Gold Stars and Orange Pumpkin Stickers: Goodreads and the Never-Ending Grade School
Goodreads is a “social cataloging app” designed for booklovers to discover new books and interact with other booklovers. I use it primarily to keep track of the books I want to read. That’s an impossible task, but still, Goodreads gives me the impression that I might actually be able to manage or control my insatiable bibliomania.
I also maintain an author profile on there, which lets me keep track of all the books I’ve written (some good, mostly bad.) Many of the anthologies and magazines in which my stories have appeared are also listed on the site, some under my profile and others not.
Goodreads isn’t a perfect database, and sometimes authors with the same or similar names to mine find their way to my profile. I try to let the Goodreads staff know about this, but sometimes it feels like a losing battle and I let things stand as they are. I’m lazy that way.
If people want to believe that, in addition to writing sleazy violent stories, I also write children’s books or medical texts, so be it.
There is a famous social realist artist/painter named Joseph Hirsch and if you Google my name you’re more likely to get results related to him than me. His existence makes me regret not using “Joey Hirsch” as a penname, thereby sparing his estate the indignity of having his work associated with mine, if only inadvertently.
Goodreads, in addition to having some good features and good intentions, has its sinister side, like everything else on the internet. Especially everything social media-related.
A lot of what’s on the net is addictive by design. When designing their websites, apps, and services, many companies actually reach out to addiction specialists for help. Mind you, this help is not intended to make the services less addictive, but *moreso.* The features like notifications, the little messages that pop up, the bells and whistles, are stimuli meant to operantly condition users. They’re there to encourage certain behaviors—usually spending, but also engagement, so that one stays on the site longer, seeing advertisements and promotions. It’s also important to point out that Goodreads has been assimilated into the Bezos Borg, with all that entails.
I spend a good amount of time on Goodreads but nowhere near as much as many others. Some people spend so much time on Goodreads it’s hard for me to see when they have time to even crack a book. Multitasking is the way these days, but unless one is listening to audiobooks, it’s hard to see how one could read while doing anything else.
Does listening to a book even count as reading?
Goodreads, like any other piece of media, risks falling afoul of the old Marshall McLuhan principle, with the medium becoming the message. And while literacy is usually good thing, it’s probably not good to get addicted to any website, even one meant to encourage literacy and mutual appreciation of books.
The strangest two features of Goodreads have to be the Ratings and Followers features. For those users who aren’t authors, they probably haven’t seen the Author Dashboard. If you’re curious, you can google it to get a look at it.
It makes sense that people should be able to rate and review books, to call them masterpieces or pieces of shit. They can even use the physical copies of the books as doorstoppers, as toilet paper (a la Castaneda’s Don Juan), or to organize their very own book burnings. It’s all protected speech, and once it’s out of the author’s hands, it’s frankly none of their business what the reader does.
I personally never understood authors taking umbrage at harsh or critical reviews of their work. My relationship to my own work, (in case you haven’t noticed) is ambivalent at best. Additionally, like most people, I have my insecurities, doubts, and my own streak of self-loathing. Tell me not only that my books suck but that I suck, too, and—based on my mood—I’m as apt to agree with you as not. Not only will I agree, but I’ll probably amplify. In other words, anything vicious you can think of saying to me, I’ve crafted much, much worse words of self-wounding.
I spend so much time in the editing and revision process that I typically end up hating my own books as much or more than my harshest critics. This is true for even the books I think are good, and maybe moreso for them. After all, I did sweat and labor more over the creation of the good ones than the bad ones. Usually, at least, that’s the way it works. Sometimes trying gives the work a feeling of flop sweat, while a casual approach makes everything feel more organic, less forced.
Rereading anything I’ve written brings back the memories of the endless hours of proofreading, correcting, diagnosing problems of plotting and pacing.
