Random Thoughts on The Cat Who Smelled a Rat

Now more random than ever! Almost every note I took turned out to be a random thought - though, considering the book's structure, I can't be blamed...

• First things first - the cover. Bravo. Classy but bright and attractive, with a lovely color scheme hinging on the crucial striking contrast between the starkness of the white background and the slightly lighter (but still vivid), more "off" tones of red and blue used in the title lettering. Wise compositional choice in regards to the out-of-focus effect used on the fire and smoke encompassing one diagonal half of the cover, which allowed the element to be noticeable but not overly dominant and meld into the background but not be hidden.
  Even the little teal-colored rat embossed on the cover was cute (even if there was not a rat to be seen in the story), and the inside page layout was clean and appealing. Mucho kudos to Walter Harper!

• This is out of order, but it has personal significance, so it's going to the top. I was very pleased to see a mention of floaters in chapter sixteen, an ailment so very common but so seldom talked about. Some floaters appeared in one of my mother's eyes a few months ago, and it scared the daylights out of both of us.
  What was not mentioned, however, is that some floaters are not of the fleeting-darkish-spot variety that Arch Riker had, similar to those which often temporarily appear after a person looks at a bright light and blinks - there's a more aggressive and annoying variety, specks and shapes which appear and stay more or less permanently in your line of vision. (Eventually, your mind learns to partially tune them out, but they're considerably more antagonizing, even debilitating, than the fleeting-spot type.) And the real danger lurking behind floaters (which is not mentioned in the book, hence my lengthy diatribe here) is that they can be symptomatic of more serious problems, namely rips in the retina. (This has to do with how the more solid, permanent floaters are formed - instead of the vitreous humor (the jelly-like substance in the center of the eye) just thinning as Mildred described, it actually separates from the retina. The matter of the vitreous humor being separated is not in itself harmful, but the retina can tear in the process from the two parts sticking together in places like two pieces of wet tissue paper. The floaters result from the debris, bits of tissue, and scar tissue set loose in the vitreous humor from the separation.)
  To make a long story short, the point of this piece is that if you get floaters, you need to see an eye doctor to make sure they aren't accompanied by retinal tears - which, if caught early, are easily tamped down with a laser treatment but which can progress into painful, complex problems if left untreated. And this comes from someone who, from years of experience of helping to care for relatives struck by long, painful illnesses which required many, many doctor visits and in-and-out hospital stays, views doctors as roughly on the same level as lower invertebrates.

• According to the books, Qwill relocates to Indian Village for the winter alternately because the barn's too hard to heat or because he craves a change of scenery every once in a while to "satisfy his wanderlust". Which, of course, is why it makes perfect sense for Qwill to move to a charmless, flimsily-built pre-fab condo complex for the season.

• Nomenclature Quibbles, Part 1 - "Kirt Nightingale was a rare-book dealer from Boston, returning to his hometown in middle age. (What do you suppose is his real name?' the village wags whispered.)" As if Rollo McBee and Thornton Haggis are normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill names which wouldn't attract a bit of attention. (I suppose it's different, though, with McBee and Haggis having lived in the area all their lives and their surnames thus established as "fine, upstanding" Moose County names". Being a for-all-practical-purposes newcomer from Boston, though, everything about Nightingale would be deemed peculiar and incongruous in local eyes by default.)

• Braun seems to be setting Brutus and Catta up as a sort of variation on a reverse Koko and Yum Yum - Catta as the more daring, alert one (not, of course, as preternaturally smart as Koko, though she shows a promising nerve), Brutus as the sweet-but-dumb one (but with a slightly thuggish side absent in Yum Yum). Braun seems to fleshing out Brutus and Catta as full-fledged feline characters in their own right, and I like that. It'd be nice to go over and pay a social call on the other Siamese couple across town once in a while.

• "Chef Wingo"? Does he room with Keestra Hedrog?

• I'm beginning to dislike Barry Morghan. There's a nosy aggressiveness to his character that rubs me the wrong way, and he seems to be trying to muscle his way into all aspects of life 400 miles north of everywhere, sticking his hand in almost every pot and bringing his relatives up, too. Maybe I'm acting like a crotchety old Moose County native, and, if anything, Morghan does know a good thing when he sees it. But it's like he wants to make the county over in the Morghan image. There's such a thing as loving a place to death.

