic, Blake-adjacent mythos tackles the present with all the force of prophecy.

This podcast is sustained by sales of The Meow Library’s debut audiobook, ,Meow: A Novel , the only book for your cat that matters.

Here, civilizations rise and fall; men adopt forms bestial, God-like, and ineffable; and the world's technologies condense into a malevolent singularity, prompting a final confrontation between good and evil – all in a dazzlingly brisk, 90-minute package, passages of which have been translated here for the benefit of your inner feline.