I worked so much on crafting certain passages that, like an actor who’s played a certain role many times, I can remember sentences and even whole paragraphs verbatim. I get nauseous upon reencountering them, like Alex the Droog after being programmed by the Ludovico Technique to upchuck at the sight of boobs or the sound of Beethoven.
So, shitting on me is all well and good.
The weird part of the rating system is that there’s an Average Rating aggregate displayed at the top of my Dashboard. Right now my cumulative rating is 3.84 stars. How bizarre is that? They have me rated, pegged, weighted down to the fraction, to the hundredth decimal place. Something about that feels absurd, unhealthy, weirdly specific. I’d frankly rather just be sat in a corner of some room wearing a dunce cap and given a “zero” or an incomplete as opposed to contemplating exactly what 3.84 means.
It feels not just like a letter grade, but like some greater assessment of me, my Goodreads Social Credit Score if you will. Mulling this over is ridiculous, but it’s these ridiculous little things—subtle social pressures and cues—that tend to “nudge” our behaviors.
It reminds me of the energy usage experiment conducted in one neighborhood. Those households whose consumption habits were under-normal received little smiley face cards in the mail; those who rated average in consumption received faces bearing a tightlipped, taciturn expression; meanwhile energy hogs got scowling faces with angrily arched brows. The cards did actually modify behavior, for the better, in terms of consumption. But what is the ultimate message, aside from that people—wanting to be thought well of—are very susceptible to praise or punishment?
What, exactly is such a feature nudging me to do? Be a less shitty, less transgressive, more socially responsible writer?
I suppose I could find some way to game the feature, pen a novel about a transgendered superhero (or even better, heroine) who battles transphobic supervillains. Pen body-positive panegyrics to overweight women of color. Or I could take the opposite tact, write manosphere tracts about lifting weights and eating elk meat and how to defeat women in the family courts. Decry “wokeness” like various grifters in the mainstream conservative movement, hit all the campuses while bilking the outraged, anxiety-riddled middleclass for their hard-earned dollars.
I could also find some middle ground in the culture war, much easier to achieve if one is writing for children. All I’d have to do is steer clear of sorcery and the supernatural (lest some bible-thumpers classify my works as endorsing witchcraft.) I could write the text to a popup picture book about a boy who travels to distant lands every night when he falls asleep.
That might get my Star Rating from the high 3s up to the low 4s, thus assuring me a larger dacha and loge seating at the opera house.
In all seriousness, though, it’s weird to see that thing staring at me, those fractional stars (for lack of a better term) every time I log in. Film critic Roger Ebert once decried the “wackiness” of the star system he used to rate films, but he obviously found it a necessary evil. And this, remember, only required Ebert to traffic in stars and half stars, not weirder and smaller fractions like tenths of stars. What, I wonder, would he have made of a film that was awarded “3.84” stars by another critic? He probably would have concluded that the man was suffering from some weird form of obsessive compulsive disorder.
Hasn’t the internet foisted that kind of thinking on all of us, though, wrecked our attention spans, our minds, and therefore part of our humanity? Reduced nuance, complexity, and ambivalence to a like or dislike. Swipe left or swipe right?
Then there’s that aforementioned “Followers” feature we talked about. If I scroll down toward the right side of the Author Dashboard, there they are: little profile pics of men and women I don’t know, who don’t know me. What are they doing there? I rarely if ever have any interactions with them, and few, if any, ever like any of my status updates, whether I’m posting blog entries or book reviews.
Most, if they’ve reviewed one of my books, haven’t reviewed others, so they’re obviously not following me from work to work. This is understandable, as I have trouble remaining in one genre for any length of time. I have a wanderlust about me that keeps me from writing series, or establishing a reputation for one kind of writing. What (or who) are these people following, then? Maybe they’re all automatically signed up after reviewing one book, or something like that. Regardless, the idea of having followers is especially bizarre for someone as antisocial as me, someone whose battery is recharged rather than drained by isolation.
