Of Cats and Dogs

The ways that cats and dogs differ in their relationship to us is often remarked. I tell you, even if they are cute, if it were not for that neat 'litter box' trick, I don't think cats would be nearly as popular with us as they are. We are warm acquaintances at best, but never truly friends, as we are with dogs.

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Look at the dogs: their confident and admiring attitude is such that some of them appear to have renounced the oldest traditions of dogdom in order to worship our own customs and even our foibles. It is just this which renders them tragic and sublime. Their choice to accept us forces them to dwell, so to speak, at the limits of their real natures, which they continually transcend with their human gazes and melancholy snouts.

But what is the demeanor of cats?—Cats are cats, briefly put, and their world is the world of cats through and through. They look at us, you say? But can you ever really know if they deign to hold your insignificant image for even a moment at the back of their retinas. Fixating on us, might they in fact be magically erasing us from their already full pupils? It is true that some of us let ourselves be taken in by their insistent and electric caresses. But these people should remember the strange, abrupt manner in which their favorite animal, distracted, turns off these effusions, which they’d presumed to be reciprocal. Even the privileged few, allowed close to cats, are rejected and disavowed many times.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

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Bo

That post on cats and dogs seems to have opened an old wound. I am missing Bo so much that it physically hurts, and like nothing could ease this pain except to hold him in my arms and hug him so hard. I guess I am feeling kind of lonely.

Elvis 1955

When the Hillbilly Cat and the Blue Moon Boys returned from their disappointing audition in New York, they were about to meet a man who could do a better job at giving them the big time, and turn Elvis’s million dollars worth of talent into a million dollars.

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His name was Thomas Andrew Parker. Parker was a colonel, of sorts. One of those “Southern” colonels. He had been given the rank by Governor Clement of Tennessee. In 1968 Stanley Booth, a talented writer, described Tom Parker in Esquire magazine as “a latter-day Barnum out of W. C. Fields by William Burroughs.” The description not only accurately fit the bill, it was one that Parker relished and he did everything to encourage its spread. Parker came from the old school of promoting: “Don’t care what they say about you just as long as they spell the name right.”

“I’m a great believer in fate,” says Red West. “It was just as if Tom Parker and Elvis Presley were born and destined to meet. Tom Parker was and is amazing. With Elvis and him it was like a joint and socket who had been looking for each other. Things were about to take off.”

-- “Elvis: What Happened?” by Steve Dunleavy

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