• It's kind of sudden for Dwight Somers to be resurfacing after such a long absence, isn't it? Then again, nearly everybody resurfaces (and resubmerges) rather quickly in this book.

• The shafthouse motorcade was, quite obviously, not one of Hixie's better ideas. In fact, it doesn't have a trace of Hixie's fingerprints on it - it's not flashy, fun, or entertaining, and I think she'd find its very idea, not to even mention its execution, rather lifeless and staid. It sounds as if it came from her collaborative partner, Somers, rather than her.

• The cranky reactions the events in the motorcade spark from the cast's old reliables, however, are almost worth the sequence - "'I don't care if I ride on the hood! Let's get this show on the road!'" "'Kid, if you do that one more time, I'll bash you with my crutch!'" "'What kind of ammunition do you use? Do you have a license to carry a handgun? How long have you belonged to the NRA?'". I also liked the truth in the small observation that in any situation where a large number of people are going on a car trip and have to be split up into separate vehicles, there're always a couple of people who have to throw the seating arrangements all in disarray and stall the whole proceedings by refusing to ride in the same car with a certain someone else they cannot stand.

• From the start of chapter three comes Koko's thought process in inspecting new items in the household - "What is its purpose? Where did it come from? Why is it here?" Kao K'o Kung, the existential cat.

• Concerning Mildred's observation at Tipsy's as to how domed, bright yellow-orange yolks are a sign of quality eggs - I don't know about the domed part, but I recall my mother (who used to raise egg-layers before I was born) saying that a vivid yellow yolk means that the hen who laid the egg was fed high-grade corn (or at least good feed in general).

• A pencil. What a chintzy prize for a haiku contest.

• Speaking of the haiku contest, I suppose I don't need to note that note of the winning contestants were aware of the most renowned aspect of haiku over here, their syllabic structure. In content, they found (IMO, of course) varied success, with "Birdling" the most representative of traditional form, observing a small scene in nature to paint a metaphorical truth about real life. "Obituary", eloquent and elegant, spoke great depths in ten simple words. "Catnap" had such cute and effective imagery - doesn't anyone who has two cats recognize that picture? "Rocking Horse" and "Tricycle" were clever and prescient, tinged with sad parental love; I can see them on crossstitches or posters (I don't mean that as a insult; they have that sort of engaging, classic, sampler-ready wisdom). "Monarch" and Listen"...eh. ("Monarch" seemed empty, and "Listen" was too heavy-handed.) "Lost Love" made me want to throw up.
  The first five listed, though, are small gems of Braun's pose at its best. (And, of course, who can't love "My teacher wears thick glasses...and makes us do things...we don't want to do.")

• Poor Arch, to have such a thing befall his tin collection. I never thought the divorce between him and Rosie had been that vicious - I'd envisioned it as a Lou-and-Edie Grant-style sad parting of ways, with the wife in both cases leaving due to some vague ideas of "finding herself". I'm not knocking the plot development as unreasonable, it's just that - well, poor Arch. (And so odd (or so vicious) for her to set up a tin shop afterward, since collectors usually sell what they themselves enjoy...)

• Although I too thought Derek's Pickax puppy song was awful, I liked the way the gleefully (and stupidly) enrapt crowd spontaneously decided to sing along on the second chorus, but, unsure of the lyrics, stumbled along, their efforts quickly devolving into auditory mush. (And I love the mental image of Qwill with his hands over his ears, eyes closed, loudly humming Handel to himself to drown out the horrid puppy song.)

• Qwill bidding on an auction a minute before the deadline? Our hero knows how to snipe! (But on porcelain parrots...?)

• Qwilleran to Maggie Sprenkle at the silent auction - "'I was hoping you'd donate the French crystal pitcher I admired at your house when I was there. I would've bid high on it.'" How dare Qwill suggest that others give away their personal effects (especially exclusively for his personal gain)?! In fact, I'd tire myself out here mentioning all the small Qwilleran the Jerk moments one by one, so I might as well round them all up here (counting the previous incident as #1) - 2) his "customers aren't breaking down your door" comment to Susan in her shop; 3) treating the crystal pitcher with such insouciance when it is given to him, "swinging it by its handle" like a $2.50 trinket from Taiwan he won at a carnival; 4) refusing to entertain his dinner guests with the tale of the origin of Squunk water, telling them that they'd have to buy his book instead (OK, it was Theo and Misty Morghan, but still - does Qwilleran really need the income from royalties that badly?); 5) his outright nasty behavior toward Susan in Rennie's in chapter ten; 6) his snide "if we find any diamond rings in the deep pile, we'll know where to return them" comment to Elizabeth concerning the rug of her father's he won at the auction; 7) his quick dismissal of Polly's rather urgent phone call at the end of chatper eleven as ornithological nonsense that could wait till tomorrow, despite Koko's excited behavior around the answering machine. It's odd that many of the incidents seem to be borne out of a contempt for (other) wealthy people, even though the targets of Qwill's scorn are at the time (and by nature) often merely being friendly, not flaunting their wealth at all.

