Rosalind Krauss (November 30, 1941) is an American art critic. She was an associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and publishes often in other prestigious journals.. Her books include
The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986)
The Optical Unconscious (1993)
Bachelors (2000)
Perpetual Inventory (2010) which is a collection of her essays.
Not all her criticism is analytical: "Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.” Still her goal is the Clement Greenberg model of criticism where a public and verifiable aesthetic evaluation is the goal. And since the 1980s she has also found inspiration in the ideas of Jacques Lacan.
In an essay on William Kentridge ("'The Rock': William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection") Krauss situates a drawing of his wherein he "pets the cat which lies in bed next to him in the absent Mrs. Eckstein's place, and the cat, leaping onto his face as though to comfort him, transforms itself into a gas mask, grotesque..."
This Columbia professor recently won a College Art Association distinguished lifetime achievement award for writing on art.
November 30, 2019
November 29, 2019
November 29, 1907
Christopher Woodforde (November 29, 1907 to August 12, 1962)was an Anglican priest and writer. Woodforde went to Cambridge. His career included a series of curacies, followed by several incumbencies. After the war he was a Chaplain (and Fellow I believe, necessarily) at New College Oxford.
There is an exceptionally nice website for the Woodfordes, an old English family. The quotes below are from it. First their summary of his literary output:
"Christopher Woodforde is known for two distinct strands of writing, namely his ghost stories written in the style of M.R.James and his studies of stained glass which are recognised as definitive works.
"His stories were first intended to be heard, rather than read. They were revised and rewritten after their first telling (to young choirboys) but are still regarded by some literary critics as rather juvenile tales.
"His interests in antiquities led Dr Woodforde to a major study of ecclesiastical stained glass. He began with small popular booklets - A Guide to the Medieval Glass in Lincoln Cathedral (1933), The Medieval Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich (1934) and Stained and Painted Glass in England(1937).
"His first major work was Stained Glass in Somerset 1250-1830 which he published in 1946. This was followed by The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the fifteenth Century published in 1950 by Oxford University Press.
"His recognised stature in this subject led to honorary degrees from Cambridge (Litt.D in 1947) and Oxford (D.Litt in 1948). Whilst at Oxford he wrote his third major work The Stained Glass of New College, Oxford which was published in 1951."
One of Christopher Woodforde's stories is included in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986.) Of the story titled "Cushi," I wrote this synopsis:
In 1939, the sexton of Cotterly church in a quiet English village, named Rooksgate Green, was Cushi Holloway. Sextons have the job of making sure the furnace heats the church, and jobs like digging graves. Holloway was also an expert in the history of Cotterly Church. And the sexton also had a "wonderful way with cats" who came to church when there was a baptism and sat in an orderly half circle. This was considered by the villagers an omen of good luck for the newly baptised infant. A new rector is critical of the sexton's ways and he excludes cats from church baptisms. As it happened both sexton and rector die within a small time frame after the War begins. One of the subsequent bombs during the War breaks open Cushi's casket where he is found to be holding what looks like the rector's skull.
A look at the life of this Anglican priest, is a look at 20th century Britain, and I quote again, and liberally, from the link I used above:
"Christopher Woodforde was....ordained in 1930.
"He served in a number of curacies including King's Lynn (1930-1932), Louth with Welton-le-Wold (1932-1934) and Drayton with Hellesdon, Norwich (1934-1936) before becoming Rector of Exford, Somerset in 1936, and Axbridge, Somerset in 1939, and Vicar of Steeple Morden, Cambs in 1945.
"In recognition of his major work, The Stained Glass in Somerset'...published in 1948, he was invited to New College, Oxford, as Chaplain. He also served as Canon and Wiccanical Prebendary at Chichester Cathedral (1950-1953).
"He married Muriel Forster in 1935. She died prematurely in 1951 after a painful illness, and during his remaining years at Oxford it is said that Dr Woodforde became isolated and depressed. His depression affected his last major published work English Stained and Painted Glass (1954) which some critics described as terse and `almost unreadable'.
"He was finally offered the post of Dean of Wells, which he occupied until his own untimely death, due to cancer, at the age of 54.... A memorial tablet was erected in the cloisters of the cathedral to commemorate his work in the diocese of Bath and Wells.
"Lord David Cecil, in his memoirs, refers to Christopher Woodforde as the `sardonic chaplain (of New College)', `not altogether a popular figure in the college, having an extremely sharp tongue'.
"John Bayley in Widower's House: A Study in Bereavement or How Margot and Mella Forced [Me] to Flee My Home gives a further insight into this sharp but perhaps somewhat melancholy man:
"Christopher Woodforde hated the college warden, in a manner altogether disproportionate to that unfortunate man's capacity to be a nuisance, although indeed he could be one. When the warden died, Christopher gave an eloquent and touching address at the funeral - like many sardonic clergymen, he was an excellent preacher - and afterwards he was congratulated on it by Alan Bullock (now Lord Bullock), the history fellow. Giving him a venomous glance, the chaplain hissed, "I hope the bastard is frying in hell."
There is an exceptionally nice website for the Woodfordes, an old English family. The quotes below are from it. First their summary of his literary output:
"Christopher Woodforde is known for two distinct strands of writing, namely his ghost stories written in the style of M.R.James and his studies of stained glass which are recognised as definitive works.
"His stories were first intended to be heard, rather than read. They were revised and rewritten after their first telling (to young choirboys) but are still regarded by some literary critics as rather juvenile tales.
"His interests in antiquities led Dr Woodforde to a major study of ecclesiastical stained glass. He began with small popular booklets - A Guide to the Medieval Glass in Lincoln Cathedral (1933), The Medieval Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich (1934) and Stained and Painted Glass in England(1937).
"His first major work was Stained Glass in Somerset 1250-1830 which he published in 1946. This was followed by The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the fifteenth Century published in 1950 by Oxford University Press.
"His recognised stature in this subject led to honorary degrees from Cambridge (Litt.D in 1947) and Oxford (D.Litt in 1948). Whilst at Oxford he wrote his third major work The Stained Glass of New College, Oxford which was published in 1951."
One of Christopher Woodforde's stories is included in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories (1986.) Of the story titled "Cushi," I wrote this synopsis:
In 1939, the sexton of Cotterly church in a quiet English village, named Rooksgate Green, was Cushi Holloway. Sextons have the job of making sure the furnace heats the church, and jobs like digging graves. Holloway was also an expert in the history of Cotterly Church. And the sexton also had a "wonderful way with cats" who came to church when there was a baptism and sat in an orderly half circle. This was considered by the villagers an omen of good luck for the newly baptised infant. A new rector is critical of the sexton's ways and he excludes cats from church baptisms. As it happened both sexton and rector die within a small time frame after the War begins. One of the subsequent bombs during the War breaks open Cushi's casket where he is found to be holding what looks like the rector's skull.
A look at the life of this Anglican priest, is a look at 20th century Britain, and I quote again, and liberally, from the link I used above:
"Christopher Woodforde was....ordained in 1930.
"He served in a number of curacies including King's Lynn (1930-1932), Louth with Welton-le-Wold (1932-1934) and Drayton with Hellesdon, Norwich (1934-1936) before becoming Rector of Exford, Somerset in 1936, and Axbridge, Somerset in 1939, and Vicar of Steeple Morden, Cambs in 1945.
"In recognition of his major work, The Stained Glass in Somerset'...published in 1948, he was invited to New College, Oxford, as Chaplain. He also served as Canon and Wiccanical Prebendary at Chichester Cathedral (1950-1953).
"He married Muriel Forster in 1935. She died prematurely in 1951 after a painful illness, and during his remaining years at Oxford it is said that Dr Woodforde became isolated and depressed. His depression affected his last major published work English Stained and Painted Glass (1954) which some critics described as terse and `almost unreadable'.
"He was finally offered the post of Dean of Wells, which he occupied until his own untimely death, due to cancer, at the age of 54.... A memorial tablet was erected in the cloisters of the cathedral to commemorate his work in the diocese of Bath and Wells.
"Lord David Cecil, in his memoirs, refers to Christopher Woodforde as the `sardonic chaplain (of New College)', `not altogether a popular figure in the college, having an extremely sharp tongue'.
