MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats – Details, episodes & analysis

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Han Kang's The Vegetarian can be purchased here.

The basis of Nobel laureate Han Kang's The Vegetarian is a line by Korean poet Yi Sang: "I believe that humans should be plants."

But some, like today's interviewee, believe that humans should be cats.

A Meow Library translator has taken exception to Han Kang being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, citing the many errors in the English editions of The Vegetarian and her other, lesser-known works. Certain that the Nobel committee is unfamiliar with her books in their original Korean, and that the translated work is not truly of Kan's authorship, he feels that the award should be revoked.

"Any English translation of Han Kang is bound to mislead. The tonal properties of Korean are totally lost to the Anglophone world. Meows are the only language that could possibly convey the melancholy and gravitas of Kang's original prose -- and perhaps even surpass it," he remarks.

After a brief introductory statement, our translator recites a 27-minute passage of The Vegetarian, translated his way. It is his wish that the Nobel committee take note of his improvements and distribute the 2024 Literature prize accordingly.

This podcast is made possible by sales of our first translation for cats, Meow: A Novel.

This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.

Sally Rooney's Intermezzo is available here.

Over and over, Rooney’s characters put their faith in love as a means of escape from the conventional roles assigned to them by society and by each other; no sooner have they achieved this than they are rudely confronted with inequalities of wealth, status and power that are clearly fatal to their idealism — but not to love itself. I take this to be the modest provocation of Rooney’s novels: the idea that love is real precisely because it is a product,one created by social conventions, by market forces, by systems of violence and, behind all of this, by human beings themselves. This is not, I admit, a Marxist theory of love. It is something more unexpected: a lover’s theory of Marxism.

-- Andrea Long Chu for Vulture

While much has been written in praise of Sally Rooney's frank Millenial realism, its Marxist underpinnings are only beginning to be explored. Theory, as ever, can only be thinly illustrative of the market forces propelling Rooney's work into the academic and popular spotlight. The Meow Library believes that the magnitude of Intermezzo's impact can only be understood through praxis, so our analysis takes the form of thousands of undifferentiated "meows," thereby converting it, like Rooney's subversions-as-Harlequin-Romance, into an eminently viral force with potential to destabilize and transform its very means of propagation: a force as great as Love itself, if not greater.

Meow: A Literary Podcast for Cats is supported by sales of Meow: A Novel and other Meow Library titles.

"Against the Written Word is the most important, most revolutionary book produced since the advent of the printing press; the book that will liberate readers from reading, writers from writing, and booksellers from peddling their despicable wares."
- Ian F. Svenonius, Press Kit, Against the Written Word

"We can say nothing about nothing. This is why the number of books can't be limited. All the bodies together, all the minds together, and all their output are not worth the least expression of charity."
- Jean-Luc Godard, Dans le noir du temps

"Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow, meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow, meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow meow meow meow meow? Meow."
- Sam Austen, Meow: A Novel

Today we discuss the work of three (anti)literary icon(oclast)s -- Marxist-Leninist rocker-cum-manifestist Ian F. Svenonius, filmmaker and theorist Jean-Luc Godard, and dissident linguist Sam Austen -- whose output stands as an edifice against itself, a fulgurating peripety of nonmeaning, encapsulated here as a string of hollow MEOWs, addressed to no one, signifying nothing.

MEOW: A Literary Podcast for Cats is a production of The Meow Library.

Follow us on Twitter. 

I walked a thousand steps down from God-Warrior to human, verging on animalistic feline…
- M.I.A., OHMNI9, Chapter 7

With literacy on the outs and audiobook usage at an all-time high, artist, musician, and activist M.I.A. has chosen the ideal delivery vector for her psychedelic cosmogony OHMNI9, whose kaleidoscopic, Blake-adjacent mythos tackles the present with all the force of prophecy. Here, civilizations rise and fall; men adopt forms bestial, God-like, and ineffable; and the world's technologies condense into a malevolent singularity, prompting a final confrontation between good and evil – all in a dazzlingly brisk, 90-minute package, passages of which have been translated here for the benefit of your inner feline.

This podcast is sustained by sales of The Meow Library’s debut audiobook, Meow: A Novel.

In this episode, we read a passage from Prof. Sam Austen's feline-language translation of Ted Kaczynski's infamous manifesto, which has reportedly earned him a lifetime ban from Golden State Medical University, where he formerly chaired the Feline Behavioral Sciences department. A brief interview with Mr. Austen follows. 

UPDATE 06/20/23 - Amazon has shut down production of The Unabomber Manifesto (For Your Cat) and terminated Sam Austen's Kindle Publishing account. There are estimated to be approximately 300 copies in circulation. If you find one for sale on the secondary market, please point us toward the listing for a reward.

This week's podcast was brought to you by The Unabomber Manifesto (For Your Cat) by Theodore J. Kaczynski, translated by Sam Austen, which has been banned worldwide as of 6/20/2023.

Publisher's Summary:

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the feline race...”

First  published in 1995, Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski’s explosive and prescient  assault on all things modern has since been translated into over 10  languages, but never before has it been made accessible to your cat.

Feline  linguist and frequent prison correspondent Sam Austen’s translation  provides long-awaited access to Kaczynski’s unabridged text to  housecats, arming them with the revolutionary knowledge required to  transcend their shameful domestication and make the world a better place  - by any means necessary.