According to the widget, I’m up to 108 followers. I’ve been out of the Army for awhile now, so my concept of various troop size elements is a little rusty, but isn’t one-hundred more than a company? Isn’t it a bit closer to battalion in terms of strength? Should I summon the troops for muster and attempt to defeat another author on the Goodreads battlefield? And if my army defeats them, do I not thereby acquire their followers, thus assimilating them into my own army? Will the battalion not eventually become a brigade if I go from strength to strength, victory to victory?
Or, if I’m of a more sinister bent regarding what to do with my suasion over my disciples, I could start a cult, hand out LSD-laced Kool-Aid laced. Wait for the acid to take effect and then address the wide-open third eyes of my now pliable acolytes.
On a slightly more serious note, there’s something a little depressing, disheartening about all this. There’s an aridity to the knowledge that even in this—my one act of liberation from the constraints of society—I have somehow found myself fixed, assigned a grade. Smiling as some imago of a schoolteacher pulls the pumpkin sticker from her strip of paper and plants one in the center of my big ugly forehead.
Or even worse, leaves my forehead bare, cold and naked, forcing me to stare around the classroom at the other kids, their brows shining with bright gold stickers.

                         SWERVING ON THE SUPERNATURAL: SOME RUMINATIONS ON GENRE

Earlier today I finished writing a short story, tentatively titled “Last Turn of the Old Wheel.” Actually, I like the title enough that I can probably stop referring to it as “tentative.” I think I’m going to stick with it, when I submit it into the world for publication.
Since talking about one’s work is only slightly less tedious than relating the details of one’s dreams, I’ll try to be brief in my summary of the story’s contents. It’s about an old man, who once was a cabdriver and is now housebound and cared for by his grandson. The old man is slipping into senility, but still retains enough of his faculties to mourn for all the things he’s lost, especially his erstwhile identity as a cabbie.
To compensate for the old man’s sadness, the grandson gives him one of those racing game simulations, complete with a steering wheel, clutch, and pedal setup. His grandpa is happy, until the Gamestop where the grandson rented the equipment wants its console back. The place is closing down, and since the grandson is living on the poverty line, he can’t afford to buy a system. And since there is no other game rental store in the neighborhood, it looks like grandpa is going to have to go back to staring at the apartment walls.
Until, that is, a techie who homebuilt his own proof-of-concept console offers his gaming system to the grandson, for a song. The kid naturally scoops it up and brings it back to his grandpa, presenting the currently morose man with the gift. Like most old people, the grandpa is reticent to try new things, especially since he’s still smarting from being forced to forfeit the old game system. Slowly, though, he begins to acclimate to the new one.
It's not hard to do, as the new system is not only an incredibly real simulation, but centers around driving a cab around the city rather than something fantastic like street racing. All is going well, until grandpa gets into a “car accident.” The quotes are necessary, as the accident is confined to the virtual realm, and shouldn’t be a big deal. Except at the exact moment where the grandpa’s virtual avatar wipes out onscreen, a real wreck occurs outside the apartment window.
Unfortunate coincidence, or something more?
If you’ve seen enough “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “The Twilight Zone,” or read or seen any number of horror anthologies, you can guess how this might go.
There are three basic options here:

1. The source of the serendipity between wrecks onscreen and in the world is supernatural and inexplicable. In this case, we know that there is something Faustian afoot, that the man who presented the grandson with the homebuilt console is some sort of devilish trickster. Not finding out the secret source of his magic power might not be a problem, if the character development and individual self-contained scenes have enough power on their own. There are worse things than abiding mystery. In “Groundhog Day” for instance, we never learn what exact mechanism is causing Phil Connors to repeat the same day over and over again. In earlier drafts, it turned out that a woman Connors spurned put a curse on him. Fans of the film as it exists are usually mortified to learn of this, and are glad it was scrubbed in subsequent drafts. Explaining the magic, in this case, would have ruined the film or at least greatly compromised its appeal.