• Not coincidentally, the incidents of other characters one-upping Qwill were among the most entertaining (and satisfying) for me in the book - Arch's prickly reactions to Qwill's inpractical interior decorating choices in chapter nine. Amanda's hissingly firm "You--did--not--see--her!" upon Qwilleran's discovery of Maggie Sprenkle. And, of course, Polly's ability to wryly, nimbly hold her own against every instance of Qwilleran being a selfish smart aleck with her here (Qwilleran trying to cop some of Polly's Scottish Egg at breakfast - "'Are you going to eat all of yours?'" "'Of course! Is my last name Duncan?'") - particularly in one incident I'll address shortly...

• "'What are you doing today, Qwill?'" "'Just puttering around.'" Qwilleran's old enough to putter around?

• I'm sorry, I wasn't going to mention this, but it oddly ate at me while I was reading the first part of the book - in regards to the lamp Qwill bought at the craft show, I can't help but think that a hammered look would not go well with a square column. Sharp geometric lines and the rather formless finish hammering lends to metal would seem to work against each other in the same piece.

• I also couldn't help but think that City Qwill would find the idea of buying a bunch of expensive, wooden apples to display on the coffee table when real, edible apples are freely and cheaply available ludicrous.

• I liked Ruff Abbey's brief appearance in the book. His style of speaking - dumb guy making conversation by amiably explaining the obvious which he can barely grasp himself - was the most engaging since Iggy's from Went Underground. Too bad he was selected to fill the role of Fire Watch Murder Victim (which could've really been filled by any faceless Moose County citizen, really). (To anyone who miraculously happens to be visiting here from my other pages - this was like a visit from Dain the delivery guy.)

• Speaking of (ahem) the batik which Ruff delivered - oh, God. It may have been extreme, but I so identified with Polly's reaction; Qwilleran's sudden enrapture with the piece was so ridiculous (why couldn't he have just found some nice sailboats?) that I literally cheered when she verbally threw up her hands and walked out. (I suppose that it's ironic that she would reject the first major bird-related objet d'art Qwilleran buys...)
  I have to question Braun's artistic sensibilities here, which have evidently changed from the time she wrote Lived High. Remember the artist Rewayne Wilk? Then: oversized close-ups of people eating spaghetti and Wing Dings = gross. Now: oversized close-ups of robins eating worms = high art. (Oh, and nice work, Lilian, likening the worms to salamis. That little finishing touch enabled the whole mental image my mind had formed to turn my stomach much more than the most-often-cited example of grossness in the Cat Who... series, the analogy of the charred body discovered in the K Mansion ruins in Knew Shakespeare to a burned black-on-the-outside-pink-in-the-middle hot dog. What's next, the "Feeding the Chickens" Bayeux Tapestry?

