The Philosopher's Cat

Edith Pargeter (September 28, 1913 to October 14, 1995) is the real name behind the mystery writer Ellis Peters, whose 12th century detective stories are widely popular. For instance the BBC adapted her Brother Cadfael mysteries for a television series starring Derek Jacobi.  Some of her stories feature cats.  The Trinity Cat  (2006, may be a reprint date) is the leading story in a collection of that name, and her cat stories appear in other collections also:  More Mystery Cats  (1993) edited by Lilian Jackson Braun is just one example. Pargeter also won a reputation and awards for her work translating Czechoslovakian literature.  The Terezín Requiem  (1963), was a Joseph Bor story of a Verdi concert at Auschwitz.. In 1949,  The Coast of Bohemia , her account of her travels there, had appeared. 

Contemporary poet and critic Heather McHugh was nominated for a National Book Award for her 1994 volume "Hinge and Sign." Her work strives after the living flux behind words. Here is an excerpt about the difficulty of getting around the static of words: The cat is killed By the passionate petter The poem by clappers Who mob its best laid calms ... On September 22, 2009, she was awarded a MacArthur genius grant.

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

Étienne Gilson (June 13, 1884 to September 19, 1978) was a French philosopher. He presented the history of philosophy as a means of considering basic  questions of reality in an era when many with the title of philosopher are not even able to formulate authentic perspectives. One of his biographers  stated  the significance of Gilson this way: "While he was generally recognized to be one of the greatest historians of medieval philosophy of his time, Mortimer J. Adler considered him to be one of the few great philosophers of the age."  Below is from an article based on this book (Shook's  Étienne Gilson,  1984) ..... In 1895, Gilson ... [started]  seven years of education at the Catholic secondary school, Petit Séminaire de Notre-Dame-des-Champs. There he underwent rigorous training in classical (“humanistic”) studies that included ancient Greek, Latin, Roman and French history, mathematics, physical science, liturgy, and music. Gilson left Notre-Dame-des-Champs in 1902 to

William March (September 18, 1893 to May 15, 1954), was an American writer. He is obscure today, and he was in the 1930s, when he started writing. Some of his novels are,  The Tallons , (1936) and  October Island  (1952). His prose was excellent, as we can observe in this excerpt from  The Tallons : She lifted the overfed kitchen cat, curled him into her lap, and thought of her uncles and the complexity of their relationship. She had not known what the quarrel was about, but she had speculated over it a good deal.  According to the Encyclopedia of Alabama : The Looking-Glass  is generally considered to be March's best Alabama-based work and, indeed, his best novel. His biographer, Roy S. Simmonds, called the novel March's "most accomplished full-length work." His life is interesting and I suggest reading the article at the link already cited. There I learned that, after he  had a novel published in April, March was found dead of a heart attack in his bed. In his typew

Candice Dyer is an American writer, born September 17, 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. 

The   J. B. Priestley Society   claims Priestley  is "The Last Great Man of English Letters." "John Boynton Priestley (September 13, 1894 to August 14,1984),  ' was born in Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire.... His father, Jonathan, was a pioneering schoolmaster, his mother, Emma, had been a mill girl. Emma died when he was very young, but fortunately his stepmother, Amy, was very kind. Jack, as he was known to the family, enjoyed the rich cultural and social life of prosperous, cosmopolitan and relatively classless Bradford: music hall, football, classical music concerts and family gatherings. Many of his finest novels, plays and memoirs draw on his feelings about this vanished time, particularly “Bright Day” (1946), in which a disillusioned scriptwriter looks back at his golden Bradford adolescence, and “Lost Empires” (1965), recreating the 1913 variety theatre.      "... When the Great War broke out, Priestley volunteered, joining the Duke of Wellingto

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. Sybill would at some point then, retire  to Scotland, so that she could 'spend more time with her family'.

  Alan Lee, the English illustrator, was born on August 20, 1947. He has illustrated many fantasy books, like the Mabinogian.  We did find a cat , he drew, for  Tales from the Perilous Realm, the sketch above. That is one of Tolkien's books, and Alan Lee illustrated many of Tolkien's reprints. In fact, he was the lead artist for all of the movies in the recent cinematic trilogy. Lee shared  the 2004 Academy Award for "Best Art Direction" for the art on  The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King .