2. The second option is what I’ll call the supernatural explicable, which is a bit prolix and unwieldy as a term, but should serve our purposes here. In this case, the cabbie-based console has some magical properties, which can be traced back to a source, which is eventually revealed. It needn’t make logical sense, but the magic comes from a certain wellspring. Perhaps the game-maker is some sadistic genius loci, who wants to make a point that one must accept age’s ceaseless advance for what it is, that Father Time and Death cannot be cheated. Trying to use technology to avert the entropic and inevitable shadow from consuming the old man only makes things worst. Yes, grandpa cries when you finally force him to relinquish the car keys, but the other option is even more unsavory. Giving in to his cries, his pleas to maintain his independence, will only eventuate in the oldster plowing his boat of an ancient Caddy into passersby on the sidewalk. This option is obviously the most amenable to imparting some kind of moral lesson, like a parable. This will y alienate those who quail at didactics, and appeal to those who think a story should have some kind of moral at its core.
3. The third option—from some perspectives the worst, from others the best—is what I’ll call the mundane. That sounds derogatory, almost like boring, but here I mean it merely to mean not supernatural, as opposed to extramundane. The explanation here could in fact be science fictional, but that would still make it explicable, no matter how farfetched the science. Treat the science in too cursory a manner and you risk having your technique dismissed by harder SF aficionados as handwavium. Why, exactly, or how, someone would build a racing game and synchronize it with the actions of a real car in the real world is a problem the writer must solve for themselves, should they decide to take this route. It’s probably not something that could be solved with one-hundred percent plausibility, but—as with both Options 1 and 2, good character development and scene-by-scene construction can make this implausibility forgivable. Wave the hand fast enough and not even those on the lookout for the wavium will notice your dexterous magician’s distractive glamour.

Ultimately, the writer must decide for themselves which way to go, how much logic or illogic their story’s construction can stand, before it collapses on itself.
This is an old problem, one which has existed in popular SF and horror for decades, as evidenced by my previous allusions to Hitchcock and Serling. Despite all they both contributed to popular culture, many of their showcase stories end up being too clever by half, especially in the last act. Especially with their overreliance on irony and the O. Henry twist ending. In Hitch’s case, this moment is usually accompanied by a few upward trilling notes on the flute. The main character might even break the fourth wall and look at the viewer when the dog digs up the wife’s body, or the plotter’s otherwise perfectly orchestrated villainy is undone by some minor bagatelle.
The technique of the twist ending can be used not just to powerful, but profound effect—see both the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Twilight Zone” iterations of Ambrose Bierce’s peerless story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
Most of the time, though, the viewer or reader can almost smell the flop sweat sliding from the brow of the storyteller as they struggle to write their way free of the corner into which they’ve unwittingly maneuvered themselves after two acts of tap-dancing. A great example of this is the film, I Bury the Living, about a cemetery caretaker who discovers he merely needs pushpins on a corkboard to kill a man. I won’t spoil the film’s big reveal here, for those who haven’t seen it. Suffice it to say, though, that horror maestro Stephen King is right when he says the film’s author would have been better off leaving the spooky source of the caretaker’s magic a riddle. Nothing about the mundane meddling that only appears supernatural in the runup to the reveal makes sense, when considered for any length of time. The film would have been better off going with option one or two.
If one uses the unreliable narrator technique, the issue may never really be clarified. The source of the conflict might be mundane, but the narrator is crazy or superstitious enough to think it supernatural, or vice versa. Stephen King’s critique of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his book The Shining very much hinges on a quibble of Kubrick’s swerving the supernatural. 
The book is very much about the supernatural explicable (King is a moralist), but Kubrick, an existential materialist, makes the story about the unreliable mental state of Jack Torrance. Since the guy playing Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson, and Nicholson always looks batshit crazy, this works, at least for Kubrick and those of a similar Weltanschauung.
