--even supposing--

Casting aside the too-obvious gap, which is to say, of course, the five year gap between the hmonley retweet and the newest work the (e)tern(ally) anonymous toughy, there remains a more subtle gap: the omission of what one must suppose.

Rather than interpret the supposition contextually within its tweet, as a reference to what the recurring Job and the newly introduced Ruth can do "with/out," we propose in this entry a narrow framework: the author suggests that we, the hypocrite reader, precisely, are even supposing.

It is clear that we are supposing: supposing the role of Toughy, supposing a hidden narrative is brewing in our tale. But the author wants rather to emphasize that we are even supposing, which is to say, that our supposition is not enough, which is to say, acknowledging the supposition, and extending, rebutting, something else, something beyond.

Collapsing into poetry, the even supposing is set off by that harshest of punctuatory gaps: the hyphen, the gap beyond the gap. And what is left unsaid is also left unfinished: is this the end? --even commencing--

The Flagging Pavement

While Toughy sleeps, and while Toughy wakes, it is still snowing in Baltimore. Ever falling, drip drip drip, upon The Ghost's Walk.

The above, most recent post by the (yet unresolved) author of the tweets of Toughy the Cat, borrows a kind of abridged structure from the opening of Bleak House's seventh chapter, The Ghost's Walk. The language, both here and in the original text, is on its surface purely descriptive—or at most, orienting. However, the close read reveals more than simple "richness" in the carefully honed diction of the passage. That is, the lexicon continues to inform as much by what it contains as what it omits from the original passages from the novel, the register plays between the patchy, high-and-low discourse one would expect of a housecat raised in relative isolation—situated, with Garfieldian disdain, among his (if we are to beleive our author) infantile owner(s) and omega-dog—and at once delicately balances the whimsey of substitution with temporally compressed, dry repetitions that underly the existential terror of the passage—which are ultimately, truly bleak.

The original passage reads:

While Esther sleeps, and while Esther wakes, it is still wet weather down at the place in Lincolnshire. The rain is ever falling--drip, drip, drip--by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace- pavement, the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again.

My exegesis on the symbology of weather in the text has already here been well-enough discussed—and criticized by other critics, I've noticed*—that I will forgo a lengthy dicussion of the connection between time, weather, and the natural order; suffice to say that it is no coincidence that the hollowness of the isolated, morphemic representation of the thing—rain-qua-weather/rain/entrapment—abuts a conflation of day and night, sleeping and waking, and a kind of slippage between the real and unreal in the comparison between imagination and the true captivity of our dual protagonists-across-medium, Esther and Toughy. My primary goal in this short entry is to explore the value in our twatter's forced equivalence between not only Toughy and Esther, but between Bleak House's seemingly endless rain (the omitted final sentence is eloquently clipped from the tweet itself, perhaps due to space limitations, and perhaps due to its superfluidity, given our twatier's facility with compressed language, imho superior to that of Dickens) and the snowstorm in Baltimore, which, all the bros agree, was truly epic.

More specifically, I would like to focus—the visual metaphor is intentional, as I would like to draw an analogy to the cinematic tradition of an extreme close-up, or in the more medium-appropriate tradition, to the Carver-esque short story, where the final, crystaline image should serve as a sort of fractal by which to unpack the piece as a whole—on the rupture between Toughy and Esther, between water and snow, and the obvious exchange between the two. That is, snow melts into water—in fact, we are not given any evidence of snow in teh taweet itself, other than the word: it only appears as hollow declaration, and then in watery, transmuted onomatopoesis. I think that this rupture, this lack of proof, per se, of a complete metamorphosis between Esther and Toughy, between human and animal, between London and baltimore, this permission to conceive of fractured, cyclical existance, is an embrace of electronic media (what I think of as the core of the Toughy tweets, really—an explosion, or perhaps, implosion of the tweeting paradigm), and its openness to intertextual and reader-author dialogue.**

Ultimately, it is the authority of the author it-self that is destabilized in the fractilic remapping we see in the Toughy tweets, and are ourselves left with the image of absence-upon-transformation-upon-absence: snow turning to water, transforming to sound, upon the Ghost's Walk.


*haters gonna hate
**Dickens is an appropriate choice for such an experiment, as he was an excellent example of pre-digital readership-author exchanged. It is a well-known fact that his readers' letters to both him and his publication outlets—demanding more or less from one character or another, requesting this or that plotline to be expanded or pruned—were influential to shaping both his individual narratives, and his general approach to composition.

