Uni: “I don’t understand—what’s she so excited about? Why is she laughing so hard, or crying, or whatever it is she’s doing? Sometimes we feel like the world is a great dustball of mystery, and we’re just pawing it fruitlessly from one corner to another. Either way, we’re ordering that Jeanette Winterson novel immediately.”

Chloe: “It’s funny how shit happens sometimes. We never thought that—just because our thoughts on Rachel Kushner’s The Flame Throwers were featured on The Paris Review!—the author would become a critical darling of just about everyone. And so quickly! We went back to Kushner’s first novel, which is about the trials and travails of wealthy Americans in Cuba on the cusp of Castro’s revolution. This lady is a real master of combining historical detail with human emotion, making this a pageturner that’s also a brain-feeder. And the prose, the goddamn delicious, unendingly inventive prose…For your delectation, just a few examples:

Kushner can do the hilarious, gross image. I.e., “And where her husband’s engineering job at the silver mine had lasted only so long as the hostile locals remained firmly under the company’s shit hammer.” 

Kushner writes about natural phenomena and colors in such a way that we don’t just breeze through those descriptive passages like most normal kittens normally would: “The moon appeared, glowing like a quartered orange section that had been ever so slightly sucked, its flat edge thinned and translucent.

And then this virtuoso passage, rendered in the third person but roughly through the eyes of the young Every Lederer: 

The same book had illustrations of parrots that were native to eastern Cuba. But they’d been extinct for four hundred years, the book explained, because a Spanish conquistador and the men of his court had eaten them as a delicacy. It seemed that “delicacy,” the way the book described it, meant not rarely, like on a special holiday, when you’d eat a Dubuque ham or a pot roast, but as often as possible until there were no more parrots. They were conquistadors. They’d come a long way and were ready to gorge themselves. Everly couldn’t imagine anything so showy and beautiful would be tasty. The metallic blue and emerald green of a parrot’s feathery coat made her think of something bitter and not meant to be eaten, like talcum powder or pencil erasers. The delicacy hadn’t been so much about taste. The point was to eat a bird that talked. She imagined the Spanish teaching the parrots to repeat cruel and offensive phrases. The parrots squawking, “Get out of here! You’re ugly and stupid! I hate you!” The Spanish would then get so angry they’d kill the parrots. “Take that, you rotten bird. Who do you think you are, talking to me that way?” And then they would eat them in revenge. It was terrible to think about, but it was interesting, too. Because it meant that eating was no longer about filling up. Making hunger go away. It was more like a court proceeding, with punishment and justice.”

Fuck me. Beyond the fact that this paragraph makes Scott want to weep and tear his clothes and give up all fiction-writing dreams of the future, has any human author ever more exactly and accidentally captured the psychology of our species’ enthusiastic mouse-killing, that hush-hush bloodsport hobby? It is us, the four-leggy furry conquistadores. And oh, we are ready for the gorging. Are we ever.” 

Uni & Chloe: “We heartily approve of this project, described as ‘an inter-generational experiment in collaboration and pedagogy, designed to encourage shared decision-making power and challenge the way we think about the urban environment.’ Plus: Kittens, fuckloads and fuckloads of kittens, and you can take them home with you!”

Chloe: “Wow, kittens. We don’t blush easily—or at all, naturally—but we must admit to being a bit shocked and amazed by this ‘Dirty Fortune Teller’ that came with our advance copy of Tamara Faith Berger’s Little Cat. (The book is out soon; we’re doing an Evening Interview with Berger to celebrate the publication date.) The first sentence of the first novel collected therein: “But if I told you everything you’d probably think I was a slut and I can’t deal with that so I’m not going to tell you absolutely everything.” But oh, narrator, we hope you do, we hope you do.”

