Sam Austen's Blog, page 6

MEOW Ep. 21: Prince Harry's Memoir, Hypnotic Cascades, and the Teachings of Gurdjieff

Claims about Prince Harry’s use of a “Meow” audiobook to lull a Sussex prostitute into a state of autoerotic trance have spread like wildfire in the weeks leading up to the release of his white-hot memoir, Spare, where they, along with a litany of other feline-tinged indiscretions, are allegedly recounted in detail.

In this episode, Oxford linguist Sam Austen plays a 20-minute segment of “Meow: A Novel,” his 14.5-hour audio opus, and explains how this, in conjunction with an obscure hypnotic technique promulgated by the renegade psychological theorist George Gurdjieff, could be used to such an end – with shocking efficacy.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliteratureFacebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary Twitter: twitter.com/meowliteratureandYouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Art Critic Jerry Saltz Offers Comment on MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

Jerry Saltz, in response to an episode of MEOW devoted to his recent bestseller Art is Life, calls the podcast "Not creative; digitally annoying; certifiably reptilian and repetitious." "But," he goes on, "first 17-seconds are funnish canned cuteness. Best part: the pic. Thank you."

No, thank you, Jerry.

SHOCKING: Kanye "Ye" West Appears to have Read Meow: A Novel

The outspoken rapper has allegedly emerged from an inferno of controversy to offer support for Sam Austen's Meow: A Novel. In a yet-unverified Instagram post, an account appearing to belong to Ye affects a bizarre feline persona to spread the word about the perplexing "book for cats," which consists entirely of repetitions of the word "meow."

"I AM A CAT," he writes (in his signature clipped, all-caps style).

"I PURR AND SAY MEOWI LOVE TO EAT CAT FOOD AND SOMETIMES EAT BIRDS AND SMALL MAMMALS

PLEASE DO NOT PULL MY TAIL

PLEASE RUB MY TUMMY AND SCRATCH BEHIND MY EARS

I LOVE MEOW A NOVEL BY SAM AUSTEN AVAILABLE NOW ON AMAZON"

West has declined to comment on this post.

MEOW Ep. 20 - Crashing Institutional Gates with Schrödinger's Cat / Eric Weinstein's DISC

In 2018, mathematician Eric Weinstein coined the term “Gated Institutional Narrative,” defined as a closed exchange of ideas promulgated by “insiders” – sitting politicians, tenured academics, high-prestige journalists, and the like. Insiders who deviate substantially from the party line are either divested of insider status or see their ideas subjected to linguistic processing that renders them compatible with the GIN. This idea was later expanded into that of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC), an all-encompassing system of checks and balances that fortifies “insider” positions by ensuring – in a decentralized, panoptic fashion – the exclusion of disruptive narratives from public conversation. All the DISC needs to do is ensure its increasingly untenable "ideas" are initially delivered with the trappings of officialdom – media institutions and the unsuspecting public do the mass-distribution dirty work.

By early 2020, it was clear how prescient and important Weinstein's concepts were.Throughout MEOW, we have attempted to use the DISC’s tactics against it, deploying official-looking thumbnail images and convoluted shownotes to impute credibility upon a repetitive string of ‘meows,’ urging fans of various authors and high-profile figures to engage in the world of “The Meow Library”, a series of books whose sole contents are hundreds of thousands of repetitions of that word. To date, we have been remarkably successful, and now seek to pay things forward.

With these shownotes, we will attempt to earn Mr. Weinstein’s endorsement, with hopes that his followers will spread our nonsense message far and wide, gauging their own followers’ subsequent response to our Schrödingerian message / non-message. We suspect that, within a few generations of “shares,” many will begin to mistake this episode for an authentic Weinstein product, thereby proving how effortlessly and insidiously the DISC operates, and – hopefully – slipping the DISC ever-so-slightly more as we enter 2023.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature

Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

Twitter: twitter.com/meowliterature

and YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

MEOW Ep. 19 - Jordan Peterson’s 12th Rule, Ailurophobia, and the Feline Panopticon

“Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.” - Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life (Rule 12)

“The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation; it is, by its very nature, the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of knowledge that this very economy needs.”

- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

In his bestselling 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson metonymizes reprieve from unavoidable suffering in the form of feline-human communion. Though well-intentioned, our feline host finds Peterson's cat-petting strategy both ableist (excluding those with extreme cat allergies and ailurophobics) and, more troublingly, harboring potential to encourage additional and undue human control over vulnerable feline bodies. He meows his case for over twenty minutes, awaiting a response from Dr. Peterson, who has declined multiple requests for his input.

In the spirit of transparency and open debate, we request that this week’s viewers solicit Dr. Peterson’s comments on this urgent matter.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliteratureFacebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary Twitter: twitter.com/meowliteratureand YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

MEOW Ep. 18 - Annie Hamilton and the Novel That Wasn't There

“That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which really is.”

- Zoë Tamerlis Lund, quoted by Annie Hamilton

“All writing is garbage.”

- Antonin Artaud

By not writing a novel, NYC-based actress Annie Hamilton has written the best and only novel of the 21st century.