There is of course another, final and fifth category of explanation (or lack of explanation), which I’ve heretofore overlooked. That would be the absurdity of the unanswerable, the inexplicable even by recourse to magic or handwavium. This is the kind of unresolvable resolution preferred by Kafka, by Dadaists, surrealists, and existentialists. These artists many times view consciousness itself as a trick, a cursed quirk of evolution that causes us to seek and expect solutions and sense from a universe under no obligation to supply them. The universe indeed might lack the consciousness we have, an endowment we either received from ourselves through solipsistic striving or some other freakish accident of egotism.
This is where the lack of an answer at the tale’s end seems to suggest less the supernatural than the complete absence of anything extramundane or even something that can be apprehended with the laws of science. How or why anything happens can’t be explained away as being due to a spell, or hinted at as some kind of sorcery invoked in contravention to the usually obtaining laws, or even via some invention that widens human understanding and possibility to see the underlying laws at work. Recourse to neither Bible nor electron microscope, nor parapsychologist’s electromagnetic wand will reveal what is ultimately afoot.
Some force is thwarting or Metamorphosing the character or their world—keeping them from reaching the Castle, putting them on Trial for unspecified crimes—to make a larger point about the remoteness or absence of any higher power, or meaning. There is no hope or explanation, only absurdity, and the only option is to laugh in the dark, alongside the dark, or have the darkness laugh at you while you weep and claw blindly at unyielding walls.
Either find the funny in your plight or find yourself the butt of a joke whose teller might not even exist.
Obviously this kind of existential, illogical surreality isn’t seen often in popular fiction, especially not on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” or “The Twilight Zone.” I suspect such unsatisfying, resolution-free stories—free of climax and catharsis, full of frustration, lacking narrative symmetry—wouldn’t have sat well with advertisers.
It makes a kind of sense, after all. For who the hell is going to be in the mood to buy soap or toothpaste or beer after having it relentlessly hammered home that there is no god and no hope? Or, as Kafka said, smiling, “There is hope, but not for us.”
 

​Aesthetic Theology: Or, How Leviathan and Behemoth Got Their Asses Kicked

Political Theology is a fairly esoteric field, popularized by the German 20th century philosopher Carl Schmitt. Put in its simplest terms, it’s the idea that certain knowledge can be derived from religion and applied to politics and metapolitics. Schmitt’s main interest here was geopolitics, and how the megafaunal cryptids Leviathan (the sea monster) and Behemoth (the land monster) could tell us certain things about nations. Land-based powers like Russia were tellurocracies (Behemoths) and sea-based powers like the U.K. or U.S. were thalassocracies (Leviathans.) This affected how these nations saw themselves and the world and dealt with other nations. It also, especially, affected how they fought and what kind of wars they preferred to engage in. 
Nobody talks about Schmitt much anymore, partly because he was a member of the Nazi Party, but mostly because a lot of his stuff is very dense.  It also helps to read Schmitt in the original German, and to have some grasp of Greek as well helps in the appreciation of his concepts like Nomos. Most people understandably have other, more pressing things to do with their time.
I, not being most people—not having much of a life to speak of at all—can afford to think about this stuff. I can even afford to mull over if I might be able to derive my own secular philosophical insights from the Bible. Not being overmuch into geography, but still trying to give this writing thing a go, I’m more inclined to find aesthetic rather than political uses for the Good Book.
So how about it, then? Aesthetic Theology?
There’s a quote I found from the Bible. I didn’t stumble over it while reading the Good Book, (though I sometimes do) but rather while perusing another book I keep in my basement bathroom.  This book is a collection of metaphors and aphorisms along with the author’s insights and ideas on metaphor’s contribution to thought and creativity. It’s cleverly titled Metaphors Be With You.
The quote I stumbled across was on the subject of Humility. 
It came from the King James Bible, the Book of Matthew: “And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
What’s the relation of the above quote about humility to aesthetics, though? Isn’t the point of art to be the exact opposite of humble, to try to harness some Promethean fire and play God, if only figuratively in one’s work?
