"Because I am both a blogger and an academic, it is incumbent upon me to write a cat post": Or, random thoughts on cats, blogs, and the imminent collapse of the known academic world
Scott's post about his temporarily ailing cat somehow led me back to the snark at Rate Your Students: "'Oh, lookie here! I found my favorite pen, maybe I can get back to work on that darn dissertation ... maybe I'll just post another picture of my 18-year-old cat, Mr. Scabies.'" (Dr. Crazy's cat also prompted some sneers.) The apparently inexplicable phenomenon of the cat photo has been mentioned more than once in the blogosphere, usually derisively.
Now, strictly speaking, academia is not inhospitable to furry, prickly, scaly, or feathered friends. At the moment, I'm engaging in what is known as CAT (Cat Assisted Typing). Professors tell illustrative anecdotes about their pets during lectures. I know people with pet photos in their offices; I've even seen one department host a bulletin board devoted to the faculty cats. Mom the Retired School Administrator once found herself listening to an eminent classicist as he chatted about his parrots. Dogs have been known to wander covertly through the halls of academe. And I'm told that certain senior superstars at UC Irvine happily exchanged fond anecdotes about their kitties (where students might overhear them, even).
Why the angst, then, about the occasional cat photo or blog post? Or, more precisely, why has the very mention of "cat photos" become shorthand for Too Much Information? (Cephalopods don't seem to provoke the same reaction.) I've rarely seen the same aggravation directed at academics who blog about comic books, baseball, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Star Wars, video games, or anything else in a similar vein, although any or all of those things could be a symptom of a fatal lack of "seriousness." (Always presuming, of course, that all academics live in a rarefied mental sphere, carefully purged of anything remotely resembling middlebrow culture, let alone pop culture.) Then again, though, comic books et al. have been safely domesticated by cultural studies and similar enterprises. Cats, besides being only dubiously domestic, are not part of the average academic's intellectual project. Their presence in our lives is all about our emotions. And I suspect that that's the rub.
During my senior year at UC Irvine, one of my favorite professors, the late Albert Wlecke, brought me along to a English/Comp Lit faculty party (I'll pass over the chain of events involved). Among other things, I heard professors discussing baseball, then-current movies, and Northern Exposure. Dr. Wlecke was not, I fear, altogether pleased that my innocent ears had been exposed to such corrupting conversation, although--being a faculty brat--I was hardly unaware that professors do tend to go on about matters other than textual criticism, Derrida, or the Great Vowel Shift. But the academic garbed in a "traditional" persona, for lack of a better term, keeps his or her non-scholarly pleasures private*; it's difficult to reconcile baseball with the life of the mind. In some fields, like media studies, scholars have been worrying away at the distinction between personal pleasure and scholarly project (one thinks of Henry Jenkins or Nancy Baym). Cats, however, take personal pleasure to an extreme. In some ways, the exemplify self-indulgence: after all, like the Victorian gentleman, the pet cat prides itself on doing no manual labor. It's exceptionally difficult to have, let alone imagine, a serious academic conversation about one's cats, although no doubt ethnographers, anthropologists, or cultural studies types have managed it. There's something pleasantly irrational, not to mention self-mocking, about attempting to co-exist with a cat--let alone mentioning that fact on a blog.
Some women in the links above have wondered if there's a gendered element involved, too. "Friday Cat Blogging" as a meme originated with political blogger Kevin Drum, and the adventures of his two felines sometimes garnered more comments than the "serious" matters. It's hard to talk about women with cats, though, without coming up with "Crazy Cat Lady" stereotypes, and there are still some very...interesting...ideas about academic women floating around. (Let's just say they crop up when you least expect it, and leave it at that.) An academic woman with a cat--let alone a single academic woman with a cat--let alone a single academic woman with a photo of a cat on her blog--is clearly failing to exercise the requisite self-control. They're being silly. And good academics, as we all know, can be sarcastic, but never silly.
*--Although some fields have their own "acceptable" popular pleasures, as one sees in the frequent ties between history and the detective novel.