total convenience and flowers seven days milk:

So late last summer currer, who is evil, introduced me to Bookmooch and I have wasted a lot of time there ever since. It's a bookswap website which, unlike most, functions reasonably well outside the US. But "reasonably well" has its limits: there are upwards of 250 books on my wishlist, and none of them are currently available to be sent to Canada. On the other hand, if I needed five thousand free copies of The DaVinci Code, Bookmooch would be there for me.

Anyway, I accumulated a lot of Bookmooch points sending books to Finland and Ireland and Israel and (mostly) the U.S., and I scrounged around on the Bookmooch site for books to get in exchange, and that's how I ended up with all five of C.J. Cherryh's Chanur books, which I read one and a half of, and then gave up on as repetitive and predictable. They're often mentioned as a good example of SF told entirely from an alien point of view, which is true, and the aliens are basically intelligent matriarchal cats, which is entertaining for about one short book as far as I'm concerned.

But so then I passed them on to fishwhistle. And Fishwhistle, as I've probably mentioned here a time or two already, really, really likes cats. He likes me well enough, and he likes cheesy science fiction too, but cats ... well, cats are special to him. So he loved those books. Loved them. He stayed up late for weeks at a time, reading about cats in space. And now he is sad because he has read them all. And so, my beloved interwebs, I turn to you: what other Cats In Space fiction can you think of? I've already thought of that Heinlein novel, but isn't it late-period Heinlein, which is to say horrible sludge? And then, speaking of horrible sludge, there are the Larry Niven novels with the Kzin in them, but I think Fishwhistle has read all of those, even the short-story collections by other authors, and they just make him sad because the humans and the intelligent space-cats are fighting all the time. But surely there is more Cats In Space science fiction out there somewhere?

Meanwhile it has recently occurred to me that the novel I most want to read, of all the novels in the world, is one that has not yet been written (as far as I can discover, anyway): the thinly veiled roman a clef about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in New York in the late 1950s. Wouldn't that make a great book? And then later, a brilliant movie?

Nuit Blanche was both better and worse than it was last year. It wasn't a complete surprise, the way it was the first year. But it has become a civic holiday - and of course it has, as it involves staying up all night in the midst of a huge crowd, taking in avant-garde art and spending no money, in the company of beloved friends and attractive strangers - complete with happy greetings the day before: "Bonne Nuit Blanche!"

I kind of want to go to the one in Montreal in March.

Anyway, our night of art began with Vietnamese dinner in a jolly gang, which was served to us rather slowly, which made the more peckish among us all emo, which in turn led to the observation that all Smiths songs should have been about food. You know,

I am the son, and the heir,
of a hunger that is criminally vulgar ...
I am human and I want to be fed
just like anyone else does

or

I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a thing to eat

and

I wanted a snack, and then I had a snack
and heaven knows I'm miserable now

Well anyway it seemed very funny to us at the time.