The Philosopher's Cat

The very first issue of Picture Post Magazine, appeared on October 1, 1938. This was a British equivalent of the American Life magazine , and was very popular and profitable. Throughout the magazine's run, 1938 to 1957, Kurt Hutton was associated with it, as a photographer. Born on the French border with Germany, (Alsace) in 1893 his name was shortened from Hubschmann to Hutton during his career in England. A history of the magazine, written by David J. Marcou  notes "With the passage of time both (Man and Hutton) today have become internationally renowned as cameramen to an extent the gentle, conscientious Hutton at least would never have expected." He did like cats and there are many of his pictures to see if you do an image search on "Kurt Hutton" cat.

  Truman Capote's birthday is September 30, 1924. Capote, whose portrayal of the cat in  Breakfast at Tiffany's  would guarantee him a place in a pantheon of cat saints, was, of course, an animal lover. One of his (real) cats was named Diotima, after " a Greek priestess who taught Socrates the philosophy of love."

  Bryan MacMahon, an Irish writer of some fame, lived from September 29, 1909 to February 13, 1998. According to one blurb, MacMahon was: Winner of the 1993 American Ireland Fund Literary Award. MacMahon is one of Ireland's great writers, a teacher who, to use his own inimitable phrase, has left 'the track of his teeth on a parish for three generations'. This account of his life has all the magic, drama, love of language, and love of Ireland that has made him famous as a talker, ballad-maker, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer of international stature.  MacMahon was from Listowel, County Kerry. His books include  The Lion Tamer, and Other Stories  (1949) and  The Red Petticoat and Other Stories  (1955). His autobiography he titled,  The Master  (1994). One of his sons is currently a judge on the Irish High Court. It is a story included in  The Red Petticoat  that caught our intention today: "The Cat and the Cornfield" in the words of the author "tel

  On September 28, 1980, the 13 part series "Cosmos" first aired on public television. It made a media star of a scientist, Carl Sagan. In a later book, "Billions and Billions,Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium," Sagan would sketch out the conundrum that led American and German scientists to invent the ozone destroying Freon. It turned out that the chemicals used to allow refrigeration, in the 1920s, were poisonous gases like ammonia, and thus a search for an inert chemical began, a chemical which was not "...flammable, doesn't corrode, burn your eyes, attract bugs, or even bother the cat." In outlining the ironic story of the invention of Freon, is Sagan blaming cats for climate change?

Although some sources disagree, I have seen September 27, 1844 listed as the date of death for Charles Nodier, French writer and archivist. He was elected a member of the Academie Francaise after a career as first, a half hearted revolutionist, and then, a half hearted monarchist. His biography was written by Prosper Merimee, who is not as forgotten as our subject. Nodier's writings were brief stories, typically, with some fantasy elements. The following two paragraph excerpt is from a story called "Trilby, or the Fairy of the Argyle" (1822). "There are privileges attached to houses inhabited by household sprites! They are preserved from the accidents of storm and the ravages of fire... [The sprites protect], also, the peaceful inhabitants of the barn-yard, and the feathered creatures, to which Providence has given only cries wherewith to make their complaints known, and which Providence has left without weapons for their defence. Oftentimes the blood-thirsty wild-ca

  George Santayana died on September 26, 1952. This European philosopher taught at Harvard and is noted for his views of America. The following is an excerpt from a letter he did not expect to be published and is addressed to a "Mr. Brooks," who had written a volume titled "Emerson and Others." The letter defends Emerson from the charges of pedantry in this manner: Have you maliciously put things together so as to let the cat out of the bag? Sham sympathy, sham classicism, sham universality, all got from books and pictures [lie behind your portrayal of Emerson]. Santayana goes on to defend an American spirit which does not depend on European aestheticism. He says of America: "The good things are football, kindness, jazz bands." His comments were written on May 22, 1927.

"...She puts great faith in medals. She would never think of starting on a journey if she had heard an owl hoot...or if she had seen a cat at midnight, or if the furniture had creaked. Oh yes, she's a most religious lady." These words were translated from the French of Marcel Proust into the English above by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. Proust gave us a vivid glimpse of a certain kind of femininity. Scott-Moncrieff is a Scottish translator whose words are responsible for the popularity of Proust in England, because of the exceptional quality of his translations. Scott-Moncrieff was born on September 25, 1889.

