The Philosopher's Cat

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-D...

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 b...

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...

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'.