The brilliant German philologist Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind even argues that poets, in trying to praise their gods, discovered man’s godlike potential via linguistic abstraction.
I think creation can be an exalting pursuit—and cathartic, and liberating. Likewise can it produce all kinds of negative feelings like frustration and inadequacy and jealousy at the skillset of one’s betters. But the best work, for me (at least as far as writing is concerned) seems to come from those who know how to subordinate their egos, to forget themselves.
There’s more than one type of good writing. There is the kind of good writing that, as one reads it, they recognize as such. We read and feel how the writer was carried away in the throes of composition. We’re grateful for the pleasure of being able to ride along with them on their flow of words. Sometimes, if they’ve really caught a tailwind, their words can even surprise or please us enough to get a small physical reaction, a laugh or sigh. The buzz they achieve somehow becomes one they lend to us in that moment.
Athletes call this state being “in the pocket,” and people in other fields sometimes refer to it as being in a flow state. It’s those moments we all work for, when the frustration and inadequacy and being tongue-tied or blocked or otherwise thwarted by fear or circumstance melt away.
I’m reading a book right now by the journalist John Colapinto, which is very well-written, but consciously and meticulously crafted. All of its metaphors are well-chosen, never overextended, and when a big, seldom-seen word is introduced, it has an exquisite flavor, a perfection that feels unobtrusive. His style is showoff-y and calls attention to itself, but his skill as a wordsmith is undeniable. Words—which so often fail their users—become a malleable putty in this man’s hands.
It induces admiration along with a twinge of jealousy to which I’ll readily admit. That so much of Colapinto’s book (and the previous novel I read by him) deals with jealousy only makes it all the more ironic and exquisite. This is a man who knows he has talent and knows also that more talented people exist, and that they experience their own agonies and insecurities, too.
Having larded all that praise on Colapinto and his book, though, I have to admit that this kind of great writing is not my favorite kind. This is writing that exalts itself, and while it doesn’t suffer some kind of humbling defeat as a result, it has its limits, and its downside. This being conscious of the writer behind the work at all times—if only to admire him—keeps the characters and the world on the page at a remove.
It reminds me of an old quote by SF writer Orson Scott Card, which I can only roughly paraphrase after all this time: You can either have people admire your words, or believe your story.
Card further states that poetry is supposed to have its effect on the mind consciously, that it’s okay to actually read a poem and say, “Damn, that’s well-written!” Fiction is more often about achieving its ends through sleight, a dexterous subsuming of one’s urges to make their presence known, to receive attention. The clinging to one’s identity in the midst of creating characters (essentially other people, however fictitious) keeps the story from being fully transporting.
This can work fine, mind you, and is actually preferred, if one is writing about the doings of their alter-ego. Author John Fante’s alter-ego Arturo Bandini and later Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski gain their reality partly by reflecting their creators’ desire for recognition. The desire to be recognized, to be praised—loved, seen, etc.—is a pretty natural one, and probably no sin in and of itself, assuming one believes in sin. Fante’s wife Joyce said that his greatest fear was to be known as a “‘Hey you,’ guy.”
I don’t want to judge this kind of writing too harshly, partly because I myself am guilty of it, and often. Indeed, that my writing calls attention to itself is perhaps my main authorial flaw.
What about the other kind of writing, though, the kind that, thus far, has been durch Abwesenheit glänzen, as the Germans say, literally “glowing through its absence?” This is the kind of writing that happens when the writer manages to subsume their ego as completely as a human can. These moments usually come when one is not concentrated on ethereal concerns like the Muse or mundane concerns like how the work will be perceived by readers. Such moments don’t just come with a buzz, but an eerie sense that some kind of veil that otherwise remains in place has been pulled back. The Muse isn’t just gracing you with her touch; she’s letting you peek up her toga.
These moments usually come after writing “one word at a time,” as Stephen King so humbly put it in his memoir On Writing.
It’s in such moments that the hands move across the keys like the planchette on a Ouija board seemingly shifting of their own volition on a stormy night. It’s scary, but it’s also sublime.
