Excuse Me, I Have to Go Feed Lee Siegel’s Imaginary Cat

Lee Siegel’s cat (aloof and self-assured, like Uma Thurman at age 16. Poor Maya! Poor beautiful, cool Uma!) requires feeding.

You may ask why I, spezzatura, must go feed the cat, when clearly she is first, imaginary, and second, not my cat, but Siegel’s. To the first, I can only state that the great Siegel himself saw fit to pour her a bowl of milk, and–what’s that, Mayachka? You would like some tuna, too? Well, it shall be done.

As to why it is me feeding the cat, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, the formula two and two make five does not mean that I am, in fact, Lee Siegel. I simply am watching Siegel’s cat while he does what he does best–order his imagination around, so as best to understand the great danger of the baseball-cap-wearing, blogofascistic young punks like Ezra Klein.

What’s that, Mayissimissima? You say I should drop the whole act, that I’m in danger of appearing to be a few bricks short of a load? To use the vulgar blog term, WTF? I feed you, and this is the thanks you give me? If you weren’t Siegel’s imaginary cat, I would refuse to take you for a walk.

Of course, I am not Lee Siegel. For Lee Siegel would never stoop to pretending to be someone else–he is far too grand a person to do such a thing. Indeed, Siegel once noted the utter futility of pretending to be something one is not:

As for the dark Internet tales, maybe Stephen Glass has his finger on the viscera of the time. He has sensed that in a commercial society that constantly stimulates the libido and makes satisfaction the highest criterion of success, any shortcut to satisfaction is permissible. Lies become a consumerist tool. Their effectiveness as a tactic earns them the quality of truth. And the libido makes no distinction between past, present, and future. It exists in an eternal present, in which each successive lie displaces the previous one and becomes the only reality. In a different age, Glass would be like one of Nabokov’s madmen, deranged frauds who have an artistic temperament but not the artist’s rational will. In our moment, the Glass-type is becoming more and more common. The Internet must be full of them.

No question, this is one of the truest things ever to be written. The brilliance of Siegel proven once again.