The Cat's Table's the Cat's Meow

This blog is at risk of turning into a look-at-the-cool-thing-I-found-on-the-web report, but today is not the day that is going to get remedied. In fact today I have a charming podcast for you that I don't have time to rewind and relisten to in order to get the quotes word-perfect, but it's so enjoyable I'm going to post it anyway, with my own (probably egregious) paraphrasing.

This is an interview of Michael Ondaatje by Carolyn Forche, together with a reading by Ondaatje from his new novel The Cat's Table, all sponsored by the Lannan Foundation.

In her introduction, Forche says of Ondaatje, "He resists all manner of systematic thought," and I realized in that characterization my secret and ungraspable aim revealed.

One quote from the novel that made me catch my breath was, "We were not safe at all. There was no sense of time."

Well worth the over-an-hour listen, which you can also download from iTunes. (In fact, you can subscribe to the Lannan Foundation Series on iTunes, and it's nearly always a great listen.)