BloodHenge wrote:
ri[[3r wrote:
BloodHenge wrote:
ri[[3r wrote:
When I was married, we had about 10-20 cats at any one time, including a breeding queen. And with that came the fucking mountain of cat books and stuff. Shitloads of it. Most cat-owners have the aesthetics of the damned. You go to a major cat show and you'll find out. I hate cat books. Cat cartoons comes a close second. They're the lowest of the lowest. Want a make a few bucks at xmas? chuck out a cat book.
I'm not sure what you mean here, since I don't know the nature of the problem you're referencing, or what you believe the correct state of affairs would be...
sorry, I was in rant mode. Talking about cats can do that to me sometimes.
Mostly, I was wondering what you meant by "aesthetics of the damned", and what's wrong with "cat books" (or even what you consider a "cat book").
The phrase "aesthetics of the damned" has two sources for me.
One if the way cat-breeders model their animals according to a fixed aesthetic, a particular look. Nearly all pedigrees have medical problems, some due to small gene-pools, some due to physical deformities caused by the breeding programs. I regard cat shows as theatres of torture.
The other is the huge sentimentality invested in cats by a particular kind of cat-owner, one who substitutes cats for children, who seems to go into a kind of frenzy with the cat-stuff, the books, the toys, statuettes, foot-scrapers, pictures, sweat-shirts, socks, waist-coat, ties, etc etc. No matter the quality, aesthetic judgment seems to go out the window. Sentimentality wins throughout. Sentimentality also infects the book-market. It's known in the trade that cat books are a simple money spinner, particularly at christmas. Cat-owners seem to have little judgement when faced with a cute cat picture, or a book stuffed with cat pictures. But I suppose this happens when the hole in your life is filled by an object of affection, and if it's a cat, well. Of course, this doesn't mean that there aren't good books about cats. Or good tee-shirts with cats on them. With hindsight, I am being a little harsh. In my defense, I was knee-deep in cat -stuff at one stage and I did get a little ... freaky.
One of my least favourite memories of those years, is watching our queen eat one of her day-old kittens. Beside her, were the remnants of the others. Another of occassional "seeing" one of our cats I'd just buried. Another, I was digging a shallow grave and I sliced through the corpse of a previously buried cat.