Uni: “Well, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods got a bit…silly…so we abandoned it before having to read, like, another dream sequence in which a buffalo-headed apparition offers ponderous Deep Life Advice. But we still wanted something light and exciting to tickle our kittenbrains, and Alan Glynn’s Graveland came in the mail right on time. (It’s due out on May 28.) We’d read Glynn’s Bloodland before, and we’re total suckers for Colin Harrison and any fast-paced literary thriller set in the mucky underbelly of New York City. (We also saw the film adaptation of Limitless, which is basically like Flowers for Algernon if Charlie had been a total loser journalist who becomes superhuman by rubbing crystal meth in his eyeballs. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well.) Anyway, Graveland is about fathers and daughters, misplaced political activism, and the horrid and depraved machinations of the ‘1% of the 1%.’ There are assassinations, plucky journos, backroom intrigues, and last minute plot twists involving diet soda and murder. Okay, so Graveland isn’t fucking Ulysses, or even a major work of John Le Carre, but it has venom and momentum and it’s a good one to curl up with while imbibing some of this springtime sunshine.”

Uni: “Lest you ever accuse of us elitism or pretension, here we are reading an honest-to-god paperback book, the sort of thing that any portly American might prop on their ample gut before proceeding to annihilate the afternoon buffet aboard their 5-day Miami-to-St. Croix Carnival cruise. We had a prejudice against Neil Gaiman for being the sort of person who appeals to the Dungeon & Dragons crowd, mainly because Scott admitted to reading Gaiman ages back, when when he had a fondness for role-playing games involving werewolves. (Nerd.) But then we flicked open our paperback and noticed that Gaiman dedicates his book, in part, to Kathy Acker. Okay, not expected…nor was the scene on page 27 in which an unknown man proceeds to be physically swallowed by the vagina of a hooker whose services he has engaged. That was wild! American Gods is a bit trashy and over-the-top (I mean, really…) but that doesn’t mean our paws aren’t aching from flipping the pages. At its best the novel hits a nice David Lynch-y vibe, mixed with tripped out Viking god esoterica (think Nicolas Refn’s Valhalla Rising, maybe) and some really dark, bad ass moments, like this fortune that the protagonist, Shadow, receives from a coin-operated gypsy:

On a superficial level, our favorite thing about American Gods is the back cover’s author photo—why did ‘serious fiction’ abandon this ego-pumping tradition, which has created some real classics?

The young Mr. Gaiman here looks a lot like Zack Braff fronting a Cars cover band in Killington, Vermont. Look at those feathery locks!”

Chloe: ” ‘How angry am I?’ That, appropriately enough, is the first line of this novel about a swiftly embittered, single 37-year old woman whose own artistic ambitions are overshadowed by those of her supposed best friend, Sirena Shahid. Nora (the swiftly embittered one) is a schoolteacher without children of her own; she doesn’t have a cat, for chrissakes. Her life is pretty drab and small and pointless until she meets Sirena, who invigorates her and also incites some never-resolved quasi-lesbian urges (soon subsumed by Nora’s urge to sleep with Sirena’s husband. She’s got a lot of urges, this woman upstairs.) The two women share an art studio where Nora finally begins working on her own creative pursuits: Tiny, intensely realistic dioramas depicting rooms inhabited by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Edie Sedgwick. Sirena, meanwhile, is embarking on an installation called Wonderland (SEE: Jerry Saltz on ‘clusterfuck esthetics’) that involves broken mirrors, flowers carved from aspirin, and enormous photos of variously aged naked people.

At first the novel seems like it’s going off into Single White Female territory—Nora is a bit too enamored of the Shahid family, and she seems eager to play substitute mother to their youngest child, Reza—but this is a story of friendships and betrayals, not a thriller about some sad psychopath. Claire Messud’s latest tickled us uncomfortably in all the right places: Is this our fate, as female kittens, aging every day, slowly whittling our hopes and dreams down into more manageable sizes, watching while lesser talents—the ones with that hunger, the sharpened teeth—make us eat their proverbial dust? (We hope not. Scott says to relax. ‘You’re fucking special,’ he says. And maybe he’s right. Maybe we are special.) What we mean is that The Woman Upstairs is a raw, painful book, one that’s about dissolution and despair but ultimately hints at a type of redemption. You should read it, unless you’re also a semi-depressed 37-year old single woman without children, in which case maybe stick with something a bit less daggerish, like Eat, Prey, Love.”