Desmond Morris is a zoologist whose book CatLore (1993) is just one of his volumes to deal with cats. In this book he mentions that there are no black cats. He means domestic kitty cats. Any one you look at will have a white hair or hairs someplace. This is because, Morris says, the black cats a woman accused of witchcraft might have as pets, could only be put to death themselves, if they were totally black. So that white hair had a survival value for the cats. September 24, 1928, is Desmond Morris's birth date. We pray for his health.

  The death of Sigmund Freud occurred on September 23, 1939, in London. Decades earlier Freud had devised a particular technique to push his patients towards insight. This consisted of, with those analysands he felt were capable of focusing on their own health, setting a termination date for the therapy sessions. This date, once set, could not be adjusted, since flexibility about the date would threaten the therapist's credibility. In Freud's words: "The lion springs only once.

The National Geographic Magazine published its first issue on September 22, 1888. We salute a premiere publisher of felidae photographs.

Andy Duncan writes science fiction and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and two World Fantasy Awards. The excerpt below is about a wizard discovering his talents. "I blew soap bubbles from my palm into the face of a sleeping tabby as it floated past. The bubbles bobbed through the cat or was it the other way around." September 21, 1964 is his birthday.

Heinrich Hoffmann (June 13, 1809 to September 20, 1894) was a German physician, a witty and learned man, who took the post of director of the lunatic asylum in Frankfurt, in 1851. Here he seems to have had an extraordinary rate of success though he refused to attribute his success to any ideological perspectives. The poem below was one of a series he wrote, meant to entertain as well as educate children. The things that strike us as grotesque were not seen as such by their original audience.  THE DREADFUL STORY OF PAULINE AND THE MATCHES Mamma and Nurse went out one day, And left Pauline alone at play; Around the room she gayly sprung, Clapp'd her hands, and danced, and sung., Now, on the table close at hand, A box of matches chanced to stand, And kind Mamma and Nurse had told her, That if she touched them they would scold her; But Pauline said, "Oh, what a pity! For, when they burn, it is so pretty; They crackle so, and spit, and flame; And Mamma often burns the same. I'l

  Hartley Coleridge (September 19, 1796 to January 6, 1849) was a writer, though he tried a variety of occupations. As a child he faltered under the extravagant expectations of his father and his father's friends. The latter included Wordsworth who wrote of the child Hartley as a “faery voyager." Another  "family friend, marveled at the continent of Ejuxria, an imaginary land that Hartley equipped with its own senate, legal system, and language (which he claimed to have translated)." These are the words of Anne Fadiman who did not mention the fact Hartley envisaged also a labor force for this kingdom, involving "a scheme for training cats and even rats for various offices and labours, civil and military."  Thus Derwent in his memoirs of his brother. The genius the young Hartley showed, such that Charles Lamb called him “the small philosopher” led, in Fadiman's words to a "penumbra of impossible expectation ...settle[d] around Hartley’s head."

  Joe Kubert (September 18, 1926 to August 12, 2012) was a major comic book artist. He was actually born on a shetl in eastern europe but his family arrived to the United States that same year, 1926. His father was a kosher butcher in Brooklyn, and Joe Kubert, in the words of his obituary, was ....  best known for co-creating DC Comics' iconic Sgt. Rock character..... Sgt. Frank Rock, a World War II hero with a dangerously accurate shot, an uncanny ability to survive numerous war rounds and who led his patrols with a fierce sense of duty and courage. Kubert also co-created Tor, a prehistoric strongman, and reinvigorated Hawkman, who flew above New York City, fighting crime with a mace.  ...His work is also poignant. " Yossel April 19, 1943 " explored the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II and what his life would have been if his parents did not emigrate from Poland when he was a baby. In the 1990s, he published " Fax from Sarajevo, " a graphic novel he creat

  Candice Dyer is an American writer, born September 17, some year, in Georgia, a writer who illustrates that talent for capturing the real when it gets surly. Here is a throwaway description from her facebook chatter, Regarding a Mother's Day greeting she wrote: I'm the doting companion to a bunch of cats, but I fed all my   babies   to the hogs. But Happy Mother's Day to you, too! :-) Her 2008 book about musical genius in middle Georgia,   Street Singers, Soul Shakers, and Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon,  will hopefully be reissued soon. Fr0m her   web page  we note she has published articles in: Atlanta magazine,.... Men’s Journal, Paste, Garden & Gun, Georgia Music Magazine, Georgia Trend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other publications. Her essay about the 50th anniversary of Waffle House was anthologized in Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing. Candice Michelle Dyer proves roots are not regional. 