"John Bayley in Widower's House: A Study in Bereavement or How Margot and Mella Forced [Me] to Flee My Home gives a further insight into this sharp but perhaps somewhat melancholy man:
"Christopher Woodforde hated the college warden, in a manner altogether disproportionate to that unfortunate man's capacity to be a nuisance, although indeed he could be one. When the warden died, Christopher gave an eloquent and touching address at the funeral - like many sardonic clergymen, he was an excellent preacher - and afterwards he was congratulated on it by Alan Bullock (now Lord Bullock), the history fellow. Giving him a venomous glance, the chaplain hissed, "I hope the bastard is frying in hell."
November 28, 1912
On November 28, 1912 the country of Albania declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire.
We trust the country will not become independent of the Balkan Lynx, but that is a possibility. This feline subspecies Lynx lynx ssp. balcanicus, is estimated to have a population, between Albania and Macedonia, of 20 to 40. (That was in 2015). This sub species is designated as "critically endangered," which is as endangered as it gets: the next status is gone.
'lynx (n.) moderate-sized wildcat with a short tail, penciled ears, more or less spotted fur, and 28 teeth, inhabiting Eurasia, Africa, and North America; mid-14c., from Latin lynx (source of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian lince), from Greek lyngx, an old name of the lynx found also in Armenian, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic, though often transformed or altered. Often linked to PIE root *leuk-"light, brightness," in reference to its gleaming eyes or its ability to see in the dark, but there are phonetic problems with that and Beekes suggests a loan from a non-IE substrate language.
'If that men hadden eyghen of a beeste that highte lynx, so that the lokynge of folk myghte percen thurw the thynges that withstonden it. [Chaucer's "Boethius," c. 1380]
'Cognates probably are Lithuanian lūšis "lynx," Old High German luhs, German luchs, Old English lox, Dutch los, Swedish lo, Armenian lusanunk'. ..'
We have however, only to look at a picture of the lynx in Albania, to favor the explanatory connection between leuk- (light, brightness) and lynx.
We trust the country will not become independent of the Balkan Lynx, but that is a possibility. This feline subspecies Lynx lynx ssp. balcanicus, is estimated to have a population, between Albania and Macedonia, of 20 to 40. (That was in 2015). This sub species is designated as "critically endangered," which is as endangered as it gets: the next status is gone.
A more recent report on the status of this Albanian lynx, the females of which may weight 40 pounds, contains this picture:
'Camera traps have revealed the presence of the Balkan Lynx which experts have dubbed the ‘jewel of Albanian forests’ in the northern Albanian Alps and several other endangered species...
'Monitoring through camera traps at the Nikaj-Merturi regional nature park in northeastern Albania bordering Kosovo has captured pictures of the Balkan Lynx, a critically endangered species which has also been previously traced in the Munella Mountain in the district of Puka and Mirdita, northern Albania.
' Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, PPNEA, has earlier warned illegal logging in the Munella Mountain, northeastern Albania, the country’s sole sanctuary of the Balkan lynx, is further putting at risk one of the most threatened wildlife species in serious danger of extinction.
'The Balkan lynx is a critically endangered species, with only about 40 or 50 individuals reported to exist in total. About 5 or 6 of these have been reported to live in the Munella Mountain in the district of Puka and Mirdita....
'“This is the second evidence that we have for this species in Albanian Alps, after the photography received three years ago by a local guide in Thethi. In addition, the cameras also photographed other important species for the area, such as, chamois, wolf, wild cat, badger, and fox,” the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania watchdog said in a statement....'
'Camera traps have revealed the presence of the Balkan Lynx which experts have dubbed the ‘jewel of Albanian forests’ in the northern Albanian Alps and several other endangered species...
'Monitoring through camera traps at the Nikaj-Merturi regional nature park in northeastern Albania bordering Kosovo has captured pictures of the Balkan Lynx, a critically endangered species which has also been previously traced in the Munella Mountain in the district of Puka and Mirdita, northern Albania.
' Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, PPNEA, has earlier warned illegal logging in the Munella Mountain, northeastern Albania, the country’s sole sanctuary of the Balkan lynx, is further putting at risk one of the most threatened wildlife species in serious danger of extinction.
'The Balkan lynx is a critically endangered species, with only about 40 or 50 individuals reported to exist in total. About 5 or 6 of these have been reported to live in the Munella Mountain in the district of Puka and Mirdita....
'“This is the second evidence that we have for this species in Albanian Alps, after the photography received three years ago by a local guide in Thethi. In addition, the cameras also photographed other important species for the area, such as, chamois, wolf, wild cat, badger, and fox,” the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania watchdog said in a statement....'
It would be too sad if the only trace of the Balkan lynx we soon have is the word "lynx."
That etymology is worth recalling:
'If that men hadden eyghen of a beeste that highte lynx, so that the lokynge of folk myghte percen thurw the thynges that withstonden it. [Chaucer's "Boethius," c. 1380]
'Cognates probably are Lithuanian lūšis "lynx," Old High German luhs, German luchs, Old English lox, Dutch los, Swedish lo, Armenian lusanunk'. ..'
November 28, 2019
November 28, 1899
Frances Yates (November 28, 1899 to September 29, 1981) was an English scholar whose association with the Warburg Institute exemplifies that institution's original and important work. Her bibliography contains works on figures of Renaissance hermetic significance, such as Dr. John Dee.
Her book, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), concerns that doctor who she contends was 'one of the most influential figures in the thought of Elizabethan England'.
A more detailed account of the importance of Yates' research is available at Slate. There we learn of the historian's life:
Yates, who was born in 1899 and wrote most of her major works in her 60s, had no formal education until she enrolled at the University College London in the early 1920s. (Her father, a shipbuilder, was also self-educated, having taught himself to read.) After getting an M.A. in French, she worked as an independent scholar, publishing books on Renaissance history and culture while caring for her ailing parents, until she found an intellectual home at the Warburg Institute, an interdisciplinary research institution loosely affiliated with the University College. “Warburgian history,” as Yates called it, sought to transcend nationalism by emphasizing pan-European ideas and culture. This unifying dream was exactly what Yates needed, in her head and in her heart. The two world wars had traumatized her—her brother was killed in the first, and her father during the Blitz, while Yates herself volunteered as an ambulance attendant—exacerbating her already melancholy temperament.
Yates’ illustrious friends included the likes of Franz Boas, Ernst Gombrich, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as several close female companions, but she never married or had any romantic relationship that we know of. (Her diaries contain oblique references to an early devastating “event.”) A former student remarked, “It wasn’t an interesting life in the emotional or physical sense, only in the mental,” but Yates’ biographer Marjorie Jones disagrees, describing Yates as a solitary yet “passionate” figure who fits in “the long line of independent women historians of the Victorian Age who researched and wrote history on their own, outside the constraints of formal education from which they usually were excluded.” Yates, Jones also writes, was a “depressive, moody, frequently unhappy woman whose salvation until her death was incessant work and an intense spiritual life.” She died in 1981.
It is in Marjorie Jones's biography of Yates, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (2008) that we find a diary entry by Yates mentioning her "little cat."
Her book, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), concerns that doctor who she contends was 'one of the most influential figures in the thought of Elizabethan England'.
A more detailed account of the importance of Yates' research is available at Slate. There we learn of the historian's life:
Yates, who was born in 1899 and wrote most of her major works in her 60s, had no formal education until she enrolled at the University College London in the early 1920s. (Her father, a shipbuilder, was also self-educated, having taught himself to read.) After getting an M.A. in French, she worked as an independent scholar, publishing books on Renaissance history and culture while caring for her ailing parents, until she found an intellectual home at the Warburg Institute, an interdisciplinary research institution loosely affiliated with the University College. “Warburgian history,” as Yates called it, sought to transcend nationalism by emphasizing pan-European ideas and culture. This unifying dream was exactly what Yates needed, in her head and in her heart. The two world wars had traumatized her—her brother was killed in the first, and her father during the Blitz, while Yates herself volunteered as an ambulance attendant—exacerbating her already melancholy temperament.
Yates’ illustrious friends included the likes of Franz Boas, Ernst Gombrich, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, as well as several close female companions, but she never married or had any romantic relationship that we know of. (Her diaries contain oblique references to an early devastating “event.”) A former student remarked, “It wasn’t an interesting life in the emotional or physical sense, only in the mental,” but Yates’ biographer Marjorie Jones disagrees, describing Yates as a solitary yet “passionate” figure who fits in “the long line of independent women historians of the Victorian Age who researched and wrote history on their own, outside the constraints of formal education from which they usually were excluded.” Yates, Jones also writes, was a “depressive, moody, frequently unhappy woman whose salvation until her death was incessant work and an intense spiritual life.” She died in 1981.