Chloe: “Man, this book starts out with an entire soap opera’s worth of narrative development in the very first chapter, like Jonathan Dee put a firecracker up the butt of his plot, lit it, and let it explode happily right in his face. We’re introduced to an excruciatingly miserable married couple, Ben and Helen, who are sneaking out to go to couple’s therapy behind the back of their adopted Chinese daughter, Sara. It does not go well. (The doctor is “a heinous cunt,” per Ben, who is in the midst of one of those “existential”, Talking Heads-style crises: “You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, you may ask yourself, well, How did I get here?, etceteras.”) From there it’s off to the races: Ben, a high-powered lawyer, becomes obsessed with a very young associate at his firm (“…what he told her was that if he didn’t have sex with her very soon he was going to die”), which culminates with the two of them in a hotel room, the girl stripping naked and posing while Ben, not touching her, gets off on some approaching-middle-age-power-trip thing. They leave the hotel room, but—bam!—the girl’s boyfriend is waiting outside and—whack!—he beats the shit out of Ben, who—groan—gets horribly drunk and goes driving and—oy vey!—gets a DWI, and then very soon afterward the girl—fuuuuuck—slaps him with an erroneous rape charge, which causes him to lose his job and his wife and get disbarred and go to rehab, while meanwhile (deep breaths!) his wife gets a job in public relations, where her specialty soon becomes damage control and media-facilitated apologies (SEE: the novel’s title), and all is going very well until  her boss tries to seduce her one night, and she politely declines, so he drives his car drunk back to New Paltz, NY, and crashes, and dies. All of this dramatic and awful shit, most of it the direct result of too much sex and too much booze, unfolds in the first 40 pages.

Unfortunately, Dee’s novel starts to get away from him after that. The tempo slows, the action becomes more and more implausible. Most fatally, the characters themselves start to turn into…assholes, really. (This includes the couple’s adopted daughter Sara which, if there was an easy way to unadopt someone at the age of 14, they should have seriously considered.) The book is trying to prove some clumsy point about forgiveness, confession, and second chances, but nothing really gels, and by the time a drunken movie star enters the scene, afraid that he’s killed a girl during a 5-day blackout—alcohol is really the evil villain of A Thousand Pardons—Helen has become so intensely unlikable that you start wishing she’d drink a bit too much and veer off a bridge. No offense! We adored Dee’s last novel, The Privileges, so it’s too bad that A Thousand Pardons feels like a rough sketch for a longer, more nuanced work.

In unrelated news, the season finale of The Following was fucking intense.”

Chloe: “We’ve got a straight-up shelving dilemma. This shit has finally hit critical mass. (And no, Kindle screens are not kittenpaw-responsive; and no, we wouldn’t get one even if they were.) If we had more money or more square footage we could live like this, or this, but alas, the cruel limitations of space and finance…Instead we’re flagrantly double rowing it, muddling categories and confounding logic—that Gerhard Richter volume hugging Kosinki’s Cockpit, stray bits of Amis everywhere, Coupland next to Clockers next to Crack (that last one a monograph of a very swell Belgian, Koen van den Broek); little mini-sculptures and clusters, Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses On The Art World suddenly dating Marie Calloway while an uncorrected proof from Juan Gabriel Vasquez looks on, all timid. There was a time and a place for clutter, for great wobbly stacks, the accidental poetry of mismatched spines—but now it just feels very ‘collegiate,’ and by that we mean ‘not grown up.’ We’re more than three. It’s about time we got our fucking act together.

In the meantime, one of Scott’s co-workers sent him an image of this book, which we’re hoping that he (or some unknown admirer) buys for us immediately…”

Oh, and also this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book we just found out about…

Chris Kraus is a critic, occasional filmmaker, and novelist whose most recent book is the excellent Summer of Hate. In the fall, Semiotext(e)/MIT Press will release a new, critical edition of her novel Aliens & Anorexia.

UNI & CHLOE: Your novel I Love Dick is, in some ways, the story of how an obsessive love interest allows a young woman to come into her own as a writer. Should love always be this consuming, all-encompassing, and borderline scary? (We’re trying to suss out our feelings for Scott, you see, and we’re afraid that sometimes we’re too giving, too clingy, too constantly present.)