We find in the documentation of a photograph in the  Royal Society Graphics Collection , this picture of early modern science: The Royal Society's third Sleeping Sickness Commission under the Directorship of Colonel Sir David Bruce left England on 16 September 1908, reaching their destination of the camp and laboratory of Mpumu, Uganda, (27 miles from Kampala) on 22 October 1908. Their mission was to continue investigations into the distribution of tsetse-fly and sleeping sickness in Uganda, utilising the facilities left by the 1906 commission.  The date is listed as about 1909. The photographer is unknown. The photograph is described, as: From a photograph album compiled by Colonel Albert Ernest Hamerton (1873-1955), documenting the Royal Society Sleeping Sickness Commission, Uganda.  A partial description of the photo reads:  A leopard slung over a pole and carried by two Ugandan porters, posed in front of a small crowd.  And  Original caption verso: "Leopard that killed my

  Murray Gell-Mann, (born, September 15, 1929) , wa s a major player in modern physics. He won a Nobel in 1969. It was Gell-Mann who organized the particle-zoo. In the words of Garrison Keillor: He developed a way to categorize the composite particles known as hadrons into eight separate types, and he called this the Eightfold Way, after the Buddhist Eightfold Path. He also theorized that hadrons were made up of three parts, and each part held a fraction of the hadron's total electric charge. He christened these smaller particles "quarks." He got the name from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"  Keillor goes on to describe Murray Gell-Mann in terms of his many interests: ... In addition to his work in physics, he has helped organize an environmental studies program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. He is also an expert on historical linguistics, and co-founded the Evolution of Human Languages Project at the S

  Peter Scott, (September 14, 1909 to August 29, 1989) was a co-founder of the World WIldlife Fund, whose priorities include tiger protection. But this does not exhaust his accomplishments. According to the   Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Scott also was ... the only Fellow of the Royal Society to have won an Olympic medal....  [Other accomplishments include being]  a distinguished ornithologist, painter and conservationist ] . In 1936, Scott won a bronze medal at the Berlin Olympics for single-handed sailing. .... Scott also went on to break the sailing speed record at Cowes in 1954, and was selected as helmsman of Sovereign for the America’s Cup in 1964. ... Elsewhere we read of Scott: " ...the Duke of Edinburgh, President Emeritus of WWF, recalled. 'I think his great contribution was that he was a brilliant communicator. For example, his television programmes in the 1950s and '60s were in those years as popular, as convincing, as David Attenborough's are

  Cesar Millan, born August 27, 1969,  came to the US as an illegal immigrant and his success is an argument for the wealth immigrants bring to their chosen homes. He is famous as a dog trainer and has written numerous books, including  A Member of the Family: The Ultimate Guide to Living with a Happy, Healthy Dog . This book has multiple editions but the first edition was dated 2008.  From this book we read that: If you have a dominant high energy cat, the cat will take care of itself in almost every situation.  On more occasions that I can count I have been called in to help humans with an uncontrollable dog - only to find that the family cat has no problem at all giving the dog rules, boundaries, and limitations.  However if you have a cat that is skittish around humans, or that is shy, elderly, weak, or ill, then you must be sure you bring home a very submissive, low-energy dog in order to keep the balance in the household. If you have any doubts, introduce the cat to the dog as pa

Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, on September 12, 1943. His most famous book is  The English Patient,  (1992) which won a Booker prize, and global fame after the movie was released. But he wrote in many genres. Ondaatje also wrote The Cat's Table  (2011). This novel tells the adventures of a young boy, who is the same age Ondaatje was when HE left Sri Lanka. The title refers to a table on such ships where the least important passengers were seated for meals. A lucky thing for the hero, who at this table meets other lonely boys, also seated at the cat's table, not the captain's table.  Ondaatje also edited a book of animal verse,  The Broken Ark  (1971). This volume was revised, and retitled, and republished in 1979, as  A Book of Beasts . His most recent novel is  Warlight , (2018).

  Sybill, a black and white moggie, handled the mouse emigration issues at 10 Downing Street during her tenure in this traditional British post. (Henry VIII is said to have kept a mouser in a similar post.) Her term in office began on September 11, 2007. Since her retirement to Scotland, to spend more time with her family, she has been promoted to chief mouser in heaven.

Karl Lagerfeld, ( 10 September 1933 to  19 February 2019), after pressure from animal rights groups did stop using real fur in his fashion. He is remembered for more than the fashion favored by women like Helen Mirren. Lagerfeld left part of his fortune to a cat, Choupette, when he died.

