The Philosopher's Cat

 Aleister Crowley (October 12, 1875 to December 1, 1947)  became famous by the simple expedient of doing stupid things just to be talked about. His was a standard case of the weak leading those begging to be deceived. Like most people, Crowley did not guess at the dimensions of freedom. At one point the least scandal surrounding his name was that  "a young man died at Crowley's villa in Italy after killing a cat and drinking its blood. ..." Crowley visited various so-called mystical groups, and it is enough to remember one of them was authentic: Gurdjieff said of Crowley that he was "dirty." 

 Jeanne Toussaint (1887-1978) designed the panther broach and bracelet which items were among the jewelry the Duchess of Windsor accumulated.  Toussaint, a woman of  beauty and glamor,  was the director of fine jewelry for the Cartier company starting in 1933. When Paris fell to the Nazis, Cartier made a broach in the figure of a bird in a cage, and after the liberation event, their Paris windows featured that design with the cage door open. It was Toussaint, one reads, who pushed for the trend of figural jewelry and away from the Art Deco abstraction as a style. Toussaint's fondness for panthers, sparked perhaps by a trip to Africa, resulted in her nickname, "the panther." Her Parisian abode was decorated with panther skins, and she wore panther coats. The bracelet she designed for the Duke of WIndsor to give his wife, in 1952, a diamond and onyx panther, was auctioned, for the second time, at Sotheby's, on November 30, 2010, for over 7 million dollars. The bracelet...

  Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 to March 6, 1888) is famous for her family and her stories about families. Here is an excerpt from  Little Women  (1868): What in the world are you going to do now, Jo?’ asked Meg one snowy afternoon, as her sister came tramping through the hall, in rubber boots, old sack, and hood, with a broom in one hand and a shovel in the other. ‘Going out for exercise,’ answered Jo with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. ‘I should think two long walks this morning would have been enough! It’s cold and dull out, and I advise you to stay warm and dry by the fire, as I do,’ said Meg with a shiver. ‘Never take advice! Can’t keep still all day, and not being a pussycat, I don’t like to doze by the fire. I like adventures, and I’m going to find some.’” For all that her father was criticized for not providing better for his family, Louisa May Alcott's books are excellent in their depictions of strong and gentle men. She did not marry and died two...

Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 to February 22, 1942) was a Austrian writer, particularly remembered for his biographies of literary figures. He was far more famous during his lifetime than he is now. Here is a description of Zweig excerpted from the introduction to a reissue (2010) of his autobiography ( The World of Yesterday,  published first in German in 1942.) The introduction is written by André Aciman: Stefan Zweig was a cosmopolite, a prototypi­cally Pan-European emancipated Jew, who managed to shed all belief systems with the exception of pacifism. To this day he remains, paradoxically enough, Europe's most grace­fully defeated and disabused optimist. As of the early 1920s, he had picked up the menac­ing rumbles in Adolf Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. By 1933 he showed suffi­cient prescience to see that life was no longer viable for Jews in the German-speaking world and soon moved to England. .....Distressed by the war in Europe, he moved to the United Sta...

 Verity Lambert (November 27,  1935 to November 22, 2007) was the youngest and first female, BBC producer when her series,  Dr. Who , premiered in November of 1963. After a career as a producer for the BBC and other studios, with credits including,   Saigon: Year of the Cat  (1983), she received an OBE in 2002.

"THE CAT BY THE FIRE" is an essay in Leigh Hunt's London Journal,  (1834-1835) the entry dated November 26, 1834. This English literary critic and poet writes about Samuel Johnson's cat, and how Johnson shopped himself for the cat's food.  Johnson, according to Leigh Hunt, "was desirous of being a Christian philosopher; and accordingly he went out, and bought food for his hungry cat, because his poor negro was too proud to do it, and there was nobody else in the way whom he had a right to ask. What must anybody that saw him have thought, as he turned up Bolt Court! But doubtless he went as secretly as possible—that is to say, if he considered the thing at all. His friend Garrick could not have done as much ! He was too grand, and on the great " stage " of life. Goldsmith could; but he would hardly have thought of it. Beauclerc might; but he would have thought it necessary to excuse it with a jest or a wager, or some such thing. Sir Joshua Reynolds, ...