CHRIS KRAUS: From the outside at least, it seems like you three have a good thing going on. He’s the biggest fan of your work, and your first reader. Maybe you need to make this Scott-worship the subject of one of your posts and see how that goes? But so far your writings haven’t been Scott-centric at all, and they’re great. I don’t think that kind of I Love Dick-type obsession is even love—for the narrator, it was more like a mania that finally allowed her to speak. That kind of obsession isn’t something I’d seek out now. As William S. Burroughs said about Queer, it was kind of an inoculation against ever doing it again.

UNI & CHLOE: We don’t like to waste too much time on magazines, but every now and then we’ll paw through a copy of something that Scott has brought home—ArtForum, say, or Art in America, or Frieze—and it generally only takes about twenty to thirty words before we’re purring our way into a deep, deep sleep. Now Chris, you write art criticism, but it doesn’t suck! What do you think is wrong with art writing today, and why is so much of it so bad?

CHRIS KRAUS: People are trying so hard to sound smart they don’t let themselves be smart enough to say what they see. Also, they lack any instinct for entertaining. I wish more of these critics would write with your kittenish charm!

UNI & CHLOE: In much of your more autobiographically inclined fiction, the reader is confronted with the difficulties of being a woman trying to be taken seriously by a cabal of men: academics, theorists, artists, and so on. We really sympathize. Sometimes we’ll be hanging out on the periphery of a group of people, and those people are asking questions like “how can we counter the hegemony of empire as posited by Hardt and Negri?”, and we’ll want to interject some common sense observation—but the second we do, whoever was speaking gives us a withering stare that translates as, “Shut up, kitten, and go back to being cute and silent.” What advice would you offer female kittens who want to be heard in a man’s world?

CHRIS KRAUS: Oh god, stay out! It’s just so BORING. Hardt and Negri themselves don’t have any good answers about “countering that hegemony.” Working freelance and being on the computer all day is hardly a plan. The best thing is to refuse alien language and insist on the right to vocalize thought on your own terms. Certain male artists have done this very aggressively. I’m thinking of Mike Kelley, how he brought a low, working class cadence into the high art mix. Of course being felines you run the risk that, rather than appreciating the genius of this, people will just see you as dumb. But pay them no mind. Better to live in a parallel world.

UNI & CHLOE: You’ve been awesomely supportive of our blogging efforts so far, for which we’re eternally grateful. It’s a bit odd to realize that we don’t know your own relationship to cats-in-general. Have you ever had one? Or any animal companions of any sort?

CHRIS KRAUS: One of my books (Aliens & Anorexia) is dedicated to the memory of my dog! I love dogs for all the reasons Gilles Deleuze hated them. But then, his animal of choice was the tick. I know you’ve written against dogs in the past, but frankly, your devotion to Scott seems a bit dog-like to me … against the aloof archetype of the cat. I mean, kittens, what gives?

UNI & CHLOE: We can’t help but feel that your body of work has spawned a legion of inferior imitators, much in the way that the seminal grunge band Nirvana led to atrocities like that Australian group, Silverchair. So we’ll cut to the chase: What are your thoughts on Marie Calloway? (And are we crazy, but is her pen name taken from a digression in I Love Dick?)

CHRIS KRAUS: I don’t remember a Marie in I Love Dick …

UNI & CHLOE: We just pawed through our cat-eared copy…There’s a Maria Calloway on page 174. She’s giving a blowjob to her New Age-y, self-actualization-type teacher. I guess Calloway has claimed that she took the name from the Sofia Coppola movie about Marie Antoinette, which seems really lame, but maybe she subconsciously cribbed it from Dick. Anyway…

CHRIS KRAUS: Oh—Marie is a cat lover, and I wish her well. In some ways, her writings remind of me Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Towards a Theory of the Young Girl, or else Michelle Bernstein doing Francoise Sagan. The part in “Adrien Brody,” though, when she asks the guy to take a sex pic with her phone, and he asks, Are You Going To Use This?, and she says No, and then does … That doesn’t seem right. Literary fashions are so cyclical. At one moment, the culture seems to want women who talk all about what it’s like being a girl; at the next, female writers who avoid giving any details at all are the most highly praised. I envy writers like Alice Munro, living up north, left mostly outside this fray to do her very specific and writerly work. I think after the buzz from the “controversy” surrounding her work dies away, if Marie Calloway decides to continue writing, she’ll figure something else out.