• While I'm at it, I might as well get my issues with Misty Morghan off my chest. Judging from the amount of page time granted Misty, Braun seems to be fascinated with her (another author's-friend avatar, perhaps?), but the artist inspires almost the same degree of revulsion in me as her work. Perhaps I can't really put a finger on what turns me off to her so - it's sort of that she's so...aggressively vapid. She laughs overly hard at Qwilleran's life-in-the-north-country jokes; her ever-ready pseudo-enthusiasm for every civic project she runs across and hears about rings painfully hollow; she tries to push her work on everybody and everything (I suppose she thinks she's being generous, but it demonstrates a tremendous amount of ego). She's such a substanceless character that the only qualities that show through are her faults - her ridiculously misplaced pride in her parlor trick of being able to tell through her "artist's eye" if someone's had plastic surgery (which she eagerly employs in all the wrong (read: any) social situations), her meant-to-be-cutesy disparagement of anything which strikes her as unusual ("Derek...Cuttlebrink?").
  One of my old high school English teachers theorized that the world is split into two different groups of people - those who have personality, and those who have essence. Misty Morghan doesn't even have a good personality going for her. Must we invest so much time in this pompous, empty little house wren?
  (BTW, I realize that the distorted proportion in Misty's work was meant to be seen as part of her...*unique*...artistic style, but to me it seems like the sort of thing which would point to a vision problem. In the examples presented in the book (the robin prints, her sunflower sweatshirt), it ends up being more of a distraction than a natural part of the piece, to the point where the artist would almost have to be unaware of its effects.)
• Final word on Misty Morghan - why would even Don Exbridge hire her to illustrate the shafthouses when Duff Campbell from Sang for the Birds has so much more expertise in painting them - has made it his life's work, even? Would Duff conscientously object to dealing with Exbridge? Was Misty chosen because she was a newcomer to the area and thus theoretically unfamiliar with Exbridge's reputation? But Exbridge didn't seem like the type to keep track of goings-on in the Pickax art world - how would he even know of Misty's work? I suppose, though, that Misty knows how to toot her own horn well enough to make her presence known to one and all. -_-

• Geez, first the corrupt Chester Ramsbottom, and now the corrupt Gregory Blythe. With so many public officials on the take infesting such a small local government as Pickax's, it's a wonder anything ever got done in the town.

• Speaking of small-town government, it just occurred to me that it'd be nice to have a town hall meeting in one of the next books. Done properly, it'd be a nice way to get away from all the hobnobbing and back to the grass roots of Moose County. Herb Hackpole raising an uproar over refusing to salute the City Hall's old 48-star flag on the grounds that "that's not the official flag of these United States" - there's real government in action (and real Qwilleran-effectively-solving-a-public-crisis).
• Then again, I suggested that killing off an established character'd be a good move after reading Robbed a Bank, and look how that suggestion turned out.

• All right, I'd better stop free-associating. Back to concerns of logic - a Continuity Alert - in chapter four, Qwilleran states that he's "never met the Y or Z" of the XYZ Corporation, yet it's made clear (is part of a plot point, actually) in Sniffed Glue that Dr. Zoller was Qwill's dentist. Are we being asked to believe that Qwill doesn't even know his own dentist?

• I suppose it's fruitless to ask if the "natal chart" given for Qwill is accurate for his birth statistics, since even though we now know Qwill was born on 11:07 p.m., May 24th, we don't have a year or an exact longitude/latitude of his birthplace (assuming that Chicago can't be narrowed down to one general coordinate).

• This is WPKX Urgent-But-Not-More-Urgent-Than-Self-Promotion News Bulletin!!: "Noose County is in dire crisis! Tune in later at eight!" I love it. It's exactly how the local news outlets up in Montana act.

• Cutting down a centuries-old family oak tree to put in a parking lot is so out-of-character for Edd in so many ways.

• Emma concludes that her husband was a pirate solely on the basis of his possessing a red bandana?

• Speaking of which, Continuity Alert #2 - the whole "pirate's wife" yarn thoroughly violates precedent concerning the Smith family backstory, related by Edd himself in Act One, Scene Eight of Sniffed Glue - Edd's great-grandfather was a book collector who earned the family fortune through mining, founding the town of Smith's Folly in the process (so named because great-granddad's mine didn't pan out in his first couple attempts). The next generation, Edd's grandfather, whittled away the fortune on women, so Edd's father became a door-to-door bookseller. The story of John Smith, the pirate who was supposedly Eddington's grandfather, doesn't fit anywhere in there. (No, it couldn't have been his maternal grandfather. The name "Smith" wouldn't have been passed down to Edd in that case, and his father's grandfather wouldn't have had his town named "Smith's Folly". Unless the claim is trying to be made that both Edd's father and mother were surnamed Smith - but such an idiosyncracy, if intended, would have been noted in the book, and the pirate tale seems to have been offered as an official explanation for the Smith riches, totally separate from and ignorant of the history established in Sniffed Glue and other, previous books.)

• The rather caustic song Qwill wrote for Amanda's mayoral campaign nearly made the Jerk list. I decided to leave it out in the end, considering that Amanda didn't seem to much mind and that she was half-jokingly half-seriously running her campaign on her faults and idiosyncracies anyway, but I still think it went a little too far, especially with the "hey! and she's dried out!" line. (Regardless of how you feel about George W. Bush, would it be proper to bring up his past addictions at a White House luncheon? And (though she of the hard-drinking branch of the Goodwinter tree) I don't even think of Amanda of being an alcoholic per se - I picture her as a hard social drinker (and someone who can down quite a few in private), but not someone with a falling-down problem.)

