September 29, 1909

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 "tells of a cat who betrayed its master, a parish clerk, who had lured a tinker girl into a cornfield."

"The Cat and the Cornfield" is English for "O Gato e o Milharal"

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August 23, 1941

Onora Sylvia O'Neill (August 23, 1941) is a British thinker. She studied at Oxford and received a doctorate from Harvard. After a noted career, in 1992, she accepted the post of Principal of N ewnham College, Cambridge, and since 2006 she has been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. Her 1997 paper, "Environmental Values, Anthroporphism, and Speciesism" contains a timely argument in which Dr. O'Neill, (she prefers that title to the "Baroness" to which her elevation to the peerage allows) points out inadequacies in the use of the term speciesism to argue against according humans more ethical rights than aspects of the non human world. A viewpoint that puts " a person torturing a cat is on a par with a cat torturing a bird," is not one she finds supportable. The link is to a downloadable version of this paper. We have this picture of Onora O'Neill, in 2002, at Newnham College: We meet in the Principal's lodge at Ne

August 25, 1990

Watch enough old movies (pandemic anyone) and you can fill in this scene--- businessmen, sex, court corridors. This is the backdrop to a scene from Morley Callaghan's novel, The Man With the Coat , (1955), from which we quote: As a businessman, Singerman might say he couldn’t afford to be associated with an old fighter who was an outcast from a place where the best people went. “I won’t be an outcast,” Mike said so loudly that his own voice in the darkness startled him and he sat up in bed. Then he heard a cat in the lane behind the building. The window was open a few inches. The weeds that bothered his hay fever grew in the lane. Again he heard the cat dragging at the lid of the garbage pail. The lid clattered and rolled and he jumped up, slammed the window shut, then he clenched his big fists with the broken knuckles and stood in a trance for a long time. A more directly biographical account is Morley Callaghan's story of accompanying a lady friend to the coliseum one night,

August 22, 1806

Jean Honoré Fragonard (April 4 1732 to August 22, 1 806) the famous French painter, whose art illustrated the lives of a gilded class, included cats occasionally in his scenes. We have some biographical context from the National Gallery of Art : 'Fragonard was one of the most prolific of the eighteenth-century painters and draftsmen. Born ... in Grasse in southern France, he moved with his family at an early age to Paris. He first took a position as a clerk, but having demonstrated an interest in art, he worked in the studio of the still life and genre painter Jean Siméon Chardin (French, 1699 - 1779). After spending a short time with Chardin, from whom he probably learned merely the bare rudiments of his craft, he entered the studio of François Boucher ....1703 - 1770). Under Boucher’s tutelage Fragonard’s talent developed rapidly, and he was soon painting decorative pictures and pastoral subjects very close to his master’s style....Although Fragonard apparently never took cour

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