Visit her Instagram, @soimwritinganovel, to read this novel.

This week’s podcast is not a passage from her novel, which does not exist.

Check out Annie Hamilton’s Twitter, @ANNIE_HAM, for the latest on this novel.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature

Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

Twitter: twitter.com/meowliterature and

YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

MEOW Ep. 17 - Jack Skelley, Guy Debord, and LA's Cat Problem

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

Jack Skelley's Interstellar Theme Park is available here .

Our relationship with cats mirrors that of the primal unconscious with domestic order: it serves as persistent reminder of the ‘Other’, by whose exclusion we define our own humanity. This is how Michel Foucault – who named his own cat ‘Insanity’ – understood the construction of madness in society. Cats, in this sense, are vehicles for our projections, misconceptions, and suppressed primal urges. The same can be said of Jack Skelley’s latest poetry collection, Interstellar Theme Park. Both, when provoked to conscious recognition, become agents of pure annihilation, eradicating the Debordian schemas of duplicity (Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ referenced in Tony Trigilio’s review of Skelley’s work) which amass and delineate our quotidian apprehensions, rendering the mental landscape a palimpsest upon which distorted ego-figurations are gradually refined into an approximation of the Real.

In this week’s episode, we read a selection from Interstellar Theme Park – translated, as always, into cat language – and follow this with a feline-intelligible interview with Jeff Thielman, commissioner of Animal Services in Skelley’s literary homeland of Los Angeles, who has found intriguing correlations between upticks in LA County’s feral cat population and releases of Skelley’s books.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliteratureFacebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary Twitter: twitter.com/meowlibraryand YouTube

MEOW Episode 16: Taylor Jenkins Reid, David Foster Wallace, and the Catgut Parcae

David Foster Wallace noticed early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too.

- John Jeremiah Sullivan, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

In a world where all relations have become gamified and subject-oriented, the tennis court provides the ideal soil for metaphor. In this week’s episode, we read a passage from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling tennis epic Carrie Soto is Back (translated, as always, into cat language). A cat with a tennis ball in its mouth then explores its surprising parallels with David Foster Wallace’s voluminous and genre-transcending writings on the sport, meowing its thoughts with unexpected clarity.

“The lattice of the Fates twines the destinies of these disparate minds, their intersecting views reinforcing the epistemic grid to create a resilient yet malleable hermeneutic surface, imparting force and direction to the anomized and deliterated individual, as the finest catgut racket gives flight to its impetuous target.”

– Cuddle Princess, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature

Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

Twitter: twitter.com/meowlibrary

and YouTube

MEOW Episode 15: Taylor Jenkins Reid, David Foster Wallace, and the Catgut Parcae

David Foster Wallace noticed early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too.

- John Jeremiah Sullivan, String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis

In a world where all relations have become gamified and subject-oriented, the tennis court provides the ideal soil for metaphor. In this week’s episode, we read a passage from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling tennis epic Carrie Soto is Back (translated, as always, into cat language). A cat with a tennis ball in its mouth then explores its surprising parallels with David Foster Wallace’s voluminous and genre-transcending writings on the sport, meowing its thoughts with unexpected clarity.

“The lattice of the Fates twines the destinies of these disparate minds, their intersecting views reinforcing the epistemic grid to create a resilient yet malleable hermeneutic surface, imparting force and direction to the anomized and deliterated individual, as the finest catgut racket gives flight to its impetuous target.”

– Cuddle Princess, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature

Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

Twitter: twitter.com/meowlibrary

and YouTube

MEOW Ep. 15: Angela Campbell's On the Scent, Psychic Detectives, and Feline-Centered Estate Planning

Cat lovers: before continuing, please consider supporting Feline Lifeline , Angela Campbell's nonprofit stray-cat rescue. On the Scent and other books in Angela Campbell's Psychic Detective series can be found on Amazon .

According to psychologist Sam Vaknin, “because our civilization resembles a jungle more and more, it’s not surprising that there is an exponential proliferation of cat ownership.” This fact, coupled with a growing number of single-member households concomitant with years of crisis-driven atomization, begs the question: where do all these cats (and other pets) fit in to the estate-planning schemes of tomorrow? Angela Campbell’s delightful On the Scent provides a clue: the pets come out on top, in a big way.

We begin this episode by reading a passage from On the Scent, translated into cat language for our feline audience. In the spirit of Campbell’s book, this is followed by a cat-intelligible conversation between probate attorney Christopher Santos and real-life psychic detective David E. Goniff, who find aspects of On the Scent – which follows an heiress, a psychic detective, and the mammalian beneficiaries of a $10 million estate – strikingly feasible.

Last but not least, we read a transcript of a stray cat’s effusive thank-you letter to the wonderful volunteers at Angela Campbell’s nonprofit cat rescue, Feline Lifeline. The devastating shortage of meows and purrs currently affecting the American Southeast can only be corrected with support from listeners like you.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats) .

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature

Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

Twitter: twitter.com/meowlibrary

and YouTube