It is in Marjorie Jones's biography of Yates, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition (2008) that we find a diary entry by Yates mentioning her "little cat."
November 26, 2019
November 27, 1961
November 27, 1961 is the date of a Life magazine issue, the one which featured this photo by Ralph Crane:
I thought I read there was something deceptive about the photo, but now I cannot find such a reference. The standard description is that the photo was the result of a casting call for a black cat to be in a movie, a 1962 horror compilation Tales of Terror, centered on Poe stories. 152 black cats descended on the Hollywood studio.
I thought I read there was something deceptive about the photo, but now I cannot find such a reference. The standard description is that the photo was the result of a casting call for a black cat to be in a movie, a 1962 horror compilation Tales of Terror, centered on Poe stories. 152 black cats descended on the Hollywood studio.
November 25, 2019
November 25, 1824
Charles Verlat, (November 25, 1824 to October 23, 1890), was part of the first real cat craze as we see from this picture of his below, which was in addition to his paintings of lions. His career parallels that of his fellow Belgian, Henriette Ronner-Knip in timeline and also subject matter. This painting would be hard to distinguish from Ronner-Knip's work.
November 24, 2019
November 24, 1990
The playwright career of Dodie Smith (May 3, 1896 to November 24, 1990) in 1930s England, recalls a forgotten part of literary history, and you will soon realize why she should NOT be forgotten, if you have not already realized whose name we mention. Here is an excerpt from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography writeup, taking up where Smith takes a pedestrian job to pay the rent, like many artists must. She is working for a retail furniture operation:
running its art gallery. Here she embarked with determination upon an affair with the married chairman of the company, Ambrose Heal, who already had an established mistress, .... Ambrose gave her the Underwood typewriter on which she wrote, in 1929, her first play, Autumn Crocus. She had been to the Leipzig toy fair to buy goods for Heals, and while there dreamed up a plot about a spinster schoolmistress from Lancashire who falls in love with a married Tyrolean innkeeper. The play was bought by Basil Dean for £100. It made Dodie, who had been earning £4 a week, rich and famous overnight in 1931. 'Shopgirl writes play', proclaimed the billboards.
After an apparently disastrous first night, Autumn Crocus, starring Fay Compton and Francis Lederer, ran for a year in the West End, and was later filmed. It was followed by a succession of light comedies: Service (1932), Touch Wood (1934, the first to be written under her own name instead of the pseudonym C. L. Anthony), Call it a Day (1935), Bonnet over the Windmill (1937), and Dear Octopus (1938), which established Dodie Smith as the most consistently successful woman playwright of her time. She appeared to have a deft touch, knowing just what the 1930s West End audience wanted: well-crafted middlebrow comedies with a skein of sentiment. But with Dear Octopus, centred on a family reunion, and starring John Gielgud, Marie Tempest, and Leon Quartermaine, she achieved her biggest triumph. The play, catching the mood of the time exactly, ran for two years; and its moving 'grand toast' speech (originally delivered by Gielgud), a paean to the durability of the family, ensured its place in repertory for the next sixty years.
Let's skip a few decades. Dodie Smith wrote a book widely ignored, and so unjustly. Starlight Barking (1967) is a classic of metaphysical exploration, so good it makes me shiver. She had previously asked Walt Disney for a limousine. He said to her, you write me another Hundred and One Dalmations and I'll get you a fleet. Starlight Barking is better than The Hundred and One Dalmations. But that fact is not recognised, and the fleet just chatter.
As is that a cat named Pussy Willow appears in both The Hundred and One Dalmations and Starlight Barking.
running its art gallery. Here she embarked with determination upon an affair with the married chairman of the company, Ambrose Heal, who already had an established mistress, .... Ambrose gave her the Underwood typewriter on which she wrote, in 1929, her first play, Autumn Crocus. She had been to the Leipzig toy fair to buy goods for Heals, and while there dreamed up a plot about a spinster schoolmistress from Lancashire who falls in love with a married Tyrolean innkeeper. The play was bought by Basil Dean for £100. It made Dodie, who had been earning £4 a week, rich and famous overnight in 1931. 'Shopgirl writes play', proclaimed the billboards.
After an apparently disastrous first night, Autumn Crocus, starring Fay Compton and Francis Lederer, ran for a year in the West End, and was later filmed. It was followed by a succession of light comedies: Service (1932), Touch Wood (1934, the first to be written under her own name instead of the pseudonym C. L. Anthony), Call it a Day (1935), Bonnet over the Windmill (1937), and Dear Octopus (1938), which established Dodie Smith as the most consistently successful woman playwright of her time. She appeared to have a deft touch, knowing just what the 1930s West End audience wanted: well-crafted middlebrow comedies with a skein of sentiment. But with Dear Octopus, centred on a family reunion, and starring John Gielgud, Marie Tempest, and Leon Quartermaine, she achieved her biggest triumph. The play, catching the mood of the time exactly, ran for two years; and its moving 'grand toast' speech (originally delivered by Gielgud), a paean to the durability of the family, ensured its place in repertory for the next sixty years.
Let's skip a few decades. Dodie Smith wrote a book widely ignored, and so unjustly. Starlight Barking (1967) is a classic of metaphysical exploration, so good it makes me shiver. She had previously asked Walt Disney for a limousine. He said to her, you write me another Hundred and One Dalmations and I'll get you a fleet. Starlight Barking is better than The Hundred and One Dalmations. But that fact is not recognised, and the fleet just chatter.
As is that a cat named Pussy Willow appears in both The Hundred and One Dalmations and Starlight Barking.
November 23, 2019
November 23, 1855
Frank Paton (November 23 1855 to 1909) was a very popular Victorian animal artist:
....Paton was a sporting and animal painter, engraver and genre illustrator who was born in Stepney, London ....He grew up around Gravesend, Kent as his father was a maritime pilot. .... His first known exhibition piece was at the age of 16 – a portrait of a German peasant girl. Thereafter he continued to exhibit regularly up to 1890. He exhibited a total of 20 works at the Royal Academy’s annual selling exhibition. The first was in 1878, a painting titled You Are No Chicken depicting two young chickens looking at a frog. It was to be a turning point in Paton’s career as the work was purchased by Edward Ernest Leggatt who was running his own successful print and art dealership. You Are No Chicken was engraved in 1880 and its commercial success cemented a lifelong association with Leggatt, who became the main publisher of Paton’s work. Paton died at Walton-on-the Naze, Essex from heart failure ten days short of his 54th birthday.
Much of his work was narrative in composition and his small signed limited edition engravings, for which he is today best known, were often surrounded by humorous vignettes.
....Paton was a sporting and animal painter, engraver and genre illustrator who was born in Stepney, London ....He grew up around Gravesend, Kent as his father was a maritime pilot. .... His first known exhibition piece was at the age of 16 – a portrait of a German peasant girl. Thereafter he continued to exhibit regularly up to 1890. He exhibited a total of 20 works at the Royal Academy’s annual selling exhibition. The first was in 1878, a painting titled You Are No Chicken depicting two young chickens looking at a frog. It was to be a turning point in Paton’s career as the work was purchased by Edward Ernest Leggatt who was running his own successful print and art dealership. You Are No Chicken was engraved in 1880 and its commercial success cemented a lifelong association with Leggatt, who became the main publisher of Paton’s work. Paton died at Walton-on-the Naze, Essex from heart failure ten days short of his 54th birthday.
Much of his work was narrative in composition and his small signed limited edition engravings, for which he is today best known, were often surrounded by humorous vignettes.
More domestic information is also available:
After his marriage to Maria Sophia Edwards, the family lived in rural communities in Kent and Essex, [and] the artist divided his time between London and the countryside, earning animal portraits on order. He was a good family man ...and [with his wife] raised four sons and three daughters.
Frank Paton's dog portraits may show off his best talents, but his cat paintings are numerous and cute and often funny.
There are lots more pictures of cats he did here.
After his marriage to Maria Sophia Edwards, the family lived in rural communities in Kent and Essex, [and] the artist divided his time between London and the countryside, earning animal portraits on order. He was a good family man ...and [with his wife] raised four sons and three daughters.
