MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats

The Meow Library

Literary analysis for your cat, presented by meowlibrary.com

  1. 84. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear: Simulation of Simulacra 

    MAY 4

    84. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear: Simulation of Simulacra 

    This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.  Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is a simulation of a simulacrum that collapses under the weight of its affected petticoats. Its protagonist wants, by her own admission, “all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity” — which is to say she wants history as a pure article of consumption. Then the book performs its nasty little miracle: it drops the woman who has been simulating a fake past into what may be the actual past (or a reality show, or divine judgment, or psychosis). The copy of the copy is forced to meet the original. Or so we think. That is where a comparison to Meow: A Novel by Sam Austen becomes strangely apt. Austen’s book is also a literary machine built from substitution and absence: a novel reduced to the sign of a novel, language made absurdly faithful to form while evacuating ordinary semantic content. Meow preserves the architecture of literary seriousness while replacing meaning with “meow,” exposing how much of “the book” lives not in plot or psychology but in packaging, cadence, inherited prestige, and the reader’s willingness to bow before the object.  Yesteryear--both in substance and in form--does something similar with ideology: it preserves the architecture of tradition while replacing lived tradition with performance. The difference is that Meow knows it is a joke, and the joke is therefore metaphysical. Yesteryear wants its joke to become moral revelation, but it flinches from the deeper politics of its premise: childbirth, breastfeeding, disability, race, misogyny, the actual meat and law of the world it claims to interrogate. It's barely there, even in simulated form. Meow is purer in its barbarism. It does not pretend the void is full. And neither does this podcast.  Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is available through Penguin Random House.  This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.

    27 min
  2. 83. Lena Dunham’s Famesick: Four Shocking Revelations 

    APR 30

    83. Lena Dunham’s Famesick: Four Shocking Revelations 

    This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.  This week’s podcast is hosted by a very special guest* and Girls superfan who devoured her Famesick ARC the second it arrived. She’ll be discussing her five biggest takeaways from what she’s calling “the best memoir of the decade.”  The Dunham-Konner friendship breakup was colder than the business breakup. Dunham’s split with Jenni Konner wasn’t just creative-decoupling boilerplate; it came with body-image wounds, chronic-illness resentment, pay weirdness, and the kind of screeching emotional fallout that makes even the cat leave the room and stare at the wall. Adam Driver allegedly brought real Adam energy to the set. The Hannah/Adam chaos apparently had an offscreen echo: Dunham recalls a charged, unresolved dynamic with Driver, including the now-reported chair-throwing anecdote, then a finale-adjacent emotional fantasy in which reconciliation never came. “He was like a cat. A goddamn idiot gutter-cat. And I had toxoplasmosis,” Dunham allegedly said. The Girls roommate lore is pure downtown carnage. Zosia Mamet and Jemima Kirke reportedly went from fast friends to roommates with matching tattoos to heartbreak after a dating “dibs” dispute—despite marriage, motherhood, and every available warning sign. Dunham’s toxoplasmosis, it seems, had been passed to them. The “teen pop star” subplot reads like prestige-TV emotional terrorism. During Dunham and Jack Antonoff’s decline, she worried about his closeness with a young female artist; his alleged retort was basically: you’re mad she doesn’t want to be your friend. Upon hearing this, Dunham immediately began stress-shedding on the duvet. * Please bear with our host, who suffers from chronic toxoplasmosis.  This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel.  Lena Dunham’s Famesick is available through Penguin Random House.

    29 min
  3. 80. Helen DeWitt Rejects Modernity, Windham-Campbell Prize

    APR 12

    80. Helen DeWitt Rejects Modernity, Windham-Campbell Prize

    “People get huffy about suicide (selfish to do it, help should be sought, seeking help is called threatning suicide); it’s true that it causes distress, so one tries to avoid it. But the best way is to avoid being driven to the edge in the first place. If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that.” — Helen DeWitt, on dealing with Windham-Campbell publicity logistics  Helen DeWitt’s decision to avoid the trappings of modernity that come with being a literary grantee have cost her the $175,000 Windham-Campbell prize. The upside? No irritating Zoom calls, podcasts, or social posts—the shunned DeWitt gets to focus writing. The downside? None. Do you know what $175,000 looks like after taxes? If you’re listening to a literary podcast, probably not. If you’re listening to this literary podcast, there’s truly no helping you. But since you’re here, we’ll present 30 straight minutes of a guy saying “meow”—what the average Zoom call must sound like to one in possession of DeWitt’s rare and noble sensitivities. Which are, by the way, worth considerably more than the rural dentist’s salary the literary world offers as the price of one’s soul.  To hear Helen DeWitt’s side of the Windham-Campbell story, visit her Blogspot page.  This podcast is sustained by sales of Meow: A Novel, the most irritating book on the planet.

    27 min
4.6
out of 5
86 Ratings

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Literary analysis for your cat, presented by meowlibrary.com

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