This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). Episode 9: Allie Rowbottom's Aesthetica, Erasure of the Flesh, and the Polymorphic Self Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica (available for preorder here) is a near-future peek into the inevitable. At 35, rudderless and lost, the protagonist, a former Instagram influencer, undergoes a dicey elective procedure to erase the years of fillers, lifts, laser and peels that extruded her form into one precision-engineered to resonate with a now-obsolete algorithm. We look back on the circumstances that led to her physical transformation and wonder whether yet another procedure could possibly allay her existential woes. In this episode of MEOW, we extend this scenario further into the future, positing ever-more-radical forms of physical transformation as the natural pursuit of the aging narcissist: human bodies, we suggest, will be reshaped into those of animals, insects, sculptural objects, architectural flourishes, and a variety of unfathomable machine-generated forms. Representing a compromise between Rowbottom’s vision and our own, this week’s narrator is a man who has had his vocal canal reconfigured in such a way as to only be able to produce the word “meow.” Human-language translation of this week's podcast is available upon request. MEOW is the first and only literary podcast for your cat, conceived and presented in its native language. This podcast is sustained by sales of our debut book, Meow: A Novel (For Cats). To pre-order Allie Rowbottom's Aesthetica, click here. Praise for Meow: A Novel "Breathtaking... a revelation." - Stubbs, Unaltered Domestic Shorthair "Meow meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow. Meow? Meow." - Joan Didion Follow us on Instagram: @meowliterature and Facebook: facebook.com/themeowlibrary

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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