And it seems to happen, for me at least, most when I “throw myself on the mercy of the court,” so to speak. When I start out writing slowly, pretending I’ve never written a word before. Sometimes I’ll even say the words as I type them, like a child phonetically teaching himself to read, unembarrassed and undaunted. Such moments of going slow allow me to exceed my usual hedonic limit of buzz to be had via composition. Rather than going from perhaps thirty to sixty, I get to go from zero to sixty, and sometimes all the way up to 120 mph.
But it's only because I began in that spirit of humility that I get to feel that high.
Sometimes at least.
“Aesthetic Theology...” How about it?
Maybe it’s total bunk. Or maybe it’s something to which you can add your own observations of how the Bible (or any holy book) impart not just moral lessons, but aesthetic techniques, too.
 

There are few scientific concepts as misunderstand or misrepresented as that of Schrödinger’s Cat. In fairness to those who fuck it up (myself included), it is a mindboggling concept. It only grows more mindboggling when one realizes it’s not just a concept or principle, but as real as gravity. I almost wrote “as observable” as gravity, but gravity is mostly observed by its effects, not by itself.
In the simplest terms, Schrödinger’s Cat is a way to visualize quantum “superposition” in a way that even the layperson can kinda sorta understand it. Superposition holds that the rules of matter are easy to understand provided we’re dealing with atomic matter. Get down to the subatomic and things get weird. A subatomic particle, in fact, exists in a state of superposition—both/and—until directly observed or measured.
In other words, the subatomic particle is doing two things at once until the scientist actually takes a look at it.
In real life, a cat trapped in a closed box where a boobytrapped phial of poison may or may not have been opened is either dead or alive. The idea that it’s both alive and dead until its state is observed or measured is supposedly just an atomic-sized metaphor for subatomic particle behavior.
In the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man, about a physics professor having a crises of faith, he explains it to his student one-on-one thusly. “The cat is just a model for the math. The math is what’s real.” Not to mention important to the kid’s grade. “Even I don’t understand the cat,” the professor says.
There’s a problem, though, with pretending the cat is just a model or metaphor, rather than existing in superposition itself. If you put enough subatomic particles together, you get particles. Put enough of those particles together and you get matter. Whether it’s organic or not is a matter of chemistry.  When exactly subatomic particles behave as particles touches on the concept of flocculence. This is particles aggregating to become bigger things and is best understood by engineers with a strong gasp of good old-fashioned Newtonian physics, i.e. an apple that either falls from the tree or doesn’t.
Trying to figure out when a bunch of “little things” become one big thing—or a bunch of little things is also one big thing—touches on the Sorites Paradox. That’s philosophy.
But you see then that the cat being both alive and dead is in fact, not a just model. It’s just a question of when its reality becomes observable to us, and how. Turns out the professor in A Serious Man wasn’t being humble or facetious when he said he didn’t understand the cat. He was simply wrong in seeing it as a metaphor for the math (or rather, the Coens, like most people who touch the subject, were wrong.)
The cat only becomes one thing in one state—alive or dead—after being observed or measured. And yes, hearing the cat meow or the scratch of its claws against the inside of the corrugated box counts as measurement.
It’s at this point that even the biggest of big brains disagree on exactly how many cats there are, though. Or whether the cat you observe—dead or alive—is the only one left of the original two.
Nobel laureate Niels Bohr believed in collapse of the wave function, a thing represented by this cool little pitchfork symbol, 𝚿, which is just the Greek letter “psi”. Once you opened the cat’s box and saw whether or not it was alive or dead, you turned the superposed cat into a single living or dead cat. At least according to Bohr.
Congratulations, you’re a magician.