November 22, 2019
November 22
Today's post in the Cat Lover's Almanac quotes the Oxford University Press Blog about -- almanacs. Since they specify such a thing as 'Almanac Day' "around November 22", the author of the Cat Lover's Almanac is the current writer spotlighted in this space. First, from the OUP blog:
As well as Halloween, Guy Fawkes, and All Saints’s day, this time of the year used to see another day of fun and frenzy. ‘Almanac Day’, towards the end of November, saw the next year’s almanacs go on sale. It generally came round on or about 22 November: St Cecilia’s Day. In London, Stationers’ Hall would be crammed to the rafters...
And on Almanac Day, this almanackist will share that our household has three cats, all black, mainly black, or blackish and orangish. For a total of 11 paws. All awesome. Oh, and this blog has a total of 2,917 published posts as of today.
As well as Halloween, Guy Fawkes, and All Saints’s day, this time of the year used to see another day of fun and frenzy. ‘Almanac Day’, towards the end of November, saw the next year’s almanacs go on sale. It generally came round on or about 22 November: St Cecilia’s Day. In London, Stationers’ Hall would be crammed to the rafters...
And on Almanac Day, this almanackist will share that our household has three cats, all black, mainly black, or blackish and orangish. For a total of 11 paws. All awesome. Oh, and this blog has a total of 2,917 published posts as of today.
November 21, 2019
November 21, 2011
Anne McCaffrey (April 1, 1926 to November 21, 2011) won fame as one of the first women to succeed in the literary genre of science fiction and fantasy. Her Dragonriders of Pern is a popular example of her writing: she sketches in that series a world where people have colonized the planet of Pern and live in a world somewhat similar to European medieval times. This prolific author was a graduate of Radcliffe, where she majored in Slavonic languages. She was married for 20 years and emigrated to the country of her forbears after a 1970 divorce. McCaffrey lived in County Wicklow the rest of her life, where she could indulge her love of horses.
Garrison Keillor reminds us " She was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Hugo Award for Science Fiction, in 1968."
She wrote many popular books but what may be less known is other jobs she had starting out, like:
Advertising copywriter and layout artist, Liberty Music Shops, NYC, 1948–50
Garrison Keillor reminds us " She was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Hugo Award for Science Fiction, in 1968."
She wrote many popular books but what may be less known is other jobs she had starting out, like:
Advertising copywriter and layout artist, Liberty Music Shops, NYC, 1948–50
and copywriter, then Sec. to Sales Manager, Helena Rubinstein, 1950–52.
Her honors include the:
Golden Pen Award, 1982;
Science Fiction Book Club Awards, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997;
Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, from the American Library Association, 1999;
Grand Master, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 2005.
The above is from an article about her in Who's Who. There we also learn her hobbies, and we quote what she told the Who's Who editors:
"Equine events, raising Maine Coon cats, quilting" are her recreations.
The above is from an article about her in Who's Who. There we also learn her hobbies, and we quote what she told the Who's Who editors:
"Equine events, raising Maine Coon cats, quilting" are her recreations.
November 20, 2019
November 20, 1889
Edwin Hubble (November 20, 1889 to September 28, 1953) is the astronomer to whom credit is given for the present picture of the world wherein our own galaxy does not include the boundary of the universe, but ours is merely one among many that compose the universe.
Claire L. Datnow's book for children, Edwin Hubble: Discoverer of Galaxies, (1997) mentions that during World War II Hubble and his wife lived in a cabin in the woods and there shared space with wild cats and raccoons. This may suggest Hubble was not so clear on the boundaries between forest and house.
The cat of Hubble's most remember though, is a black Persian. This feline was called Copernicus.
November 19, 2019
November 19, 1819
Auguste Vacquerie (November 19, 1819 to February 19, 1895) is the name of a minor French writer. He was an in-law of Victor Hugo's, whose political sympathies he shared. Here is a brief bibliography for Vacquerie:
L'Enfer de l'esprit (1840) (poetry)
In addition to photographing the Hugo family, Vacquerie immortalized his own cats, as well as Hugo's, in that medium. I am having trouble finding copies online of Vacquerie's own cats. However, these kitties can be seen in Sally Eauclaire's book The Cat in Photography, (1990).
L'Enfer de l'esprit (1840) (poetry)
Antigone(1844) (translation)
Tragaldabas(1848) (play.)
Souvent homme varie (1859), (comedy in verse)
Jean Baudry (1863) (play)
Le Rappel (1869 ff) (periodical which he co-founded, edited, and wrote for)
In addition to photographing the Hugo family, Vacquerie immortalized his own cats, as well as Hugo's, in that medium. I am having trouble finding copies online of Vacquerie's own cats. However, these kitties can be seen in Sally Eauclaire's book The Cat in Photography, (1990).
November 18, 2019
November 18, 1995
Miron Grindea (January 31, 1909 to November 18 , 1995) edited the ADAM International Review: A Literary Magazine in English and French. In a 1969 issue we find he includes poems of Baudelaire's. This specifically, "Spleen" from Les Fleurs du Mal:
....the tomb always understands the poet...
.....
My cat that on the bare floor seeks a litter
Turns its thin mangy body without rest.
The soul of an old poet roams the gutter
During the 1930s Bucharest was in intellectual and political turmoil, with the Antonescu regime and the Iron Guard fanning the flames of antisemitism and enacting harsh laws that left many Jewish intellectuals unemployed. Grindea attended Bucharest University and the Sorbonne, studying the humanities, and in 1936 he became the editor of Adam, a magazine focusing on Jewish culture and commentary. Editorials lamented the exodus from Bucharest and other European cities of Jewish intellectuals. He was also a music critic. At a recital at Bucharest Conservatory he fell in love with the pianist Carola Rabinovici....and devoted a whole article to her performance. They married in 1936 and had a daughter, Nadia.
Grindea, in editing Adam showed his ability to spot talent. The periodical was described thusly:
....‘Throughout the panoramic sweep of editorial content—from Strindberg to Senegal—three great themes persist: music, Proust and anti-Semitism’, with ‘music [as his] greatest passion’ ....
.....
My cat that on the bare floor seeks a litter
Turns its thin mangy body without rest.
The soul of an old poet roams the gutter
Grindea was not French or English, though he accidentally wound up in England just before the War started. Miron Grindea was a Roumanian Jew. According to his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article:
During the 1930s Bucharest was in intellectual and political turmoil, with the Antonescu regime and the Iron Guard fanning the flames of antisemitism and enacting harsh laws that left many Jewish intellectuals unemployed. Grindea attended Bucharest University and the Sorbonne, studying the humanities, and in 1936 he became the editor of Adam, a magazine focusing on Jewish culture and commentary. Editorials lamented the exodus from Bucharest and other European cities of Jewish intellectuals. He was also a music critic. At a recital at Bucharest Conservatory he fell in love with the pianist Carola Rabinovici....and devoted a whole article to her performance. They married in 1936 and had a daughter, Nadia.
Grindea, in editing Adam showed his ability to spot talent. The periodical was described thusly:
....‘Throughout the panoramic sweep of editorial content—from Strindberg to Senegal—three great themes persist: music, Proust and anti-Semitism’, with ‘music [as his] greatest passion’ ....
The Grindeas' flat at 28 Emperor's Gate, South Kensington, off the Cromwell Road, became the centre of Adam's and Grindea's universe, ‘more redolent of Paris or Vienna than London’. Assistants came and went, since Grindea was ‘hopeless at delegating … obsessive and disorganized’ .... From the early 1950s the Grindeas also had a spacious apartment off the Hove seafront, filled with artwork and cultural artefacts, and a plethora of books. Grindea was forever seeking funds to continue Adam..... The printer's bill was a constant worry and the editorials contained frequent and urgent pleas for support. Grindea also raised money for causes he considered worthy, for instance assisting David Gascoyne, and Dylan Thomas's family.
Grindea's life intersected that of other great men. From the same source we learn:
Grindea's life intersected that of other great men. From the same source we learn:
It was the influence of his subsequently distinguished near-contemporary Mircea Eliade and ... [Eliade's] intellectual exuberance that first gave ...[him] the impetus to write’ .
.....
In a cartoon drawn on a napkin Picasso depicted him as a Don Quixote bird of prey. His final years were blighted by a lengthy illness. He continued to edit Adam and was working on the 500th issue when he died. He took pride and pleasure in his family. Awards came to him, including the Prix de l'Académie française (1955), appointment as a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (1974) and commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985), the Lundquist literary prize, Sweden (1965), an honorary DLitt from the University of Kent, Canterbury (1983), and appointment as an MBE (1976) and then OBE (1986). Before his death his archives were sold to King's College, London.