  Félix Lope de Vega (November 25, 1562 to August 27, 1635) was a contemporary of Cervantes, who called Lope de Vega "The Phoenix of Wits." Together they defined a golden age of Spanish literature. One of the playwright's later works was a "burlesque epic called The Battle of the Cats." Lope de Vega published this poem, which has a feline heroine, Zapaquilda, in 1634.   According to a modern explication, the point of the parody, La Gatomaquia, was the "chasm between the ideal and the reality of those imperialist practices" which used medieval epic descriptions to justify an aristocratic assumption of power in early modern Spain. Such is the thesis of Barbara Simerka (assistant professor of hispanic studies at Queens College, CUNY), in her 2008 book,  Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain.

  Emma Lavinia Gifford  was born on 24 November 1840 and her place in history is assured since she was Thomas Hardy's first wife. They grew apart after their 1874 marriage but they always shared a love of literature and of cats. She considered herself better born than he was, and in her latter years could seem scatter brained in speech. She called his family peasants. But his biographer Claire Tomalin, took care to specify Emma was just eccentric, not crazy, as some of their friends had said. She was interested in women's suffrage, and wrote many letters to the press -- including letters complaining about cruelty to circus tigers. Emma Hardy died on November 27, 1912 at Max Gate, their home in Dorchester.

  Alvin Langdon Coburn was a photographer whose portraits of Yeats, D. T. Suzuki. Twain, are among his many masterpieces. He might be more famous today had he not pursued his mystical interests and found a group which stressed the value of anonymity for mystical achievement. So, although we do not know the name of his teacher, we are glad he wrote what is called an autobiography, where we learn of his delight in going to the silent pictures with family and friends to watch "Felix the Cat" cartoons. This book,  Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer . was published after his death, and may not represent his own wishes about details. It is mainly photographs anyway. He died on November 23, 1966, and the book was published in 1978 with editing credits.

  George Gissing, (November 22, 1857 to December 28, 1903), the English novelist, is classified by the  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , specifically by Pierre Coustillas ... as an intellectual who rose to be the conscience of his time. An apt analyst of the female mind, Gissing was perhaps at his strongest, as he himself declared in 1895, when he described 'a class of young men distinctive of our time-well educated, fairly bred, but without money' ... His unremitting cultural commitment has endeared him to successive generations of discerning readers. However unpalatable a particular truth was, he courageously voiced it, and his lucid, if pessimistic, judgements on human affairs, as well as the sterling originality of his art, have secured his place in the history of the English novel. I include the above since perhaps others, will, like myself, find Gissing hard to place. Here is an excerpt from an early novel,  The Unclassed , (1884). The setup is a woman...

  A comparative view of the social life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles the Second to the French Revolution  (1828) was a history written by Mary Berry, (March 16 1763 to November 21 1852). Berry was a friend of Thomas Macaulay, and other intellectual luminaries, of the late 18th century. This volume enhanced her fame, but she was already known for her editing of Horace Walpole's correspondence, and other books also. I am gong to briefly quote from the preface because it gives a good sense of an ahistorical past which governed the imaginations of writers until about this period. You can see her need to defend her history because if things really changed, that might cast doubt on the fundamentals of the 18th century world. (If things did NOT change the reason to write history is different or non-existent). Nowadays we are accustomed to the view that fundamental worldviews can shift in an historical time, but our view was itself an historical development. S...

  Tipu Sultan (November 20, 1750 to  4 May 4, 1799), was the ruler of the Indian kingdom of Mysore. He was a brilliant and ruthless man. He never stopped hating the British, and used alliances with the French to contain and defeat them. Ultimately Tipu Sultan, died in battle against the English, and his astounding collection of jewels was among the loot.  One of his jewels came up for auction recently: (2010).  It is described as a "gold pendant ... set with a 38 carat emerald surrounded by nine precious stones including topaz, blue sapphire, ruby, diamond and pearl. It is one of the very few pieces of jewellery from Tipu Sultan’s fabulous treasury to have survived in its original setting." Tipu Sultan was known during his lifetime as the Tiger of Mysore; he encouraged this informal title. The story he told was that while hunting in the forest a tiger attacked him. His gun would not fire and the tiger knocked his dagger out of his hand when jumping him. Tipu Sul...