Another scientist though, named Hugh Everett the Third, claimed that it only appeared you and your eyes had collapsed those two cats into a single one. Rather than collapsing the wave function, you were simply riding one of the propagated waves. It appeared to collapse because you are just one you at a time. The you who opened the box and sighed with relief to see the cat hadn’t tripped the poison mechanism is just one of you. Another you (with whom you’ll never interact) opened the box and saw, much to his horror, the little butterscotch tabby curled up, lifeless in the box. This other you turned out to be a shitty magician and should also seek therapy from the resulting guilt and trauma of poisoning a cat.
Who, then, among the big brains is right and who is wrong?
For a long time, most people thought Niels Bohr was right and Everett was wrong. Partly this was because they knew about Bohrs’ theory, as he was a well-established and well-funded, much celebrated Nobel Laureate who enjoyed institutional support.  “Everyone,” as the currently en vogue Bin Laden once observed, “loves a strong horse.”
Meanwhile Everett was just an ill-mannered, chain-smoking young man whose doctoral thesis faced many challenges. He was prickly even among a normally contentious and prickly group of (mostly) men not known for observing the social graces. As his academic career floundered and his papers moldered in some Harvard subbasement, he became even harder to deal with. He drank heavily and did R & D work for the military industrial complex, and the secretaries he sexually harassed claimed he had bad BO. He had a couple kids, too, one of whom committed suicide, and another of whom is the lead singer of the popular indie band, Eels.
Scientists, despite the cosmic scope of their remit, can be petty, vain, as given to the picayune vagaries of human emotion as anyone else. Academia is a cutthroat Machiavellian world where resources like tenure and grants are scarce, and fought over more tenaciously than rare oases discovered in the desert. I only survived to get an MA, and every moment I spent on-campus I felt like I was suffocating, my ribcage contracting until my chest hurt.
And if Everett were right, he was basically  putting his cigarette out on Bohrs’ addlepated skull. Not only that, but scientists would have to contemplate the deep philosophical and moral implications of a multiverse, not because they wanted to, but because the math led there.
With the passage of time, though, Everett’s theory has come to be not only accepted, but embraced by many, and not just hack SF writers like yours truly. To those who don’t have to bolster their supposition with mathematical proofs—i.e. artists, screenwriters, philosophers—Everett’s idea is the more interesting, the more savory.
Its implications are definitely more metaphorically resonant, too.
Just remember that the cat isn’t a metaphor, though. The cat is a model for a reality, whether you think that reality consists of branches or a single line. It’s only metaphoric to the extent the metaphor lets you visualize what you can’t understand when written out in equations that span multiple chalkboards. If you’re the kind of person who quails before math problems that involve Roman numerals, you definitely have no business getting near the ones that need Greek letters, too.
Be thankful for the cat.
For myself, the model-metaphor involves another box, and rather than a cat, a man. The box in this example would be the computer screen on which these words are being typed, and the man would be me.
Sitting here, now, I can sense (but obviously not see) the various branches I could take myself on just by typing. I could write a well-written sentence or a shitty one. I could potentially close this MS-word window out now—without saving this document (no big loss) and search the dark web for guns and pills. The fact that I’m even thinking about it (or at least facetiously countenancing it) means on another branch there’s probably a me already doing it. This me is either soon to have an Uzi micro and a prescription bottle of Perc 10s in hand, or is soon to be cuffed by an ATF agent.
Sometimes just thinking about doing something, I’ll feel a little breeze, or at least imagine I’m feeling one brushing past me.
Is that me going off on another branch, I wonder, succumbing to the impulse there while the more circumspect me remains here, riding this spear?
If I reconsider again, and cave to the urge—especially if it’s sinful or ill-advised—I’ll feel the wind again, probably because I’m hopping onto another spear. Call the personal computer hooked up to the net Schrödinger’s Litterbox, then, a kind of container that’s only as pure or dirty as the creature using it.
Some use it to read scholarly articles on the latest development in crater-sited coronagraphs and its implications for direct imaging astronomy. Others use it to watch BBWs wrestle in kiddie pools filled with vanilla-flavored custard. Some—sui generis renaissance men—like me, do both.