His wife was the family's main financial support, with her musical performances, and music teaching.
.....
In a cartoon drawn on a napkin Picasso depicted him as a Don Quixote bird of prey. His final years were blighted by a lengthy illness. He continued to edit Adam and was working on the 500th issue when he died. He took pride and pleasure in his family. Awards came to him, including the Prix de l'Académie française (1955), appointment as a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (1974) and commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985), the Lundquist literary prize, Sweden (1965), an honorary DLitt from the University of Kent, Canterbury (1983), and appointment as an MBE (1976) and then OBE (1986). Before his death his archives were sold to King's College, London.
His wife was the family's main financial support, with her musical performances, and music teaching.
[Of course there were other]... supporters who helped relieve his perpetual financial anxiety: ...[including] T. S. Eliot, who gave some of his Nobel prize money to Adam. ...
In the end ...Adam outlived all its contemporary magazines, running for nearly sixty years...
In the end ...Adam outlived all its contemporary magazines, running for nearly sixty years...
November 17, 2019
November 17, 2009
John Craxton (October 3, 1922 to November 17, 2009) came from a family of intellectuals involved in music. They encouraged his painting and he is now counted a major talent in that field. Craxton lived in Crete where he had a house on the harbor in Chania (a region of Crete). His family's London home meant he could really live both places. The Guardian obituary for Craxton contains marvelous detail and we will quote from it. First though, here is a painting of his, currently in the Tate collection.
This is "Still Life with Cat and Child" (1959) (Tempera on board support)
Ian Collins was a friend of Craxton's and wrote the obituary published in The Guardian, (November 19, 2009). I have rearranged some sections as I often do in these circumstances, but the intent and quoted material is of course, exact. And so:
John's father, Harold Craxton, was a pianist, musicologist and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. The family home in St John's Wood, north-west London, was a chaotic haven with five boys and, finally, a longed-for daughter (the oboist Janet Craxton). Famous musicians visited, impoverished students were virtually adopted, meals were massed assemblies. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who shared a governess with John at one point, fell for the glamour of such bohemian disorder and wrote of his parents: "They were happy and, like pollen, some of this rubbed off on anyone who came in contact with them." [Craxton did however have the often unhappy boarding school experiences of his era].
[Skipping mention of key life events, like Craxton being rejected for military service, we find--].... John's key patron was Peter Watson, co-founder of the arts magazine Horizon and the Institute of Contemporary Art....Through "PW", he met Joan Rayner, later to marry the writer and fellow lover of Greece Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose book jackets John would decorate most brilliantly. Late in 1941 he met Lucian Freud, and for a time the two were inseparable, both taking drawing lessons at Goldsmiths College.
Early in 1942 Watson offered to fund a studio for his protege, and John found a maisonette around the corner – convincing the benefactor that Freud could take the top floor [of the maisonette] and they would both still focus on work. A neighbour railed against the mice that consumed John's still-life studies of croissants and the girls ringing his doorbell after midnight and asking for Lucian. Mercifully, he [the neighbor] missed the dead animals brought in for Lucian to draw (one putrid monkey corpse was hidden in the oven when Sir Kenneth and Lady Clark came to tea)....
In 1946 the painter John Craxton,..., had a show of haunted landscapes in Zurich. He sent a postcard home, saying that he might go on to Italy, but by the time it arrived he had landed in his eventual homeland of Greece. He had been spirited away [from Zurich] by Lady Norton, wife of the British ambassador in Athens, who was seeking provisions abroad in those straitened times in a borrowed bomber. ...
After a joint 1947 show with Freud at ELT Mesens' London Gallery, solo shows followed regularly and then sporadically. The list included six Leicester Galleries exhibitions to 1966, a 1967 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective, four shows with Christopher Hull (1982-1993) and a final display with Art First in 2001. By then he had accepted election to the Royal Academy, [1993] after nomination by his friends Eduardo Paolozzi and Mary Fedden, but he exhibited rarely.
Lastly, the obituary included this picture described as a "Detail of John Craxton's Shepherds Near Knossos (1947)." That landscape seems on the verge of breaking into speech.
This is "Still Life with Cat and Child" (1959) (Tempera on board support)
Ian Collins was a friend of Craxton's and wrote the obituary published in The Guardian, (November 19, 2009). I have rearranged some sections as I often do in these circumstances, but the intent and quoted material is of course, exact. And so:
John's father, Harold Craxton, was a pianist, musicologist and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. The family home in St John's Wood, north-west London, was a chaotic haven with five boys and, finally, a longed-for daughter (the oboist Janet Craxton). Famous musicians visited, impoverished students were virtually adopted, meals were massed assemblies. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who shared a governess with John at one point, fell for the glamour of such bohemian disorder and wrote of his parents: "They were happy and, like pollen, some of this rubbed off on anyone who came in contact with them." [Craxton did however have the often unhappy boarding school experiences of his era].
[Skipping mention of key life events, like Craxton being rejected for military service, we find--].... John's key patron was Peter Watson, co-founder of the arts magazine Horizon and the Institute of Contemporary Art....Through "PW", he met Joan Rayner, later to marry the writer and fellow lover of Greece Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose book jackets John would decorate most brilliantly. Late in 1941 he met Lucian Freud, and for a time the two were inseparable, both taking drawing lessons at Goldsmiths College.
Early in 1942 Watson offered to fund a studio for his protege, and John found a maisonette around the corner – convincing the benefactor that Freud could take the top floor [of the maisonette] and they would both still focus on work. A neighbour railed against the mice that consumed John's still-life studies of croissants and the girls ringing his doorbell after midnight and asking for Lucian. Mercifully, he [the neighbor] missed the dead animals brought in for Lucian to draw (one putrid monkey corpse was hidden in the oven when Sir Kenneth and Lady Clark came to tea)....
In 1946 the painter John Craxton,..., had a show of haunted landscapes in Zurich. He sent a postcard home, saying that he might go on to Italy, but by the time it arrived he had landed in his eventual homeland of Greece. He had been spirited away [from Zurich] by Lady Norton, wife of the British ambassador in Athens, who was seeking provisions abroad in those straitened times in a borrowed bomber. ...
After a joint 1947 show with Freud at ELT Mesens' London Gallery, solo shows followed regularly and then sporadically. The list included six Leicester Galleries exhibitions to 1966, a 1967 Whitechapel Gallery retrospective, four shows with Christopher Hull (1982-1993) and a final display with Art First in 2001. By then he had accepted election to the Royal Academy, [1993] after nomination by his friends Eduardo Paolozzi and Mary Fedden, but he exhibited rarely.
Lastly, the obituary included this picture described as a "Detail of John Craxton's Shepherds Near Knossos (1947)." That landscape seems on the verge of breaking into speech.
November 16, 2019
November 16, 1964
Donald Culross Peattie (June 21, 1898 to November 16, 1964) graduated from Harvard in 1922, where he studied as a student of William Morton Wheeler, "the great Harvard myrmecologist." Peattie would turn his botanist credentials into books that extend beyond the physical environment to man and his self-knowledge. Here is what the Natural History Network says about the 1935 book of his, An Almanac For Moderns.
What sets apart Donald Culross Peattie’s An Almanac for Moderns, first published in 1935, and what makes it such a unique contribution to this canon, is its blend of modern and classical styles.
The tone is modernist, reflecting Peattie’s deep literary background. Even though he was a Harvard-trained scientist, for some years a botanist by trade, he was also a novelist, a columnist for several newspapers, and a poet. He was as connected to the world of letters – his mother a literary critic, father a journalist, and wife, Louise Redfield, an author – as he was to the world of science......
Peattie’s celebrations of the lives of scientists also include real drama. It is hard, for example, not to feel pity for Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, an erratically – and prolifically – creative polymath. He coined over 6,000 specific epithets in the North American flora (many of which have been subsequently ignored), investigated the systematics of fish and molluscs of the Ohio River, and wrote two volumes on the medical uses of plants of the United States. During his lifetime, his peers pilloried him in correspondence as an unprincipled, and perhaps unhinged, charlatan interested only in self-promotion, and he was publically played the fool by a bullying Audubon, who fed him lies and laughed as Rafinesque repeated them as truth. Rafinesque died alone and penniless, his body discovered by a landlord who then attempted to sell the corpse to recoup a debt. As if that were not indignity enough for one lifetime, he was denounced posthumously by Asa Gray as a delusional liar.
