The Literate Kitty

It doesn’t matter if we’re living in the big city, an itty-bitty hamlet, or something in-between, we all expect the same access to the world around us... and for the most part, we get it, with internet, cellular technology, and all those forms of transportation at our disposal. Go back as little as eighty or so years, though, and that wasn’t the case... not in a place like South Riding , the small Yorkshire town at the heart of a recent BBC production of the same name. ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ When the train stops in South Riding and thirty-something Sarah Burton steps out onto the platform, her look of consternation speaks volumes; trains, it seems, do not adhere to the same rigorous time schedules in this northern backwater as they do in London--something which isn’t likely to improve her odds of making a good impression at the job interview for which she’s now running late. She arrives with only a moment to catch her breath. That moment, however, is a telling one; a quick look at the other int...

Destiny. Fate. Call it what you will, but the fact remains that all of us start out, to a certain extent, either cursed or blessed by circumstances entirely beyond our control--namely, the sort of conditions into which we’re born. There’s little rhyme or reason to it, of course; it’s all a matter of biology and luck-of-the-draw as to our parents and their respective situations. Kings and queens are just as likely to have half-wits for heirs as paupers are to bear geniuses. (And no, I’m not discounting the importance of “nurture” in the old “nature vs. nurture” equation, I’m merely pointing out the randomness of it all when it comes to innate abilities.) That kind of randomness--and whether or not we attempt to change our lots in life or just accept things as they are--struck me when watching a pair of mini-series which aired (on PBS, here in the States) recently. The two stories have their similarities and differences, but it was how each character’s situation in life informs his/her a...

The saying “You can’t tell a book by its cover” is an interesting one, because we almost never use it when talking about books, do we? We pull it out to describe the slovenly fellow who paints delicate watercolors... the fragile-looking woman who packs a mean right hook... or maybe, the old, driven-by-grandpa four-door that surprises with a souped-up V-8 under its oxidized hood. The point is that none of those things involves a book.  More interesting, perhaps, is that the saying isn’t strictly accurate; I think you pretty much can guess what a book will be like by studying its cover. The artwork may not jibe completely with the author’s words, but you can usually get at least a sense of what kind of story you’ve picked up, and if there are any blurbs, quotes, or snippets on the cover, those all provide yet more clues to what lies within.  But, what happens when there is no cover? With the growing popularity of e-books, it’s becoming more and more common to access someth...

We may not give much thought to it one way or the other--in fact, I’m pretty sure we don’t--but no matter what else we do, we’re constantly doing one thing: filing away memories, for later retrieval at some unspecified date.  Case in point? All we have to do is hear a song playing in a store, catch a few minutes of an old movie on TV, get a waft of a certain perfume while walking through a room, or read a name or phrase in a book... and suddenly, without even trying, we’re right back in the middle of whenever , reliving in our minds some episode--either momentous or inconsequential--from the past.  Good, bad, and boringly-mundane memories... our minds are like so many rows of filing cabinets in a huge warehouse, with vast storage space to hold all that stuff as we accumulate it with each passing day. But, we might ask, why do we have so many memories? Is their purpose, by turns, to titillate, amuse, anger, and/or embarrass us... or do we learn something valuable from them, as...