my beautiful cat has only two faults
one is she can’t take direction
the other is, you know how people talk about actors having iphone face? she doesn’t have that but she does have a face that broadcasts her pre-existing possession of the knowledge of good and evil
not ideal in this rôle

no, theo, look up there, not at me
no, try to look like the snake told you to do it
this must be how god felt when he finally got one good pic after putting everyone in their places & realized he‘d left the vacuum cleaner behind the Tree right where he couldn’t crop it out

I can and did once expel a human man in a cloak trying to trade me holly berries for a book, with just my flashing eyes and floating hair. but one time a rat got in & we had to deputize the cats to help. they were happy to do it

in my considerable bookselling experience, the larger the beast, the easier it is to evict. the smaller ones can hide in tiny forgotten places you would never think to look. the poetry section, and so on.

this is true of customers as well

when I actually did work in an open shop I had three cats and a baseball bat all expressly available to me for self-defense & defense of the books. any living thing up to & including a human man was helpless before me

these all from the same person, whose views are at times questionable but who agrees with me on maria callas being the original miss jesus, as gabriel byrne says in the film. so the occasional misstep I let go by
they’re not kidding about the screams btw. so good

no matter how awful things get there are always insane opera posters to sustain & enthrall them that have ears to hear
nobody’s written titles/headlines like this since clickhole’s best years. but opera monomaniacs really mean it

I could buy a vintage anne klein ii coat while I am awake, it would be easy, but I don't feel good about it anymore. it would not have an owl in it but the owl is symbolic.* well, so is the coat

*of responsibilities that I can't handle but that accrue to my discredit if I do not take care

had a distressing dream last night about buying a vintage anne klein II trench coat that had an owl in it

the owl wasn't distressing on its own, I made friends with it & it went through airplane security on my shoulder. no trouble. but there were complications

we were pursued into the mountains

she read it twenty years ago but nobody told me then, I just found out.
she's a vampire these days, of course
good for her

I don't remember wondering as a child why l'engle couldn't stand to let the war be entirely america's fault. I mean she could still have dragged wales & the world's mothers-in-law into it somehow, who would have stopped her

anyway guess who read the audiobook of it? that's right.
lestat's mother!!

remember in a swiftly tilting planet when the special american children had to avert global thermonuclear war with, I want to say, patagonia? by going back in time & being nice at strategic moments to the welsh & also to meg's mother-in-law

SHE’S DONE IT

will she at least bite the fucking oranges
no
she will bat at them to please me but only if I pull them down off the tree first
theodora you and your precious snake are making a mockery of the book of genesis

I built her a whole fake orange tree with my own two hands and all she wants to do is make out with her snake
theodora you break my heart

going through some so-so youtube bits on "one-hit wonders" & I thought you'd like to know that she likes tubular bells (that is what took me back to pure moods in the first place) but does not care for rico suave. or even tarzan boy
well I don't care what you say, theodora. I like tarzan boy

theodora YOU are a pure mood

six years I've spent with my beautiful cat & before today I never once played her a single album or song I was sure meant anything to her. it was like she had no feeling for music at all
and now by god she's stretched out next to me listening like she's never listened before
(to Pure Moods)

the other good parts are:
1. among the listed reasons a woman might not be already married to a man is the fact that she might be in love with another woman
2. you should definitely have sex before marriage if (& only if) you feel like it, and only creeps expect otherwise

the rest is real awful

every bad book has a couple of good parts & here is the main good part of this one ("dateable men fall into several types, but the best type is homosexuals & every smart woman knows it") (I paraphrase but only just)

next time I want to make someone's eyebrows stand on end due to the static electricity coming out of their brains, I will show you what it was like to be pushing 40 in 1963. or what people thought of you. but a lot of what life is like is determined by what people think of you

how could you come that close to greatness & throw it away
twice! two wasted titles, both should exist, neither does:
ACCUSED MUSE
ACCURSED NURSE
please notify me the instant one of these comes into being. especially if it already has & I wasn't paying attention

or whatever the fuck
wonderful title AND rare, or so it seemed to me, who could not find a copy. nurse novels are almost never rare. well, who'd want em
anyway but then I found out the worst thing in the world (I saw a misprint, the title is actually ACCUSED NURSE)
doesn't even fucking rhyme

for a full week and a half I was captivated by a nurse novel I thought existed
(the greater mass of nurse novels as you must know are the dullest things in the world)
"accursed nurse" it was called & I would whisper it to myself - ACCURSED NURSE! imagine it echoing down the stone walls of an abbey

"why would I eat a pumpkin" she says. "not natural"
well, imagine if you stalked a pumpkin in the wild, cut out the weakest one from the pumpkin herd & brought it down, you'd be pretty proud of yourself. you'd bite it, maybe
she says she cannot imagine doing this
I can't either. but I can't say that

if I can be very dull for a minute
I got my beautiful cat some of those pumpkin & wheatgrass packets you are supposed to feed to your beautiful cat now and then for the good of her health. but it doesn't say on the packets how you are supposed to explain this to your beautiful cat

imagine how stunned I was to find out just now that he was born in 1927. out of college before the '40s were over.

god damn

I do believe I will choose to excuse him on a couple of otherwise inexcusable points. my source did not report a death date so I dare to hope he hasn't died. good for him

people generally agree that his books have a pronounced '60s-'70s air about them, no matter how far into the 80s & '90s they were written. I got the general impression from The Grounding of Group Six that he was probably in his 20s when he started writing about teens. maybe 30s but I doubted it

read another julian thompson that I will not name because I can't implicitly recommend it even with reservations & disclaimers. language & some of the ideas not what you would call redeemable for the youth of today, even large-minded, history-conscious youth. still, it had moments

it isn't historical but I enjoy it