Meowing at the terror of the times …

… The nine lives of Cats: how poetry became a musical, then a film … | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Eliot’s cat land is every bit as bleak as The Waste Land. Both share a sense of chronic disorder, where violence simmers just beneath the surface, regret drowns optimism and wilful self-interest trumps finer feeling every time. Above all, here is the moral grubbiness of what Eliot’s younger friend WH Auden dubbed “a low dishonest decade”.