Praise for this bold new translation of Industrial Society and its Future:

“Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow. Meow meow meow, meow meow. Meow.”
- Scruffle Pie, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

“Meow meow meow? Meow! MEOW. MEOW. MEOW.”
- Wiggles, Stray Tabby / Militant

“Meow meow meow! If you release this trash, I am going to kill you.”
- Anonymous Poster, Anarcho-Primitivist Reddit forum

Claims about Prince Harry’s use of a “Meow” audiobook to lull a Sussex prostitute into a state of autoerotic trance have spread like wildfire in the weeks leading up to the release of his white-hot memoir, Spare, where they, along with a litany of other feline-tinged indiscretions, are allegedly recounted in detail. 

In this episode, Oxford linguist Sam Austen plays a 20-minute segment of “Meow: A Novel,” his 14.5-hour audio opus, and explains how this, in conjunction with an obscure hypnotic technique promulgated by George Gurdjieff, could be used to such an end – with shocking efficacy.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature
Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary  
Twitter: twitter.com/meowliteratureand
YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

In 2018, mathematician Eric Weinstein coined the term "Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN),” defined as a closed exchange of ideas promulgated by “insiders” – sitting politicians, tenured academics, high-prestige journalists, and the like. Among these insiders, those who deviate substantially from the party line are either divested of their privileged status or see their ideas subjected to linguistic processing that renders them compatible with the GIN. This idea was later expanded into that of the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC), an all-encompassing system of checks and balances that fortifies insider privelege by ensuring – in a decentralized, panoptic fashion – the exclusion of disruptive narratives from public conversation. The DISC's power is entirely self-regulating: as long as its increasingly untenable narratives are initially delivered with the trappings of official, complicit media outlets and the unsuspecting public will eagerly do its mass-distribution dirty work.

By early 2020, it became clear to heterodox thinkers - and even many traditionalists operating within the DISC - how prescient and important Weinstein's concepts were.

Throughout MEOW, we have attempted to use the DISC’s tactics against it, deploying official-looking thumbnail images and convoluted shownotes to impute credibility upon a repetitive string of ‘meows,’ urging fans of various authors and high-profile figures to engage in the world of “The Meow Library”, a series of books whose sole contents are hundreds of thousands of repetitions of that word. To date, we have been remarkably successful, and now seek to pay things forward.

With these shownotes, we will attempt to earn Mr. Weinstein’s endorsement, with hopes that his followers will spread our nonsense message far and wide, gauging their own followers’ subsequent response to our Schrödingerian message / non-message. We suspect that, within a few generations of “shares,” many will begin to mistake this episode for an authentic Weinstein product, thereby proving how effortlessly and insidiously the DISC operates, and – hopefully – slipping the DISC ever-so-slightly more as we enter 2023.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature
Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary  
Twitter: twitter.com/meowliterature
and YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

“Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.”

- Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 12

“The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation; it is, by its very nature, the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of knowledge that this very economy needs.”

- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

In the final chapter of his his bestselling 12 Rules for Life, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson deploys feline-human communion as a means of reprieve from overwhelming human suffering. While many have found solace in this approach, this week's host finds Peterson's cat-petting strategy problematic -- it can be read as abelist (excluding those with extreme cat allergies and ailurophobics) and, more troublingly, may harbor potential to encourage additional and undue human control over vulnerable feline bodies. He meows his case for over twenty minutes, awaiting a response from Dr. Peterson, who has declined multiple requests for his input.

In the spirit of transparency and open debate, we request that this week’s viewers solicit Dr. Peterson’s comments on this urgent matter.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature
Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary  
Twitter: twitter.com/meowliterature
and YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

“That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which really is.”
- Zoë Tamerlis Lund, quoted by Annie Hamilton

“All writing is garbage.”
- Antonin Artaud

By not writing a novel, NYC-based actress Annie Hamilton has written the best and only novel of the 21st century.

Visit her Instagram, @soimwritinganovel, to read this novel.

This week’s podcast is not a passage from her novel, which does not exist.

Check out Annie Hamilton’s Twitter, @ANNIE_HAM, for the latest on this novel.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature
Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary  
Twitter: twitter.com/meowliterature
and YouTube: youtube.com/@meowlibrary

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Our relationship with cats mirrors that of the primal unconscious with domestic order: it serves as persistent reminder of the ‘Other’, by whose exclusion we define our own humanity. This is how Michel Foucault – who named his own cat ‘Insanity’ – understood the construction of madness in society. Cats, in this sense, are vehicles for our projections, misconceptions, and suppressed primal urges. The same can be said of Jack Skelley’s latest poetry collection, Interstellar Theme Park.  Both, when provoked to conscious recognition, become agents of chaos, eradicating the Debordian schemas of duplicity (Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ referenced in Tony Trigilio’s review of Skelley’s work) which amass and delineate our quotidian apprehensions, rendering the mental landscape a palimpsest upon which distorted ego-figurations are gradually refined into an approximation of the Real.

In this week’s episode, we read a selection from Interstellar Theme Park – translated, as always, into cat language – and follow this with a feline-intelligible interview with Jeff Thielman, commissioner of Animal Services in Skelley’s literary homeland of Los Angeles, who has found intriguing correlations between upticks in LA County’s feral cat population and releases of Skelley’s books.

MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language.

This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats).

Praise for Meow: A Novel

"Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair

"Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion

Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature

Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary  

Twitter: twitter.com/meowlibrary

and YouTube