These same qualities, erudition and human insight, are apparent in a later book, Flowering Earth (1939). Here is another bit:
Protoplasm alone exhibits the sign of life.The power to grow..., not as a snowdrift or a crystal grows, by mere accretion, but from the inside out. The power to repair tissue, which is a kind of growth.[stet] The power to reproduce, which is growth to perpetuity; the living alone, are able, from one self particle, to evolve another complex individual like unto themselves. And response, --response that springs less from the manner of stimulus than from the inner nature of the respondent. Hit a rock and it answers you only according to your blow; but just flick a tiger and it may leap and kill you. In life alone are these properties uniquely combined. Protoplasm, the almost invisible, is the organizer of all the inconceivable multiplicity of life's organisms.
Donald Peattie and his wife, Louise also have a modest fame for a short story they wrote together. Titled "Plutarch's Lives" it begins with a kitten in a blue satin basket. The story of this Persian kitten was first published in the Ladies' Home Journal, in November, 1927.
What sets apart Donald Culross Peattie’s An Almanac for Moderns, first published in 1935, and what makes it such a unique contribution to this canon, is its blend of modern and classical styles.
The tone is modernist, reflecting Peattie’s deep literary background. Even though he was a Harvard-trained scientist, for some years a botanist by trade, he was also a novelist, a columnist for several newspapers, and a poet. He was as connected to the world of letters – his mother a literary critic, father a journalist, and wife, Louise Redfield, an author – as he was to the world of science......
Peattie’s celebrations of the lives of scientists also include real drama. It is hard, for example, not to feel pity for Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, an erratically – and prolifically – creative polymath. He coined over 6,000 specific epithets in the North American flora (many of which have been subsequently ignored), investigated the systematics of fish and molluscs of the Ohio River, and wrote two volumes on the medical uses of plants of the United States. During his lifetime, his peers pilloried him in correspondence as an unprincipled, and perhaps unhinged, charlatan interested only in self-promotion, and he was publically played the fool by a bullying Audubon, who fed him lies and laughed as Rafinesque repeated them as truth. Rafinesque died alone and penniless, his body discovered by a landlord who then attempted to sell the corpse to recoup a debt. As if that were not indignity enough for one lifetime, he was denounced posthumously by Asa Gray as a delusional liar.
These same qualities, erudition and human insight, are apparent in a later book, Flowering Earth (1939). Here is another bit:
Protoplasm alone exhibits the sign of life.The power to grow..., not as a snowdrift or a crystal grows, by mere accretion, but from the inside out. The power to repair tissue, which is a kind of growth.[stet] The power to reproduce, which is growth to perpetuity; the living alone, are able, from one self particle, to evolve another complex individual like unto themselves. And response, --response that springs less from the manner of stimulus than from the inner nature of the respondent. Hit a rock and it answers you only according to your blow; but just flick a tiger and it may leap and kill you. In life alone are these properties uniquely combined. Protoplasm, the almost invisible, is the organizer of all the inconceivable multiplicity of life's organisms.
Donald Peattie and his wife, Louise also have a modest fame for a short story they wrote together. Titled "Plutarch's Lives" it begins with a kitten in a blue satin basket. The story of this Persian kitten was first published in the Ladies' Home Journal, in November, 1927.
November 14, 2019
November 15, 1862
Gerhart Hauptmann (November 15, 1862 to June 6, 1946) won the Nobel Prize in 1912:
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1912 was awarded to Gerhart Hauptmann "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art".
They also have a biography of the Laureate. So it may well be true that he was the face of German literature to those outside Germany. Thomas Mann is said to have thought Hauptmann good company. History of course was just beginning then, and the rest of his life we see him shuffled along like most in the 20th century, with little dignity, but minimal criminal evidence.
Ludwig Lewisohn edited Gerhart Hauptmann's Collected Works and here is an excerpt from Volume 7, The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann: Miscellaneous dramas: (1917).
The below dialogue is specifically from Commemoration Masque, (translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan). This drama was designed:
To Commemorate The Spirit Of The Wars Of Liberation
Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen
Performed At The Centennial In Breslau (1913)
That is, this presentation recalls when the German states threw off the yoke of Napoleon. And I will add, to me, the description below is not of French action, but of modernity.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1912 was awarded to Gerhart Hauptmann "primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art".
They also have a biography of the Laureate. So it may well be true that he was the face of German literature to those outside Germany. Thomas Mann is said to have thought Hauptmann good company. History of course was just beginning then, and the rest of his life we see him shuffled along like most in the 20th century, with little dignity, but minimal criminal evidence.
Ludwig Lewisohn edited Gerhart Hauptmann's Collected Works and here is an excerpt from Volume 7, The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann: Miscellaneous dramas: (1917).
The below dialogue is specifically from Commemoration Masque, (translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan). This drama was designed:
To Commemorate The Spirit Of The Wars Of Liberation
Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, Fourteen And Fifteen
Performed At The Centennial In Breslau (1913)
That is, this presentation recalls when the German states threw off the yoke of Napoleon. And I will add, to me, the description below is not of French action, but of modernity.
There is an amusing interval when the stage actors playing a Parisian mob, spill off the stage,
[The director]
You come too soon, the times are rude.
Out, out! Your cue has not been spoken.
First Jacobin
Scoundrel, you want your cranium broken?
The Director I'm the director!
Second Jacobin
Who?
But our main focus is on a section with a bloody description of mob action. I will not gloss the French Revolution, merely point out I do not think these events are exaggerated.
Our quotation:
But we had our little joke, at least.
The man who works deserves his feast.
The Princess Lamballe was a bite to allure you:
We lit'rally tore her to bits, I assure you.
But that was the final scene of the fray,
For first we had at her with merry play:
You know she was furnished without and within.
.....
First Jacobin
I also am a Septembriseur.
Long live the Terror! Terreur! terreur!
I fished in a body as though 'twas a pocket,
To pull the quivering heart from its socket;
I held it as a cat a captured mouse,
And sucked it bare as a haunted house.
.....
People, so must you gobble and guzzle,
That is the genuine sacrament
.....
I say again, modernity is the point, not France, but everybody, over two hundred years ago.
And of course not ALL of modernity.
[The director]
You come too soon, the times are rude.
Out, out! Your cue has not been spoken.
First Jacobin
Scoundrel, you want your cranium broken?
The Director I'm the director!
Second Jacobin
Who?
But our main focus is on a section with a bloody description of mob action. I will not gloss the French Revolution, merely point out I do not think these events are exaggerated.
Our quotation:
But we had our little joke, at least.
The man who works deserves his feast.
The Princess Lamballe was a bite to allure you:
We lit'rally tore her to bits, I assure you.
But that was the final scene of the fray,
For first we had at her with merry play:
You know she was furnished without and within.
.....
First Jacobin
I also am a Septembriseur.
Long live the Terror! Terreur! terreur!
I fished in a body as though 'twas a pocket,
To pull the quivering heart from its socket;
I held it as a cat a captured mouse,
And sucked it bare as a haunted house.
.....
People, so must you gobble and guzzle,
That is the genuine sacrament
.....
I say again, modernity is the point, not France, but everybody, over two hundred years ago.
And of course not ALL of modernity.
November 13, 2019
November 13, 1963
Margaret Murray, (July 13, 1863 to November 13, 1963) was a British scholar and archaeologist; she is most famous today for her books on the history of witchcraft. According to her Who's Who article, she both attended the University College of London as a student and later was a Fellow at that illustrious institution.
In between she taught at Oxford, and--
"excavated in Egypt, 1902–04;
excavated a Neolithic Temple in Malta, 1921–23;
excavated an early mediæval site in Hertfordshire, 1925;
excavated megalithic remains in Minorca, 1930–31;
excavated Nabatean remains at Petra, 1937;
excavated Bronze-age site at Tell Ajjul, South Palestine....."
And she wrote about it all, which does not mean this next list is complete--it is not.
Egyptian Antiquities, (1902)
Osireion at Abydos, (1904)
Scarabs in the Dublin Museum, (1904).
The astrological character of the Egyptian magical wands, (1906).
