Wednesday, April 27, 2005
(2:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Wednesday Cat Questioning
Why do cats love to sit on printed matter so much? Magazines and newspapers seem equally appealling. Part of it is certainly the narcissistic desire to be at the center of your attention, but if a cat is presented with a dining room table that is completely clean except for a copy of The New Yorker, it's going to sit on The New Yorker.I suppose I'd like to apply the insights of evolutionary psychology to this problem, since it's well-known that cats have complex and tortured psyches.
On a New Yorker-related note, last weekend, Anthony and I were on the Red Line, kind of late at night. I suppose that since the Red Line runs all night, homeless people must start congregating in there once it gets late, and last weekend it was especially cold out. So there we are, with probably two or three homeless people at our end of the car, and Anthony was telling me about how one of his professors has a technique for memorizing books -- you just make it into a house, by associating each chapter with a room and each major point with something in that room. "So let's say you wanted to do Plato's Republic. Book I is the living room, and maybe Glaucon's speech is the New Yorker sitting on the coffee table...." The whole conversation struck me as hugely incongruous with our actual surroundings.
Maybe it would have made more sense if we were on a bus in Oxford -- the homeless people there seemed to be much better read.
