MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

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 ShapeshiftingThis 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: @sighswoonThe Meow Library: @meowliterature

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 PassengerIn 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. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut work, Meow: A Novel.

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, 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. And follow us on Twitter.

"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. Follow us on Twitter. 

In this episode, we read a passage from Prof. Sam Austen's feline-language translation of Ted Kaczynski's infamous manifesto, which has reportedly 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. UPDATE 06/20/23 - Amazon has shut down production of The Unabomber Manifesto (For Your Cat) and terminated Sam Austen's Kindle Publishing account. There are estimated to be approximately 300 copies in circulation. If you find one for sale on the secondary market, please point us toward the listing for a reward. This week's podcast was brought to you by The Unabomber Manifesto (For Your Cat) by Theodore J. Kaczynski, translated by Sam Austen, which has been banned worldwide as of 6/20/2023. 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

In 2018, mathematician Eric Weinstein coined the term "Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN),” defined as a closed exchange of ideas promulgated by “insiders” – sitting politicians, tenured academics, high-prestige journalists, and the like. Among these insiders, those who deviate substantially from the party line are either divested of their privileged 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 privelege by ensuring – in a decentralized, panoptic fashion – the exclusion of disruptive narratives from public conversation. The DISC's power is entirely self-regulating: as long as its increasingly untenable narratives are initially delivered with the trappings of official, complicit media outlets and the unsuspecting public will eagerly do its mass-distribution dirty work. By early 2020, it became clear to heterodox thinkers - and even many traditionalists operating within the DISC - 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. 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/meowliterature and YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

“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

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). "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 the majority of one-on-one relations are becoming increasingly adversarial and gamified, the tennis court provides an ideal clay 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 varied and unexpected parallels reinforcing the epistemic grid to create a resilient hermeneutic surface, imparting force and direction to the anomized and deliterated individual as the thrust of the racket gives flight to its impetuous target.” – Cuddle Princess, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair *** 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

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). In this episode, we celebrate Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s devotion to animal welfare; namely, his support of The Pixie Project, a Portland-based animal rescue facing an unprecedented inflow of “pandemic remorse” animals. Enthusiastically adopted during COVID lockdowns, rescue pets are now being resheltered in droves, enabling their owners to shed their tired dog-parent personae and ease into a more cosmopolitan, travel-selfie-based lifestyle. For more on how you can help Chuck help The Pixie Project, visit his Substack. As added incentive, we’ve included a reading of Palahniuk’s Phoenix, a 2015 short story attesting to the apocalyptic power of a feline scorned, and a warning to fair-weather pet adopters. This reading is presented in cat language. The human-language original can be found here. 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 and Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

This podcast is sustained by sales of our book series for cats, The Meow Library. Episode 12: Jerry Saltz: Art Is Life - An Excerpt for Your Cat Released today, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz's signature wit, levity, and insight unfolds as a dizzying panorama of the contemporary art scene in Art is Life. Touching yet informative, Saltz's latest effort is sure to resonate with a wide array of readers -- not least of whom is the common housecat. The Meow Library has taken the liberty of translating an excerpt of Art Is Life for your feline companion, presenting it here in audio form. A human-language excerpt is available here. 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 book series for cats, The Meow Library. Jerry Saltz's Art is Life is available here. Praise for The Meow Library Presents - 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 and Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Episode 10: Caitlin Forst’s NDA, the Primacy of Autofiction, and the Rise of Otherspecies Narratives Today’s conversation turns at first to Caitlin Forst, editor of the upcoming NDA: An Autofiction Anthology and curator of a the NDA Autofiction Reading Series at Stories Books & Café in Los Angeles. She is also a formidable autofictress in her own right, with knockout pieces available here and here, and a novel in the works. And then, an investigation of form: A perennial bête noire among a vocal group of established authors, autofiction’s rise to primacy among today’s emerging talent continues unabated, circulating almost as vigorously in brick-and-mortar circles as in its native cyberspace, in spite of its alleged obtuseness and inaccessibility. In this episode, we pound a defiant nail into the the warped and splintered coffin of elitist critique by delivering, in cattus linguarum, a selection of short works by three of the genre's biggest names -- works that cannot be denied, whose power transcends the tired strictures of literature and language-as-such, and which can be understood and enjoyed by the common housecat: in short, bulwarks of a profound, multifarious, and radically democratic literature. Human-language translation of this week's episode is available upon request. 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). To pre-order NDA: An Autofiction Anthology, click here. 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 and Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Episode 8: Tao Lin’s Mandalas, Repetition Compulsion, and Hofstadter’s Labyrinth Today we discuss Tao Lin’s recently publicized mandala art as an extension of his literary practice. Known for its simple language, circularity, and psychedelic aloofness – biting yet airy, kaleidoscopic yet concise, concrete yet polymorphic, polarizing yet irresistible – Lin's prose and poetry embody, to some, the fullest and most elegant form of human expression; infinite yet featherlight, redolent of a master’s koan. In a 2016 interview with artist Dorothy Howard, the author paraphrases Jung, calling mandalas “psychological expressions of the totality of the self.” As texts and images created by computer-controlled “neural nets” proliferate, Lin’s visual art and writing stand uniquely positioned to interrogate the role of human cognition in generating meaningful and aesthetically resonant patterns. What forces inform the unique character of Lin’s work – are they something personal and uniquely human, or a bio-agnostic expression of reality’s latent structures, a universal compulsion to repeat certain forms in a certain sequence? To confront this issue, we have trained a neural net to "meow" in a sequence corresponding to Tao Lin’s 8x8 = 64 method of mandala generation, converting the 8th sentence of every 8 paragraphs of Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s seminal work on the primacy of human consciousness, to a correspondingly inflected and contextualized MEOW. The result is a provocative meditation on Tao Lin’s work, the ontology of thought, and the sanctity of human reason. 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). To view and purchase prints of Tao Lin's Mandalas, click here. 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 Twitter: @meowliterature and Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Episode 6: Jordan Castro's The Novelist, Georges Bataille, and the Triumph of Fecality Today we discuss Jordan Castro’s divisive prose debut, paying particular attention to its unprecedented 22-page exposition of a single bowel movement: how it gives form to Bataille’s symbol of the ‘Solar Anus,’ and how this development perturbs and reshapes the contemporary canon. We then draw parallels between the excretion of the fecal stick and the breech emergence of a newborn, and propose the genesis of certain novels, Castro’s in particular, as a form of male childbirth – an act transitioning from oxymoronic to quotidian, metaphorically and in alleged biological fact, in progressive online spaces like those both Castro and his fictional avatar harangue against. Castro’s work, we go on, is both an antidote to and affirmation of Bataille’s “purely parodic” conception of the world, exemplified by such incursions of the fringe and fantastical into the hermeneutical Commons. The universe may indeed be a litterbox, the aperture beneath its occupant’s arched and quavering tail ever-widening. But with Castro’s refined sensibility, we argue, comes hope: an abundant release of rich, fertile coagulum awaits, portended here by a stream of meows – at first, strained and hesitant; at last, buoyant, choiring, resolute. 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 Twitter: @meowliterature and Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary