Writers and Animals

My name is Sara, and I have a cat.

I talk about him quite a bit more than is considered polite, treating him in conversation and life as if he were a person, although I am quite aware from the fur covering my apartment, car upholstery and nasal passages that he is, indeed, an animal.

Just because I have a cat (or, for the righteous among you, a cat has me) doesn't mean I love all cats. But I do get a kick out of certain websites related to cats, and recently I've noticed that all of my newly discovered cat websites, including this one and this one*, have been recommendations from writers like him and her.

I here present to you my latest deep question of the universe:

Do writers love their pets more than the average person (perhaps because, if they are home writing, they spend more time with them than those of us who die slow deaths in, ahem, offices)? Or do they just have more time to search out pet-related websites (because they are home writing) and publish them on their blogs/personal websites (that they are tending to while procrastinating, perhaps, on "real" writing)?

*Although I visit these sites, I do not recommend them to everyone, or at least not to anyone unwilling to view the pictures posted with either complete irony or a complete lack thereof.

Pseudo-Olympians

These guys-- who are in pretty good shape, it seems to me-- recreated five Olympic events and competed against each other:

Not only is it amazing to see how they compare to actual Olympians, their video provides inspiration to try this stuff myself (except the hurdles-- I tore my ACL jumping over a hurdle in 9th grade). Why is it that exercise seems more fun when I set up challenges, especially competition, for myself? I enjoy the track workouts I've been doing (basic speed intervals) exponentially more than the long runs required for marathon training, which get so boring. I enjoy Pilates classes more than just stretching on a mat. Even the old Presidential Fitness tests in school got me going-- I ran my fastest mile ever during a presidential fitness test run in high school (although I admit I don't often run timed miles on the track at my fastest possible speed). Anyway, this is a concept many espouse but clearly works for me: specific challenges inspire greater results.

Now I just need to find a friend foolhardy enough to be my teammate/competition.

Last of the Mohicans, or Another Derivative Post

In his review of How Fiction Works, Walter Kirn took author James Woods to flight school, giving a sideways proposal that a better title for the book might be Why Readers Nap. Okay, fine. But what interested me when I read this review is why Kirn-- who published a novel on Slate and whose "strange story of an affair with the Dali Lama's ditsy public relations woman" was one of the most interesting, but most out-there, selections at last year's PEN/Faulkner gala (if I remember correctly, it was also one of the funniest)-- was chosen to review Woods' book, especially when the Sunday Book Review seems to attune reviewers and assignments so carefully (i.e. Christopher Dickey's review of Rick Bragg's book about his father).

Well, the NY Times blog Papercuts recently asserted that Kirn's review represents the latest battle in the unending galactic war between the two literary types, Paleface and Redskin, or as a certain professor at George Mason might call them, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. It's amazing to me that this debate continues as fiercely as ever-- doesn't it seem clear that each side will continue to have supporters, that each will experience its heyday (I would argue that currently, the Redskins are ahead) and then fall back for a while, only to surge again in the future?

I guess we'll have to wait for that one mythical writer who will merge both backgrounds, breaking the binary and bringing glory to us all, before the argument ends. (I predict that if male, he'll resemble Daniel Day Lewis, and if female, Madeleine Stowe.) Until then, I suggest we writers continue practicing our tracking skills or our military drills, whichever we may choose, rather than wasting time comparing whose weapon shoots better.