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.