Elizabeth Coles was born on July 3, 1912 in Reading, Berkshire. She  grew up and wrote novels. Her literary reputation has grown considerably since her death. The following is probably from her article in the  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography : She has been described as   "best known for not being better known"....Kingsley Amis named her "one of the best English novelists born in this century"; Antonia Fraser called her "one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century". Hilary Mantel says that she is "deft, accomplished and somewhat underrated...." [Elizabeth Coles]. .. led a highly respectable Home Counties life, married to a chocolate manufacturer,  [named Taylor]  and many of her books are, on the surface, about lives comfortably lived. ..."What she loved best, I think, were outbreaks of vulgarity, embarrassingly improper behaviour, people saying or doing exactly the wrong thing."...One of her main strengths, however, e...

Margaret Atwood, born on November 18, 1939, is a Canadian novelist and poet. She has won many awards and her novels have titles we all recognise, like  The Handmaiden's Tale, (1985) and  The Cat's Eye  (1988). The latter was a Booker Prize (1989) finalist. She is a very prolific and much honored writer.  We have this excerpt from Margaret Atwood's poem "February": ... ... it's love that does us in. Over and over Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits  thirty below, and the pollution pours  out of our chimneys to keep us warm. February, month of despair,  with a skewered heart in the centre. I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries with a splash of vinegar. Cat, enough of your greedy whining  and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You're the life principle,  more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here.  Get rid o...

  Mervyn Peake (July 9, 1911, to the night of November 16/17, 1968) was a British artist, whose novels and drawings portray an intensely imagined and unexpected world. We quote passages from the article about Peake in the  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography  to convey a sense of his achievement.  "[His illustrations for ]  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  (1943); ... is considered to be his greatest achievement as an illustrator and he was praised for adding a new spiritual dimension to the work...[After the war] he was commissioned by  The Leader  magazine to tour western Europe with the journalist Tom Pocock. They witnessed the first war crimes trial at Bad Neuenahr in June 1945 and Peake sent back haunting drawings of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp...  Titus Groan  was published in 1946. It was the first in a projected series in which Titus, the seventy-seventh earl of Groan, rebels against his ancestral home Gormenghast Castle...

  William Pitt Turner was a doctor and the brother of a doctor and the son of Dr. Philip Turner, all good Connecticut citizens in post revolutionary America, in 1787, to be exact. William and John were members of a local musical society, to which they contributed their collection of dance tunes. William also wrote verse describing members of this Norwich Assembly and we quote: ...the lads with merry glee, ... Have spent of shillings not a few; the fair to please, night-errants stout, they've turn'd their purses wrong-side out; And to maintain, their dancing sett, All head and ears they've run in debt; Some to the Cobler for their shoes, Some to the Merchants for their cloaths, Of jackets, stocks and cambrick ruffles, .... A Dokt-r trimmed with fur of cat. Gives orders out and does proceed, In managing to take the lead; .... A self portrait perhaps, of youth in a young nation. We found this in  Dance and its music in America, 1528-1789,  (2007) by Kate Van Winkle Keller. W...

We note that, according to some art sale site,  Elisabeth Frink .... was an English artist, best known for her sculptures of men, animals and religious motifs. Born in rural Suffolk, Frink first studied art at the Guildford School of Art from 1946-49 before moving to London to attend the Chelsea School of Art from 1949-1953. Although an able painter and draughtsman, Frink favoured sculpture. Associated with the group of post-war British sculptors including Eduardo Paolozzi and Reg Butler, Frink is distinguishable for the recurrent natural themes, and the organic style manifest in many of her bronzes. The naturalistic subject matter of much of Frink’s sculpture is exaggerated by her technique of layering and distressing plaster onto a metal frame, achieving a weathered and scarred effect and integrating her sculpture within its often rural context. During the 1960s the animalistic forms which had dominated much of her early sculpture were gradually replaced by a focus on the human f...