Scratch that

it's a monkey.

A word on the image

The twittier hmonley has coyly chosen an image of a cat as her identifying icon. As one of the speculated authors of The Toughy Tales—more on the authorial controversy later—she must be aware of how this image might be read, particularly since the photograph was taken of a feline who is most certainly not the Toughy of the tales, but rather the mostly-caged malcontent neighbor of Sylvia and Jon, Toughy's presumed roomates.

Is hmonley Toughy? is Toughy hmonley? Is that pictured grey pervert the author of them both? How are we to read this doubly-absent image?

The Naming by the News.

Of passing interest to this endeavor: it seems the mainstream media have become at least superficially acquainted with our subject medium: the Washington Post (that bastion of the Establishment!) has ventured so far as to suggest that Twitter can be (perhaps even should be) Art. Unsurprisingly, the Post's treatment focuses on the less-challenging practitioners: @mrichtel, @fireland, @sacca -- a completely unjust snubbing of the epic Toughy Tales!

The article suggests a normative view of Twitter as art. In the rigid valuation of Monica Hesse:

The best [tweets] are intimacy wrapped in aphorisms topped off with self-deprecation and a dash of ambiguity. They capture individual moments in time, but allude to past and future. They are not memorable quotes so much as they're miniature stories.

Perhaps the most compelling demonstration against Hesse's evaluative framework is the work we are here devoted to interpreting -- that is, the Toughy Tales. The Toughy Tales' complexity -- which of course encompass intimacy, ambiguity, etc. etc. -- far exceed the constrictions of Hesse's framework.

Although the Post's critique is far from penetrating, we may find illuminating the published quotations from Twitter "artists" and commentators ("twitics" is the coinage the Post suggests -- what would Kripke say?!) Professor Dinty W. Moore, editor of the celebrated journal Brevity, notes: "They raise questions. They don't answer questions. Like poetry, very short prose pieces are all about compression. Every word and detail must do triple duty to set a mood." Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly, namer of the "Web 2.0," cogently comments that "[i]n a medium like Twitter, the literary work isn't the tweet. It's the persona that you're putting together." We may have to beg to quibble with the esteemed Mr. O'Reilly -- it seems to me, at least, that the Toughy Tales prove that the artistic work is not only the tweet, but the "persona" -- as well, of course, as the interactivity (of, for example, unpacking.)

The Generous Among Us: What Do They Want?

Toughy sings of birds and a man. Truly, I found myself wondering, what does Toughy see in the birds that implies generosity? Or does Toughy observe the birds, take note of their particularly ungenerous nature, and think of other more generous creatures? Who among us has not observed the subject, only to find our thoughts rushing to what is not there?

Ultimately the question is: what does Toughy perceive as generous? I believe we need to construct both an operational definition of generosity and then a Toughy definition of generosity in order to better unpack these lines. For if Toughy envies sincerely or ironically - for what Toughy envies sincerely or ironically - that, to me, is the crux of the matter.

Larks, Linnets and Goldfinches: Misrule, Fall, and Prolonged Infancy

Larks, linnets and goldfinches. The wind in the east. Fed, I say, "It's only you, the generous creatures, whom I envy. Being quite a child." (Toughy Chesser)


Where once the reader only had to make meaning of a text and its author, these days she must grapple too with her own meaning-making impulses, her now-abjected desires to connect the dots of essentialist biographical detritus, defunct mythos, and potentially tongue-in-cheek symbolism. These interpretive pitfalls are further complicated by not only the vast quantity of information that an author may draw on, but the multiplicity of discourses and cross-discourses that she may invoke. As such, it is tempting to read the Toughy Tales biographically, particularly given the format of their release—the Twat—which is typically biographical, and the Tales' heavily autobiographical themes of anachronism, dependency, and birds.

Such a reading may operate insidiously in the realm of symbols. The birds for instance, if we remember Nabokov's lectures—in this case his analysis of Dickens's Bleak House—may reference the three types Ms. Flite kept in captivity, while she awaited resolution of the court case, the catalyst and ultimate foil for the interpersonal drama of the novel. In apparent spite of the scattershot territory covered by Ms. Flite's actual names for the birds—Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach—and the manifold historico-religious symbolic possibilities I will soon discuss, Nabokov decides that they "correspond to lark-youth, linnet-hope, and goldfinch-beauty." This is a fair reading, which, as we know, at least serves to highlight the absence of Beauty in the actual naming of the birds, Nabokov suggests, to foreshadow Esther's later loss of beauty due to her illness. So here the birds, with no small trace of irony, symbolize varieties of potential-in-confinement—willfully unrealized ideals, perpetually dying in captivity.