St. Menas of Alexandria, (1907)
Index of names and titles of the old kingdom (1908)
Priesthoods of women in Egypt, (1908)
Egyptian antiquities, (1910)
The Tomb of Two Brothers, (1910)
Note upon an early Egyptian standard, (1911)
Royal Marriages and Matrilineal Descent, (1915)
Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance, (1916)
Ancient Egyptian Legends, (1920)
Witch Cult in Western Europe, (1921)
The witch-cult in Palaeolithic times, (1922)
Knots (1922)
Excavations in Malta, (1923)
Egyptian poems (Rendered into English verse from the originals) (1926)
The dying god, (1926)
Elementary Coptic Grammar, (1927)
Egyptian objects found in Malta, (1928)
Witchcraft and its suppression : a study of fanaticism and delusion attending the survival into modern times of a pre-Christian cult, (1928?)
Egyptian sculpture, (1930)
Queen Meryt-Amon, (1930)
Egyptian Temples, 1931
Maltese Folk-tales, (1932)
(with D. Pilcher) Coptic Reading-Book, (1933)
The God of the witches, (1933)
China and Egypt, (1933)
Female fertility figures, (1934)
Ritual masking, (1934)
Coptic painted pottery, (1935)
Petra, The Rock of Edom, (1939)
My First Hundred Years, (1963)
It is not surprising Murray mentions cats in her writing. Egypt was her first love. In her book Egyptian Temples (1931) she points to a minor mystery:
Bast was [an Egyptian goddess identified with] the cat; by the Greeks ...[Bast] was identified with Artemis, though the reason for the identification is obscure, for Artemis originated in a bear, not [something feline.]
In this book Murray maintains the first Egyptians valued the cat, not so much for its abilities as a ratter, but because the cat killed snakes. This could be, but a major angle in her research, that witchcraft was a undercurrent in history from paleolithic times, is certainly not the case. Margaret Murray, flawed like all scholars, still lights a path.
In between she taught at Oxford, and--
"excavated in Egypt, 1902–04;
excavated a Neolithic Temple in Malta, 1921–23;
excavated an early mediæval site in Hertfordshire, 1925;
excavated megalithic remains in Minorca, 1930–31;
excavated Nabatean remains at Petra, 1937;
excavated Bronze-age site at Tell Ajjul, South Palestine....."
And she wrote about it all, which does not mean this next list is complete--it is not.
Egyptian Antiquities, (1902)
Osireion at Abydos, (1904)
Scarabs in the Dublin Museum, (1904).
The astrological character of the Egyptian magical wands, (1906).
St. Menas of Alexandria, (1907)
Index of names and titles of the old kingdom (1908)
Priesthoods of women in Egypt, (1908)
Egyptian antiquities, (1910)
The Tomb of Two Brothers, (1910)
Note upon an early Egyptian standard, (1911)
Royal Marriages and Matrilineal Descent, (1915)
Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance, (1916)
Ancient Egyptian Legends, (1920)
Witch Cult in Western Europe, (1921)
The witch-cult in Palaeolithic times, (1922)
Knots (1922)
Excavations in Malta, (1923)
Egyptian poems (Rendered into English verse from the originals) (1926)
The dying god, (1926)
Elementary Coptic Grammar, (1927)
Egyptian objects found in Malta, (1928)
Witchcraft and its suppression : a study of fanaticism and delusion attending the survival into modern times of a pre-Christian cult, (1928?)
Egyptian sculpture, (1930)
Queen Meryt-Amon, (1930)
Egyptian Temples, 1931
Maltese Folk-tales, (1932)
(with D. Pilcher) Coptic Reading-Book, (1933)
The God of the witches, (1933)
China and Egypt, (1933)
Female fertility figures, (1934)
Ritual masking, (1934)
Coptic painted pottery, (1935)
Petra, The Rock of Edom, (1939)
My First Hundred Years, (1963)
It is not surprising Murray mentions cats in her writing. Egypt was her first love. In her book Egyptian Temples (1931) she points to a minor mystery:
Bast was [an Egyptian goddess identified with] the cat; by the Greeks ...[Bast] was identified with Artemis, though the reason for the identification is obscure, for Artemis originated in a bear, not [something feline.]
In this book Murray maintains the first Egyptians valued the cat, not so much for its abilities as a ratter, but because the cat killed snakes. This could be, but a major angle in her research, that witchcraft was a undercurrent in history from paleolithic times, is certainly not the case. Margaret Murray, flawed like all scholars, still lights a path.
November 12, 2019
November 12, 1927
Literature and Revolution was first published in 1925. Thus this text was written before the author, Leon Trotsky lost the power struggle for control of the Soviet state, an event dated to November 12, 1927, when he was expelled from the communist party, and soon to be deported from the USSR. Leon Trotsky (November 7, 1879 to August 21, 1940 ) is widely assumed to be less tyrannical than Stalin, but his hands are bloody enough. Percentages in the magnitude of thousands differentiate the number of people dying in Tsarist prisons, compared to those killed at the hands of the people's revolutionaries. And you still find modern intellectuals who say, well, they had to be tough, to make the revolution successful. We need to stop thinking that way.
Trotsky wrote: "The nightingale of poetry is heard only after the sun is set. The day is a time for action…all through history mind limps after reality. " This is a verbal formulation of a common modern confusion. I don't know who originated that point, but Husserl certainly echoed it. The error is hard to elucidate, because there is an obviousness in man's experience that does support the phrase, "mind limps after reality." The confusion rests in assuming 'mind' means: verbal reality. Yes 'words' traipse after external action--- but the mind contains a percipient talent that is more than 'words.' The point is made about the time Trotsky was writing Literature and Revolution, by a emigre then safely in France: Georges Gurdjieff. His method of self-observation was just that-- having the mind, attentive at the current moment, not after any action. This is a non-verbal feat, and is not utterly impossible. The mind need not always trail external events. This is the difference through out history between saints and academic smart-alecks. That latter phrase is another of Gurdjieff's, and he could have had Trotsky in mind, though probably not.
We have a quote from Trotsky:
Can it be that the Revolution, the same one that is now before us, the first since the earth began, needs the seasoning of romantic outbursts, as a cat ragout needs hare sauce? Leave that to the Bielys. Let them chew to the very end the philistine cat ragout with anthroposophic sauce.
"Bielys" points to Andrey Biely, (October 26, 1880 to January 8, 1934), the poet whose book title can give us a clue to Trotsky's disdain-- Gold in Azure (1904) . The Soviets, like the ordinary everywhere, cannot bear a glimpse of real complexity, and can only accuse their betters of their own weaknesses. Trotsky exemplifies that of which he accuses others: the ordinariness of the petty intellectual thug.
Can it be that the Revolution, the same one that is now before us, the first since the earth began, needs the seasoning of romantic outbursts, as a cat ragout needs hare sauce? Leave that to the Bielys. Let them chew to the very end the philistine cat ragout with anthroposophic sauce.
"Bielys" points to Andrey Biely, (October 26, 1880 to January 8, 1934), the poet whose book title can give us a clue to Trotsky's disdain-- Gold in Azure (1904) . The Soviets, like the ordinary everywhere, cannot bear a glimpse of real complexity, and can only accuse their betters of their own weaknesses. Trotsky exemplifies that of which he accuses others: the ordinariness of the petty intellectual thug.
November 10, 2019
November 10, 1697
William Hogarth (November 10, 1697 to October 26, 1764) was a British painter whose prints contain narratives and busy scenes to give an often unique glimpse into city life. Cats are often part of the bustle. Our attention now is on a busy scene in a prostitute's quarters.
The print we link to is part of a Hogarth series titled "The Harlot's Progress." Notice the cat by the bed echoes the sexual imagery.
According to one book Anecdotes of William Hogarth: Written by Himself....With Essays On his Life and Genius, And Criticisms on his Works (1833):
In the following year [1731] appeared the first of those three admirable graphic Dramas which created a new epoch in the Art to which they belong, and conferred upon their author the .... appellation of a great Ethic Painter,— namely " The Harlot's Progress," "The Rake's Progress," and " Marriage-a-la-mode."
Ronald Paulson, in Hogarth's Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England (2003), suggests that the scene is modeled upon the many annunciation scenes in art history.
The print we link to is part of a Hogarth series titled "The Harlot's Progress." Notice the cat by the bed echoes the sexual imagery.
According to one book Anecdotes of William Hogarth: Written by Himself....With Essays On his Life and Genius, And Criticisms on his Works (1833):
In the following year [1731] appeared the first of those three admirable graphic Dramas which created a new epoch in the Art to which they belong, and conferred upon their author the .... appellation of a great Ethic Painter,— namely " The Harlot's Progress," "The Rake's Progress," and " Marriage-a-la-mode."