  Percival Lowell (March 13, 1855 to November 12, 1916) wrote several books about his travels in Japan, and one of these  Occult Japan: or, The way of the gods; an esoteric study of Japanese personality and possession , was published in 1894.  One of  possession cults Lowell wrote about was the Ryobu, which we now recall has a karate aspect. He describes scenes of possession which sound like some kind of hypnosis. Accompanying the rituals around these events, which involved receiving communications from a god, were special finger and hand gestures of a complexity remarkable to the western observer. " There is quite an esoteric library on the subject, and so thoroughly defined is the system that the several finger-joints bear special names ," Lowell records.  One such gesture involved overlapping the fingers of both hands so that a grid with a gate function was formed. They only used 9 fingers in this symbolic gate though, not all ten. The reason, Lowell says, fo...

  Simon Schama is one of England's greatest historians. Schama, born on February 13, 1945,  is on the faculty of Colombia, author of classics such as  Citizens,   (a history of the French Revolution), and an art critic for   The New Yorker .  Schama has a scene in his book  The American Future: A History  (2010), which describes Dick Cheney. The setting is Cheney's speech on Veteran's Day, 2007.  ... Cheney would  [occasionally]  look up from the teleprompter, sight line briefly changed and then move impassively to the next homily, like a tank rolling over a cat. It was warm on 11 November, and the temper in the amphitheater was jocund.  Simon Schama, graduate of Cambridge, and one of America's greatest historians, was one of the guests aboard the  Spirit of Chartwell , the royal barge carrying the Queen of England,  during the Diamond Jubilee flotilla event,  June 3, 2012.

Vachel Lindsay (November 10, 1879 to December 5, 1931) was famous during his lifetime for his poetry. He both came from the Middle West (USA) and wrote about those values. A surprising number of major American writers also come from that geographical area, but most of those artists cast their origins in a bitter light. Not so Lindsay and that may play into his current lack of critical attention. There are reasons to remember his originality in themes and techniques. You can see his instructions for reading ""A Dirge for a Righteous Kitten," published with the poem: A DIRGE FOR A RIGHTEOUS KITTEN To be intoned, all but the two italicized lines, which are to be spoken in a snappy, matter-of-fact way. Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong.  Here lies a kitten good, who kept  A kitten's proper place.  He stole no pantry eatables,  Nor scratched the baby's face.  He let the alley-cats alone.  He had no yowling vice.  His shirt was always laundried well,  He ...

The passengers aboard the Mayflower sighted the land that we now call Cape Cod on November 9, 1620. The passengers included "one or two cats." We learn this from a book titled  Everything Cats Expect You to Know. (2007) The author, Elizabeth Martyn has a series of popular interest books about cats, and there is no need to expect any of them are well-researched. There is no reason to doubt her information about the Mayflower though, or her assertion that the Mayflower cats arrived after the Jesuits brought cats to what we now consider Quebec in the 1500s. 

  The extraordinary talent of the author of  The Remains of the Day  (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro, was rewarded with the Man Booker prize for this story. The questions Ishiguro asks in his novels reflect a focus on human puzzlement. [It has]...  always fascinated me that we can't be like cats or dogs or cows.  These other creatures are quite happy to just eat and sleep and reproduce and then die. Its a perfectly good life for them. We are very different, we keep stopping and saying, "Is this good enough?" and so on, and we behave in a very strange way...because we want to fulfill some idea of having done good, although nobody knows what that is.  I'm sure cats and cows don't worry about these things, but we do... Ishiguro, born on November 8, 1954, in Japan, and educated in England, phrased this major theme in his work thusly during interviews published in  Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro  (2008) conducted by Brian W. Shaffe and Cy...

Robert Brault, the American writer who was born on November 7, 1938, says of his career, that he worked as a journalist for little money and no acclaim, and now he writes for no money and some acclaim. Here are examples of his writing: "If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit." And we share this very acute observation: "Psychologists now recognize that the need in some people to have a dozen cats is really a sublimated desire to have two dozen cats."