  John Hall Wheelock is the American poet who won the Bollingen Prize in 1962. He was born on September 9, 1886. Though his reputation has an aura of the antique, he was one of the first to recognise the genius of James Dickey. His poem "Panther, Panther" appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1921. There is a panther caged within my breast, But what his name there is no breast shall know  Save mine, nor what it is that drives him so, Backward and forward, in relentless quest: That silent rage, baffled but unsuppressed, ....   Well enough of that. at   Thursday, September 09, 2010   No comments:     Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest

  Michael Frayn, the British writer, born on September 8, 1933, has achieved critical success as a novelist as well as a playwright. His play  Copenhagen  (1998) plays with the possibilities inherent in a 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. This list of awards Copenhagen  won is not inclusive: The Critics' Circle Theatre Awards (1998) , the (American) Tony Award (2000) and, New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play of the 1999-2000 Season. In his writing Frayn exhibits the philosophical curiosity that prompted him to major in philosophy at Cambridge. He graduated in 1957. We see this concern in his book on the relation of language and reality,   The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe  (2008). Here Frayn analyzes what the dimension of language adds to the cosmos. Our excerpt is just a part of this inquiry: .. .Could one imagine identifying all tastes forever just purely as tastes?  [Animals must since]  the cat...drinks the mi

  Manuel Komroff is an American writer in undeserved obscurity. He was born on September 7, 1890 and in the 1950's was writing screenplays for General Electric theater. Our interest was caught when we picked up a copy of his 1933 novel: I, The Tiger. It is a fantasy story about the life of a big cat captured and used in the movies and zoos. The novel is written from the point of view of the tiger, and the empathy for the imprisonment of a wild creature is so vivid that the reader, at the denouement, must hope the tiger dominates.

Zelia Nuttall was an American archeologist born in San Francisco (September 6, 1857), and educated abroad. She worked with the Peabody Museum at Harvard and among her publications is this volume she edited, and, published in 1903: The book of the life of the ancient Mexicans, containing an account of their rites and superstitions: an anonymous Hispano-Mexican manuscript preserved at the Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Florence, Italy. The work is about the pre-Aztec culture, and contains a rendering of a jaguar, a feline to my knowledge significant in all South American cultures. One of the jaguars in this volume though is definitely a very realistic skinned animal.  Here is a link to the book, The book of the life of the ancient Mexicans .

Robert Fergusson, (September 5, 1750 to October 16, 1774 ) the Scottish poet, was born near Edinburgh, schooled at St. Andrews, and flourished at a time Scotland was in an intellectual ferment of global import. Here is an excerpt from his " The Farmer's Ingle " ... For weel she trows, that fiends an' fairies 'be Sent frae the deil to fleetch us to our ill; That ky'hae thit their milk wi' evil ee; An' com been scowder'd on the glowin' kill. O mock nae this, my friends! but rather mourn, Ye in life's brawest spring wi' reason clear; Wi' eild our idle fancies a' return, And dim our dolefu' days wi' baimly fear; The mind's ay cradled whan the grave is near. ... Where the gudeman aft streeks him at his ease; A warm and canny lean for weary banes O' labourers doy'lt upo' the wintry leas. Round him will baudrins an' the collie come, To wag their tail, and cast a thankfu' ee, To him wha kindly flings them

The book, "Madeleine and the Cats of Rome," was published on this date, September 4, in 2008. This continuation of the Madeleine series was written by the grandson of the originator of the story, Ludwig Bemelmans. That would be John Bemelmans Marciano. Rome of course is famous for the care they give stray and wild cats, even putting up street signs that direct one to the feline feeding stations.

  Our research department here at Almanackists Inc. has verified that Disney did not buy the rights to Catwoman, because that is a DC comics character, not Marvel comics. Still, it was almost a coincidence, that news item, and the fact the movie-- Cat Women of the Moon -- was released on this date, September 3, 1953. (Not that Catwoman was in that movie, no, there were not even any cats in the movie, Cat Women of the Moon.)

  Cleveland Amory, the Manhattan writer, is so well known for his activism in animal causes, that we had to dig deeply to find an obscure trivia item. In his novel Home Town, published in 1950, Amory describes a home with three different sized cat doors to accommodate a family with a large cat, a middle sized one, and a small cat. Amory's dates are  September 2, 1917 to October 14, 1998.