• Polly-Qwilleran exchange on dining at Rennie's - "'I hear it's impossible to get a reservation on Saturday night.'" "'It helps if your name is Mackintosh.'" Argh, it helps if the place was named after your mother, too.

• Qwilleran's reflections on his own perceived "loneliness" after meeting Polly at Rennie's in chapter ten - what do they mean? Rueing the "loneliness in his life" indicates that he yearns for more intimacy, perhaps a closer relationship (or maybe even marriage), but he complained in his previous breath of Polly misunderstanding him. But he seems to have no other potential partners in mind. Odd. Idle speculation brought on by momentary feelings of isolation? The moment seems to have more significance than that..

• The little bit, though, about Qwilleran musing that all he had except the cats was his alias, Ronald Frobnitz, and "'if I ever start conversing with him, I'm sick!'", was greatly amusing to me in how, in combination with the recent frequent invocation of the Frobnitz nom de plume, it conjured up images of sort of a Cat Who... version of Stephen King's The Dark Half. Now there would be some book, if Braun by any chance ever went off her rocker.

• Miriam's dead. There goes my Mrs. Rochester theory. I note the cause of Qwilleran's breakup has been revised, placing the blame on Miriam's supposedly elitist parents and stating that Qwilleran hit the bottle only after the break-up, not during the marriage (though this may be mental revisionism on Qwilleran's part, perhaps to partially absolve him of responsibility for his role in the divorce - which only goes to prove that he's getting more self-centered and less humble). I prefer the idea that the pressures of the couple's careers and individual character flaws drove them apart instead of evil in-laws.

• Speaking of Qwill's past, he's divulging details of his days of alcoholism quite freely. I know Wetherby Goode/Joe Bunker is, at this point, probably Qwill's cloest guy pal outside of Arch, but it's still quite a break with precedent, where it literally took the matter of someone's life hanging in the balance (as in the case of Isabelle Wilburton from Lived High) to pry the story out of him.

• Why did the Something print Exbridge's bogus letters? Experienced newsmen Arch and Qwill both knew they were fakes, it wouldn't have been hard in a small, close-knit county to prove that at least several of the correspondents' names were contrived aliases, and the paper should've been able to easily refuse to print them on the grounds that they couldn't verify their authorship - a matter of paramount concern to newspapers in order to fend off libel suits from misattributed or forged letters.

• I don't know where Jeffa Young got her info, but as a Scorpio myself, I can avow that "talkativeness", despite the impression this column might give, is not attributed to be a Scorpio trait - all the astrological material I've read describes the Scorpio archetype to be secretive and introverted...

• I'm glad to see Polly's found a positive outlet for her culinary energies preferable to FCBs or explosive curries.

• I'll reserve my rant about the PoisonousRadioactive!Post Office Murals subplot for the Rules C-Pad, but considering the current sorry state of Moose County, I wonder what "pioneer activities" the proposed new, reworked murals would represent. Farmers making the long trek into town to get a check-up at the dermatology clinic? Old men gathered on a Sunday to talk about the latest prizefights down at the unisex hair salon?

• And I hate to break it to Qwilleran (and Derek), but if the Montana-Moose County parallels hold true (and going by just the ornery, anti-establishment nature of the Pickax natives alone), I doubt that being "first to pay the taxes" would be a point of county pride...

• He couldn't figure out that the g/love box's false bottom slid open? Oh, Qwill.

• The joint-replacement spa's think-game memories of the long-gone sound of "an officeful of manual typewriters all clattering at the same time" evoked my own memories of Qwilleran's own disappointed expectations as he entered the Fluxion offices in the first chapter of Read Backwards. (That the image surely must be based on Braun's own fond recollections of her newspaper days gives the bit an extra resonance.) I would like to happily avow, however, that, contrary to Homer and Chaucer's assertions, push-mowers, at least in certain parts of the country, are alive and well. They still sell them in the feed & ranch store at the edge of town, and I myself use one and find it much preferable to the gasoline kind. They're much more maneuverable, they don't cut the grass so low that it burns up from the heat, and your arm won't fall off in trying to start one.

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