  George Eliot (November 22 ,1819 to December 22, 1880), is the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. This Victorian intellectual translated Spinoza, ( De Deo   in 1844.) Her lover George Henry Lewes was perhaps the first to introduce Baruch Spinoza to English readers. The good fortune of these two intellectuals having found each other, and their happiness together, is a testament to the power of the intellect in addition to the other factors in relationships. And it was a brilliant person who wrote the fiction we excerpt below.   Scenes of Clerical Life , was submitted to its publisher, John Blackwood's  Edinburgh Magazine  on November 6, 1856. A vignette: The little old lady took her son's arm with placid pleasure. She could barely reach it so as to rest upon it, but he inclined a little towards her, and accommodated his heavy long-limbed steps to her feeble pace. The cat chose to sun herself too, and walked close beside them, with tail erect, rubbing her sleek sides ag...

John Leonard (February 25, 1939 to November 5, 2008) was an American writer, a  critic, whose focus included various cultural manifestations. He became executive editor of the   Times Book Review  in 1971.   Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008  (2012) is a posthumous collection, and here we read about the  novel,  A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone (1992). John Leonard writes-- The heresy here is Gnostic and Manichean. There is a "divine spark" and a "library in a jar". Culture and love are both secret. The demiurge is a tourist. ... In the absence of evil --to an anthropologist nothing is evil, including himself, we have history: snakes, feathers, lizards, jewels, a fanged cat, a wooden cross, a unicorn, and death without mercy. Mr. Stone kicks the brain around; we live in heresy; Satan prevails;  A Flag for Sunrise  is the best novel of ideas I've read since Dostoevsky escaped from Omsk.  John Leonard als...

  Alfred Henschke (November 4, 1890 to August 14, 1928), is the real name of the German writer, Klabund. He married often and wrote a lot. One of his novels, titled  Peter The Czar , is a story about the Czar of Russia, told as if it were Norse mythology. For instance in one scene, during a visit to the peasants in a public house, Peter describes the ship which bore him to their fire and tavern. The Sokol, is both his fallow stallion, and a ship that has the "power...of a steer, her speed that of a greyhound. She has eyes at her prow like eagle's eyes. Her eyebrows are of black sable. " The Czar, stranger, magician, "sat at the chimney fire and warmed his hands. A white he-cat leaped upon the table and stared at him." The stranger takes pity on the proprietor and promises to take a locket to his dead daughter in heaven.  An English translation of Peter the Czar appeared in 1925. Klabund was also interested in the literature of the East. Better known are his work...

Thomas Kyd, (November 3 1558, buried August 15, 1594), a popular Elizabethan playwright, acquaintance of Christopher Marlowe, and possible author of an early version of Hamlet, lived a life that dwarfed his stories in terms of drama. What we have here is an example by another author of some qualities of Kyd's drama, a deliberate imitation. Kyd's most popular work is  The Spanish Tragedy . The author of this analysis is Jakob Ayrer, a German scholar, in his edition of Kyd's works:  The Works of Thomas Kyd  (1901.) In the Induction to another piece of the same genre,  A Warning for Faire Women (1599), there is a satirical catalogue of the stock incidents in dramas of Kyd's semi-Senecan type: How some damn'd tyrant to obtaine a crowne,  Stabs, hangs, impoysons, smothers, cutteth throats,  And then a Chorus too comes howling in,  And tells us of the worrying of a cat.  Then ... a filthie whining ghost  Lapt in some fowle sheete, or a leather pilc...

Henrik Schück (November 2, 1855 to October 3, 1947) wrote literary histories. This Swedish scholar taught at various universities in his career. He was a member of the Swedish Academy 1913-1947, an institution comparable to the Academie Francaise. His career was much honored, including his work as chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation. His stint with the Nobel was from 1918 to 1929 and I cannot help but note that it was under his tenure that Sigrid Undset won the literature prize for  Kristin Lavransdatter, which is not a very good book. Schuck collected medieval stories and folklore and I assume the book titled  Mediæval Stories  (1902) which lists him as the author is such a tome. I am quoting a passage from this book: When the traitor heard this  [ Blandamer has slain his lord who was abusing a woman ]  be became both mad and amazed, for the black knight was his lord and master, as well as of a crowd of other scoundrels. He hid his rage, though h...