  Sylvia Nasar , (born 17 August 1947 in Rosenheim, Germany) is an economist first. She is most famous though for her book,  A Beautiful Mind. a biography of John  Nash, which was made into a popular movie, a movie about a mathematician. She reads novels, though, according to a recent interview in a column called "By the Book"  dated August 10, 2012. Against the odds of her finding any story line as interesting as real life, -- and she has demonstrated an ability not just to write well, but to appreciate the complexities of human situations, -- she reads Victorian novels, like Elizabeth Gaskell's books.  But the reading interests of anyone at the level of accomplishment Nasar demonstrates are of interest and here are some excerpts from the interview: What book is on your night stand now? Two biographies of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope’s mother; an Elizabeth Gaskell novel; and E. M. Delafield’s “Diary of a Provincial Lady.” Some cold war history.   When and where do

  Thomas Fuller D.D., author of the  Church History of Britain,  may or may not have written down this charming observation: "Nothing's more playful than a young cat nor more grave than an old one." Dr. Fuller lived from 1608 to August 16, 1661. He wrote  The Worthies of England  and books with titles like  The History of the University of Cambridge: from the Conquest to the year 1634.   While these titles may not sound witty at all, his book of meditations Good Thoughts in Bad Times , illustrates this meaning of wit, which we also see in the quote about cats. The bad times to which Fuller refers was the 17th century English revolution. He was on the losing side, til the King was invited back, and he said of those years: "All that time I could not live to study, who did only study to live." Wit exemplified.  In fact,  "Antithetic and axiomatic sentences abound in his pages." "Wit," wrote Coleridge after reading the  Church History , "was

There is a sense in which Sir Walter Scott (August 15, 1771 to September 21, 1832) invented history. By this I mean that his novels, the first widely popular historical novels, gave an arena to the populace which had not existed before. Royalty always had history, they WERE history for millenia. in so far as historians wrote it then. But most folk, and certainly the middle classes, the most of folks, had little sense of their forebears, and in a world which saw change as merely differing families wielding the sceptre, the change we think of as historical change, was not missed, because nobody knew things had been different in the past. Part of this amnesia about the past, was the effect of the world as envisaged by the medieval European church: the verities, the four corners of the world, the rules, did NOT change. What did change was covered in the theological texts. The important stuff did not change, so no history. Why note something, if it will just repeat tomorrow.  This situation

  John Galsworthy (August 14, 1867 to January 31, 1933) wrote about his own social world, in his novels.  The Forsyte Saga  series, adapted for television by the BBC in 1967 (26 episodes) formed part of the American dream of England as a huge theme park with scenery that ranges from cottages to manor houses, a pastoral gamut barely tied down anywhere.  It is perhaps a surprise then to find out, as James Gindin notes, in  The English climate: an excursion into a biography of John Galsworthy  (1979),   that his neighbors recall his dogs, and specifically a Bedlington terrier with a reputation as a cat-killer, as intimidating. Galsworthy's own saga though also includes working for reform of the way animals are treated. And his books refer often to cats, often when describing women.  

The quotes below come from  Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics: Collected Essays  by Neil Cornwell (1998), which I mention now since our post today features an obscure literary figure Vladimir Odoevsky. Cornwell makes major claims about this figure, and I, being unfamiliar with the subject, am reliant on this secondary research.  Prince Vladimir Odoevsky (August 13, 1803 to March 11, 1869) is described as a polymath -- an engineer, a philosopher, and a  writer of fiction which encompasses romanticism and mysticism in a particularly Russian alchemical mixture. He also had a pedigree as glorious as that of the then ruling Romanov dynasty. His short piece, "The Story of a Cock, a Cat and a Frog," is set in imaginary province of Rezhensk. and illustrates Odoevsky's tendency to "whimsical ...black  humor." His other writing sometimes contains "...visions [which]come disturbingly close, as romantic writing occasionally could, to what has more recently been la

The classical scholar Edith Hamilton was born on August 12, 1867. She retired as  headmistress of an exclusive girl's school before she began publishing the numerous works describing the classical world, which made her famous, such as The Greek Way, which, though written in 1930, was a "Book of the Month Club" selection in 1957. Hamilton has been described as an animal lover, never without a cat or a dog.