But what, in this symbolic effort, does it mean for Toughy to quote this passage, and how can we confine the reference to Bleak House? To address the latter question first: we cannot disregard the Christian, Pagan and socio-narrative symbolism of the three birds, for they are essential to our biographical reading of the passage.

The lark, typically the symbol of merriment and possibility, due to its energetic daybreak twitterings, was thought to have sung at the gates of heaven, welcoming new souls. The irony of the image should not pass us by—the tidings of the new day were not untainted by the spectre of mortality, just as the sun (Son), in it's arrival, portends its own departure. Similarly, the goldfinch, which is said to represent Jesus, as it feeds on and nests in thistles, too represents beauty; and we begin to see a pattern: arrested states of glory, the uncanny liminal of stunted potential—perpetual death, or, the Unlived, in the life overshadowed by its own undoing. The reference itself, cast nonchalantly at the head of the Twat, belies its own gravity, seeking to be understood at mere surface: a catalog of birds; certainly beautiful to a cat, though perhaps only in the heat of gastro-libidinal desire—an ending: to eat one's cake, and have it too.

The following line sets the tone for the first, in a neumonimic syntactic pun: "the wind is in the east", perhaps another reference to the Dick's tomb, wherein Mr. Jarndyce indicates that an easterly wind is an index of misrule. In fact, in many of the Dick's tombs, from David Copperfield to The Haunted Man, the east wind is treated ominously. Sometimes this idea, which perhaps has its roots in the maxim, "When the wind is in the east, 'tis neither good for man nor beast", is invoked playfully, to indicate a superstitious character, but often is a reliable indicator that something foul is afoot. In fact, I do not use the term "misrule" lightly; I do so to invoke both the playful character of the common yearly carnival atmosphere, in which aberrant behaviors, sexualities and social practices were tolerable for the one day, and the cruel, 364-day wake of intolerance that would follow—see Halloween, Carnivale, and any number of other strategies for the containment of subversive social identities. In this twat, the wind announces that the entire twat itself is representative of a kind of misrule—to be tolerated, perhaps, but maybe also prolongued beyond its acceptable boundaries—including the jokingly swapped order of the first two phrases.

So, what has been pre-judged as the upset of the social order? What crime against nature and sense is so contained in our twat? Our answer is contained in the blindly self-congratulatory final section, wherein Toughy—presumably?—turns not only his relationship to his carers, but his relationship to reality, on its ear.

It would be easy to chalk this section up to simple quotation, as it is easy to do in the wake of the earlier Dickens references, of Bleak House, where, if we remember correctly, Mr. Skimpole said much the same thing, playfully turning the burden of gratitude back on his patrons, for "enjoying the luxury of generosity".

Now, we have come to understand the tension between Toughy's understated wit and capacity for vastly drawn, deft and razor-sharp verbal turntablism, and his naive understanding of the very content of his speech—like a child spelling out the facts of sex or death without an understanding of the rammifications of these events, as if they are merely adjective to other words or concepts, and not living beings. In fact, Toughy is very much a child, in some senses, "fed", cared for, sheltered from a reality unbounded by cat-leashes and whisker-smudged windows. However, we must also acknowledge that he has in some ways imposed this world on himself, at least somewhat aware of the dangers and responsibilities carried on by his caretakers. This fact is at the heart of his world—this is the true upset.


Toughy is chiefly not a child because he understands the limitations of his world and the types of responsibilities he is sheltered from. That Toughy willfully keeps himself in this arrested adolescence, a perpetual death, an Unlived state, is itself the deeply uncanny, intolerable misrule. That he eats food from a small bowl, reads from a color-coded library, and waxes mature on his own lifestyle undercuts both his "natural" immaturity and the precocity of his now-and-then wit. He can be neither kitten nor cat—his birds, his objects of desire fly outside the sphere of his influence (and dare I say, outside of his actual desiring), the wind frankly lives in the east, and Toughy, always fed, always talking, considers "'being' [to be] quite a child", as that is what he has made "being" to be.

Of course, the trouble with this misleading symbolic reading is that we have assumed certain meaning for cats, children, birds, Toughy, books, being, and words.