UNI & CHLOE: There was a point in time when Scott’s bookshelf was very, shall we say, patriarchal. Times have changed! Now, in a given month, we might not even read a single book written by someone who possesses a penis. Still, we feel like are there some gaps in our knowledge of fiction written by women. Who are some writers that we should know about, but probably don’t?

CHRIS KRAUS: Well if you like reading poems, Dorothea Lasky is amazing. And so is Fanny Howe, both her poems and her prose. Fanny’s daughter, Danzy Senna is a great writer too. I like Tamara Berger. Recently someone recommended Marie Bashkirtseff’s diaries to me, and they’re great. Emily Gould and Ruth Curry have a great list on Emily Books. Have you ever read Janet Flanner’s Uncollected Writings? Her long essay “Mrs. Jeffries” is the best account I’ve read of Occupied France. So great. Or Dawn Powell?

UNI & CHLOE: It always titillates us to read what you have to say about S&M; we feel a weird shimmery mix of attraction and repulsion when considering the topic itself. Of course, we haven’t really dabbled ourselves…A) we’re cats, and B) this apartment in Bed-Stuy isn’t exactly crawling with eligible play partners…but we do have a strong compulsion to fit ourselves into boxes—especially boxes that are really too small for us to properly fit inside, so that we’re sort of confined and spilling out over the edges. We can’t help but thing of bondage; we feel both constrained and very safe when squished into those boxes! Are we making any sense? Or are we just trying too hard to identify, when all we really are is a couple of really vanilla kittens?

CHRIS KRAUS: I’m not involved in S&M now … that was part of my, I guess, research when I moved to LA and started being involved more in the art world. I wrote about S&M in Aliens & Anorexia and Video Green as kind of an antidote to the absolute impersonality of art world life in LA - an extreme presence in an otherwise vacant terrain. I mean, it’s not something I would have gotten into had I lived in Bed-Stuy, I don’t think. There’s no denying the protection and safety of small space. But maybe you don’t have to give it a name? S&M can be very addictive. Remaining Free Kittens gives you the same paradox and in the end seems less limiting to me.

**

 CHRIS KRAUS: You cats are my new favorite literary critics because your responses are so direct and agenda-less. I’m guessing this is because you have all the time in the world—at least, you seem to—and no position to uphold. Do you think this is a requisite for criticism?

UNI: We’re in a unique situation, Chris, and not just because there’s very few—or, okay, no—other cats who are currently engaged in literary criticism as a vocation.

CHLOE: We’re in a dependency system that, depending on how you look at it, can start to resemble the stereotypical nightmare of American conservatives: the “welfare queen” perversely anchored to the fast-flowing teat of the state—  

UNI: What Chloe means is that we don’t have to work. We don’t have to worry about money, because we’re ‘taken care of.’ We are ‘kept kittens.’ In some ways we’re in the enviable position of, say, visual artists in Europe, before the rush toward austerity disemboweled all of those funding programs.

CHLOE: And like those artists of bygone days, we can pursue our passions without worrying about other concerns, economies, or alliances. Unlike post-crash artists, who have to resort to, like, decorating a limited edition bottle of Maker’s Mark, or designing a pair of lady’s high heels, just to pay their rent.

UNI: But we also don’t have any promises to make or break, friendships or relationships to maintain. We don’t have any ‘writer friends.’ We’re not churning out reviews for an editor who wants to plug his wife’s sister’s memoir about learning to love again (and cook!) in India.

CHLOE: Our kitten-hearts hurt for those ‘freelance’ writers—as if there were anything free about it!—trying to smush a few paychecks together into a livelihood. Who can think about books properly when you’re thinking about, like, whether or not you’re going to have to work at Red Lobster again? Things are rough out there. Scott tells us it’s not uncommon for magazines now to have a clause in their contracts, ‘almost definitely probably promising payment’ within ‘365 to 1095 days following publication,’ barring any ‘acts of God or changes in financial standing.’

