{"id":5690,"date":"2019-03-24T21:52:59","date_gmt":"2019-03-24T21:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/?p=5690"},"modified":"2019-11-27T10:56:26","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T10:56:26","slug":"the-lament-of-the-cartoon-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/2019\/03\/24\/the-lament-of-the-cartoon-cats\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lament of the Cartoon Cats"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was cleaning out my Gmail account a bit earlier today (because stuff does get piled up in there over time) and came across something… unusual.<\/p>\n

Long long ago, before Google developed Google Drive, various people got clever and found ways to store larger-than-officially-permitted files inside Gmail by attaching them to mails using a specific tagging\/uploading method. (Forgive me for being vague here but I no longer remember exactly how this particular hack worked; the brain cells once harboring that data are probably now full of Scrivener strategies or Sherlock fanfic.)<\/p>\n

I found a bunch of such mails today and proceeded to delete them or empty them out into more modern forms of storage. But one of them brought me up short. It held a text file containing several fragments of a poem.<\/p>\n

What really got my attention were the first couple of lines, because as I read them something went twang<\/em> inside me like a plucked string, and an image sprang out to accompany the twang<\/em>. If you write at all, you may know this drill. You reread a line, sometimes many years after it was set down, and some sensory cue, visual or auditory or taste- or touch- or smell-based, pops up to accompany it. For example: there are parts of Spock’s World<\/em> I can’t now read without hearing the sounds pfttt<\/em>, as of the firing of a pellet-firing air gun, and squawk,<\/em> which was the sound of one of the pheasants Peter was targeting out the window of the castle-wall cottage we were renting in Scotland. (BTW, “no pheasants were harmed…”, as the saying goes: they could have cared less about the pellets — they just shook their feathers and rolled their eyes at Peter.)<\/p>\n

Anyway. I read these two lines at the top of the file —<\/p>\n

O, Hell is deep an\u2019 Hell is dark
\nAnd Hell is full o\u2019 mice…<\/p>\n

…and immediately I was standing in the kitchen of our little cottage, about twenty years ago, and John M. Ford<\/a> was there. Maybe not in the room: but somewhere in the neighborhood. He and his partner Elise Matthesen<\/a> (who, as many of you know, goes by @LionessElise<\/a> on Twitter) were visiting us. And somehow these verses had resulted — either during the visit or right after — and had been tucked away to be completed.<\/p>\n

I date them as having been written between 2002 and 2005. It’s hard to be sure, due to the unusual way the file was stored. As for the subject matter? Ghu knows what brought it on. Outside of Mike’s normal superpower — which seemed to involve raising the “talent bar” in local space so that the people packed into that space with him got smarter\/more creative than they usually were —\u00a0 the local influences remain obscure. There’s no denying that I’ve written my share of animation,<\/a> and like other animation writers working during the 1980s, my relationship with what would eventually become the Animators’ Guild was ambivalent. (This is secondary to its originally being an artists’ organization, not a writers’ one. But that’s all a long time ago now.)<\/p>\n

All I can be sure of is that something during that visit, something mediated by Mike’s and Elise’s presence, got me thinking about the indignities inflicted on cartoon cats. All that was missing from the poem as it stood were a few lines. I finished them a couple of hours ago.<\/p>\n

So now, here’s this. Just doggerel, to be sure. But won’t somebody think of the kitties?…<\/p>\n

The Lament of the Cartoon Cats<\/em><\/p>\n

O, Hell is deep an\u2019 Hell is dark
\nAnd Hell is full o\u2019 mice:
\nThey ha\u2019 wee horns and wee barbed tails
\nAn\u2019 eyes o\u2019 cockatrice;
\nThe kitties bad who made them mad
\nWhile they were still on life
\nNow sairly pay by night and day
\nFor contramuscine strife.<\/p>\n

Wi\u2019 wee barbed tridents poke they us,
\nThe mousies o\u2019 the damned:
\nWi\u2019 mickle anvils dropped on us
\nOur days and nights are crammed.
\nWi\u2019 mallets all they mousies come
\nAn\u2019 bang us i\u2019 the head:
\nWi\u2019 ropes an\u2019 rods an\u2019 cattleprods
\nA sorry chase we\u2019re led.<\/p>\n

O, ilka morn and evenin\u2019 too
\nWe wail fra\u2019 mousies\u2019 whacksies,
\nAnd aye their sticks o\u2019 dynamite
\nstuck up our wee poor jacksies.
\nAn\u2019 wha\u2019 sad justice is there here
\nFor a\u2019 the meowin\u2019 dead,
\nWhen we poor puss-cats only did
\nWha\u2019 some screenwriter said?<\/p>\n

O curst be Local 839
\no\u2019 the MPSCG*,
\nSince we must writhe in pain condign
\nFor their naughty sadistry:
\nMay they run whinin\u2019 through some Hell
\nWhere kitties scratch and bite,
\nAnd so be paid i\u2019 their own coin
\nFor our own piteous plight.<\/p>\n

*The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, Hollywood CA, formerly known as the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists\u2019 Guild.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was cleaning out my Gmail account a bit earlier today (because stuff does get piled up in there over time) and came across something… unusual. Long long ago, before…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[834,784,37,39,70,871],"tags":[873,872],"class_list":["post-5690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-absent-friends","category-animation-2","category-home-life","category-ireland","category-writing","category-writing-process","tag-elise-matthesen","tag-john-m-ford"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Lament of the Cartoon Cats - Out of Ambit<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/2019\/03\/24\/the-lament-of-the-cartoon-cats\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Lament of the Cartoon Cats - Out of Ambit\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I was cleaning out my Gmail account a bit earlier today (because stuff does get piled up in there over time) and came across something… unusual. 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