Barking Kitten's Feed
Welcome To Barking Kitten
Welcome to Barking Kitten.
Over the next few weeks I hope to fill this blog with cogent, wonderfully reasoned entries about a few of my passions: books, writing, and cooking. I am hoping to find a few fellow travelers, people who enjoy reading and writing fiction and essay with beginnings, middles, and ends. Writing that excludes levitating tables, brilliantly colored birds that fly through characters' windows to discourse on semiotics, or the sort of hypertextual stuff New York publishers seem to love these days. If your taste runs toward endless footnotes, protagonists who share their author's names, or books featuring type of varying sizes, including the requisite blank page, this is not the blog for you. Not to insult this kind of writing (well, okay, maybe a little). It has a place, often on the bestseller list. But not here. Over time my page will fill with links to a few favorite spots and (I hope) come to resemble the better blogs out there.
Still with me? Let me reward you with a simple quiz. If you answer yes to three or more of the following statements, you, too, may be a barking kitten.
1. You agree with the Dixie Chicks.
2. You wish Danielle Steel would retire.
3. The June 12, 2006, New York Times article about product placement in books made you want to scream uncontrollably.
4. Whenever Margaret Atwood releases a new novel, you pre-order it, then sneak out during lunch to buy it, in hardcover, from your local independent bookstore.
5. You have an altar to Joan Didion in your home.
6. You were upset by Judith Moore's death. Nobody else in your workplace had ever heard of her.
7. You shop your local independent bookseller instead of the big bad box stores--assuming you live where there are such choices.
8. You used the glossy Dean Koontz promo in the New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue to fuel your barbeque. Those of you without barbeques finally put that personal shredder to use.
9. You never have enough bookshelves.
10. Literature gives you reason to live. When everything is awful, when the people around you let you down, when your country is acting abominably, when worldwide war, illness, and poverty threaten to crush your soul, you pick up your favorite book, with its tattered cover and smell of papery dust, and there again is the story that so captivated you, the words vivid, enrapturing you once more, until you are carried through the black marks on the page into that wonderful world, peopled by characters you love, and you are carried along, and forget whatever it was that threatened to wreck you, until you surface, five minutes or five hours later, and once again you can handle this thing called living.
Yes? yes?
Me too.
Over the next few weeks I hope to fill this blog with cogent, wonderfully reasoned entries about a few of my passions: books, writing, and cooking. I am hoping to find a few fellow travelers, people who enjoy reading and writing fiction and essay with beginnings, middles, and ends. Writing that excludes levitating tables, brilliantly colored birds that fly through characters' windows to discourse on semiotics, or the sort of hypertextual stuff New York publishers seem to love these days. If your taste runs toward endless footnotes, protagonists who share their author's names, or books featuring type of varying sizes, including the requisite blank page, this is not the blog for you. Not to insult this kind of writing (well, okay, maybe a little). It has a place, often on the bestseller list. But not here. Over time my page will fill with links to a few favorite spots and (I hope) come to resemble the better blogs out there.
Still with me? Let me reward you with a simple quiz. If you answer yes to three or more of the following statements, you, too, may be a barking kitten.
1. You agree with the Dixie Chicks.
2. You wish Danielle Steel would retire.
3. The June 12, 2006, New York Times article about product placement in books made you want to scream uncontrollably.
4. Whenever Margaret Atwood releases a new novel, you pre-order it, then sneak out during lunch to buy it, in hardcover, from your local independent bookstore.
5. You have an altar to Joan Didion in your home.
6. You were upset by Judith Moore's death. Nobody else in your workplace had ever heard of her.
7. You shop your local independent bookseller instead of the big bad box stores--assuming you live where there are such choices.
8. You used the glossy Dean Koontz promo in the New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue to fuel your barbeque. Those of you without barbeques finally put that personal shredder to use.
9. You never have enough bookshelves.
10. Literature gives you reason to live. When everything is awful, when the people around you let you down, when your country is acting abominably, when worldwide war, illness, and poverty threaten to crush your soul, you pick up your favorite book, with its tattered cover and smell of papery dust, and there again is the story that so captivated you, the words vivid, enrapturing you once more, until you are carried through the black marks on the page into that wonderful world, peopled by characters you love, and you are carried along, and forget whatever it was that threatened to wreck you, until you surface, five minutes or five hours later, and once again you can handle this thing called living.
Yes? yes?
Me too.
posted by Barking Kitten | 1:54 PM
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1 comments