UNI: We’re in the dying days of a something-or-other. Until it’s well and truly over we just count our blessings, remain gracious about the opportunities we’ve been given, and approach each book without prejudice or obligation.

CHRIS KRAUS: Colette loved cats. Do you love Colette?

UNI: We must shamefully admit that we’ve only read Gigi.

CHLOE: Which, as far as we could tell, was a disturbing true tale of a 15-year old girl who is pimped out by her deranged grandmother.

UNI: There were some good pieces of advice in the novella, though. Like: “You can, at a pinch, leave the face till the morning, when traveling or pressed for time. For a woman, attention to the lower parts is the first law of self-respect.”

CHRIS KRAUS: How do you feel about cat-lovers, generally?

UNI: They can get a little creepy.

CHLOE: There are limits. Always limits.

CHRIS KRAUS: At what point does feline appreciation end and anthropomorphization begin?

CHLOE: I think we might be at that point right now, Chris. Right here.

CHRIS KRAUS: Can any of us truly understand another species?

UNI: I can sort of understand humans, but certain species are still a mystery to me. I’m at a loss with most lizards. Insects, who knows what goes on in their heads (probably nothing.) Dogs I can comprehend the way one understands and sort of pities an inferior peer.

CHRIS KRAUS: What about that rubbing thing cats do against human legs and soft furniture?

UNI: This is the way that we show affection or exercise personal jurisdiction over our human helpmeets, or pieces of inanimate property.

CHLOE: There are several derivations—and we’re glad you’ve asked, because we’ve been meaning to put together a taxonomy of cat-head-rubbing for a while now.

UNI: It probably helps if we draw some pictures; that should clear everything up!

PAYING HAPPY TRIBUTE TO THE LIMB

BRISKLY DEMARCATING THE SOUL-ZONE OF THE CUSHION

THE ROVING BRUSHJOB / STOP & FRISK

CHRIS KRAUS: My friend Hestia Peppe does a performance where she unravels, and then re-winds, a ball of string in front of whoever stops long enough to watch her do this in the museum. What’s your experience with yarn, string, raveling and unraveling, shredding and tearing?

UNI: Can you have Hestia email us? We want to be friends with her, too.

CHLOE: Tell her we’d probably watch her do that for, like, hours. Or days. We might remain interested even when she loses interest. It’s possible.

UNI: But personally, we’re definitely more in the shred-and-tear camp rather than the ravel/unravel or chase-the-string group.

CHLOE: It’s a tactile thing: the joy of claws skittering over unique surfaces. Vinyl, cardboard, corrugated ANYTHING, Arches paper, wax paper, toilet paper…Plus we should add that the shred-and-tear instinct also helps keep our nails slightly manageable, since Scott is quite neglicent on the clipping frontier.

UNI: He’s deathly afraid of nipping the quick. You should see him squirm; it’s fairly adorable.

CHRIS KRAUS: I know you don’t write about art, but still, perhaps you have an opinion: Do you think artists should return to their studios and material things and forget all this ‘post-studio’ and ‘social practice’?

UNI: I like things. Call me old-fashioned. I like art that you can touch (if they let you), that’s made of stuff, that takes up space, that you can move and look at. That involves people or animals actually using their hands or paws to generate an object that exists in the world. Plus the romance of the studio itself, the dirty overalls, the stinky turpentine, the pile of found junk in the corner waiting to be made into a sculpture—I think all of that is pretty damn cool.

CHLOE: This is where my sister and I disagree. ‘All of that’ is so retrograde and a bit sad. The new materials of the 21^st century should be uncommon, unnameable, really: Air! Food! Love! Relationships! Occupations! I swooned for this character in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers who worked at a crappy restaurant and treated it—her job, her wasted hours!—as performance art. We need more ruptured boundaries. The last thing I want to see is another white dude with a beard slinging paint in Bushwick.

XX

Don’t miss our previous Evening Interviews with Sam Lipsyte, Rick Moody, Keren Cytter, Meg Wolitzer, and Simon Tofield!