Ronald Paulson, in Hogarth's Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England (2003), suggests that the scene is modeled upon the many annunciation scenes in art history.
November 9, 2019
November 9, 1914
Alan Caillou was the pseudonym under which Alan Lyle-Smythe (November 9, 1914 to October 1, 2006), wrote. His books often rely on his experiences as a hunter. His World War ll experiences in military intelligence were the basis for a non-fiction book. The World Is Six Foot Square (1954,) is described as an "account of the author's adventures after his capture by the Italians in the Western desert."
Lyle-Smythe also was an actor and screen-writer. Two of his popular titles:
Bichu the Jaguar (1969) and The Cheetahs: a novel (1969), on which Disney based a movie in 1989. He wrote lots more adventure stories.
Lyle-Smythe also was an actor and screen-writer. Two of his popular titles:
Bichu the Jaguar (1969) and The Cheetahs: a novel (1969), on which Disney based a movie in 1989. He wrote lots more adventure stories.
November 8, 2019
November 8, 1935
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (July 10, 1846, to November 8, 1935), was the sister of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. She was the kind of woman who, incapable of rigourous thought, parrot the views of their husbands. Thus, after her husband, a rabid anit-semite, died, and she was her brother's caretaker in his last feeble years, she retold the story of Nietzshce's ideas in such a manner as would glorify Nazism.
From The Young Nietzsche (1912, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici) we see the feminine universe at it's most pathetic. Here is a sample of what she includes, speaking of a time in their youth, when they set up housekeeping together.
In his letters to his friends, written from Bonndorf, [1875] there is, in spite of all, a feeling of great content.
"Everywhere I see despair !" he says, " and yet I do not feel it myself, although I am not in Bayreuth! Do you understand how this can be? I hardly can. And yet I am there in spirit for over three-quarters of the day, and like a ghost I am perpetually hovering round it. Do not have any qualms about making my soul die of longing, but just tell me all about it, dear friend. On my walks, I conduct whole passages of the music which I know by heart, and hum to myself. Remember me most kindly to the Wagners! ..."
My brother returned to Bale in the middle of August, and was full of admiration and childlike joy at the sight of his new home, which I had been arranging in the meantime. Everything was pleasant and comfortable; but it was far from being "sybaritic in its luxury," as a certain critic declared our simple and somewhat old-fashioned establishment to be. During the whole of this period, from the middle of August to the end of November, my brother's health was really excellent. From early in the morning till late in the evening he was radiant and cheerful, and declared himself exceptionally pleased with everything.....We enjoyed watching the strange formations of the clouds, the effects of light, and the flight of birds over the bare fields. We loved to walk on green fields and along country lanes, and to stop and look at the most simple things: now we would be amused at a dog that sprang to catch a partridge and slunk away with a most comical expression of shame when it missed its prey, and anon at a cat which would fawn upon my brother, purring affectionately the while, and rubbing its arched back against his leg. We rejoiced over the children who brought us flowers or played their games with zest, and in doing so revealed human nature free from all artificiality.
She would speak of Nietzsche's idea of a will to power, which he used to specify the labor of the individual against the herd thinking of the masses, to justify Hitler. Hitler attended her funeral. Her vile taint is not yet erased.
From The Young Nietzsche (1912, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici) we see the feminine universe at it's most pathetic. Here is a sample of what she includes, speaking of a time in their youth, when they set up housekeeping together.
In his letters to his friends, written from Bonndorf, [1875] there is, in spite of all, a feeling of great content.
"Everywhere I see despair !" he says, " and yet I do not feel it myself, although I am not in Bayreuth! Do you understand how this can be? I hardly can. And yet I am there in spirit for over three-quarters of the day, and like a ghost I am perpetually hovering round it. Do not have any qualms about making my soul die of longing, but just tell me all about it, dear friend. On my walks, I conduct whole passages of the music which I know by heart, and hum to myself. Remember me most kindly to the Wagners! ..."
My brother returned to Bale in the middle of August, and was full of admiration and childlike joy at the sight of his new home, which I had been arranging in the meantime. Everything was pleasant and comfortable; but it was far from being "sybaritic in its luxury," as a certain critic declared our simple and somewhat old-fashioned establishment to be. During the whole of this period, from the middle of August to the end of November, my brother's health was really excellent. From early in the morning till late in the evening he was radiant and cheerful, and declared himself exceptionally pleased with everything.....We enjoyed watching the strange formations of the clouds, the effects of light, and the flight of birds over the bare fields. We loved to walk on green fields and along country lanes, and to stop and look at the most simple things: now we would be amused at a dog that sprang to catch a partridge and slunk away with a most comical expression of shame when it missed its prey, and anon at a cat which would fawn upon my brother, purring affectionately the while, and rubbing its arched back against his leg. We rejoiced over the children who brought us flowers or played their games with zest, and in doing so revealed human nature free from all artificiality.
She would speak of Nietzsche's idea of a will to power, which he used to specify the labor of the individual against the herd thinking of the masses, to justify Hitler. Hitler attended her funeral. Her vile taint is not yet erased.
November 7, 2019
November 7, 1929
The Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller inspired and largely funded, collection of art, was opened to the public first, on November 7, 1929. Their initial quarters were rented Manhattan space. The real estate is finer now. They remain a major Manhattan destination.
We found that typing cats into the advanced search box on their website got 61 hits. Other numbers to conjure with, though this sounds like a fraction of their collection: 8,355 artists and 50,029 works online.
If you go to http://www.moma.org/collection/advancedsearch.php, and type in "cats"
you can see some cats online. Like this one we copied below, titled Cat (Katze). The artist was Christian Rohlfs (German, 1849–1938) who created it in 1913, of a stencil used with "spray and spatter" which may be technical terminology, though it sounds clear enough.
The work measures 7. 5/16 x 11 9/16" (18.5 x 29.4 cm) on a irregularly shaped sheet. The artist printed this single copy. The museum purchased it with money from the Matthew T. Mellon Foundation. You need to visit them and buy something nice.
We found that typing cats into the advanced search box on their website got 61 hits. Other numbers to conjure with, though this sounds like a fraction of their collection: 8,355 artists and 50,029 works online.
If you go to http://www.moma.org/collection/advancedsearch.php, and type in "cats"
you can see some cats online. Like this one we copied below, titled Cat (Katze). The artist was Christian Rohlfs (German, 1849–1938) who created it in 1913, of a stencil used with "spray and spatter" which may be technical terminology, though it sounds clear enough.
The work measures 7. 5/16 x 11 9/16" (18.5 x 29.4 cm) on a irregularly shaped sheet. The artist printed this single copy. The museum purchased it with money from the Matthew T. Mellon Foundation. You need to visit them and buy something nice.
November 6, 2019
November 6, 1922
Ronald Blythe (November 6, 1922) is an English writer, essayist and editor. You should know about him, and so this article as an introduction.
The track down which Ronald Blythe first walked in 1947 sinks into a valley on the border between Suffolk and Essex and ends at Bottengoms Farm. Everything in the rambling garden is blazing on an oddly hot autumn day. The runner beans are plentiful, and three roses throw competing scents into the air. A recently vacated folding chair shows that Blythe has just taken his lunch outside. It is a deeply peaceful scene....
Bottengoms Farm is the star of Blythe's latest book, At the Yeoman's House. "It's a kind of poem, the book, isn't it?" he says diffidently. A book about your home might be considered a narrowing of horizons that comes, quite naturally, with old age. Blythe, who is 89, has lived a geographically restricted life. He has never left East Anglia for more than a month at a time. His writing, however, is vivid and outward-looking, part social history, part memoir. In the new book he spins all kinds of tiny stories and vivid recollections from these sturdy, independent dwellings built by yeomen – countrymen above a farmer but below a gentleman – in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Blythe is best known for Akenfield, his stark account of village life in Suffolk, which was published to instant acclaim in 1969. He thinks of himself primarily as an essayist and poet but has written two novels and many short stories, has edited editions of Thomas Hardy and Henry James, and inspired a generation of nature writers, including Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin, who became close friends. This has also seen the publication of At Helpston, a collection of lucid essays about John Clare (he is president of the John Clare Society), and every week for two decades he has written his "Word from Wormingford" diary for the Church Times. He continues to accept speaking engagements across the country. While Penguin and Faber have recently republished his classic works, it is perhaps surprising that only small publishing houses are publishing his new writing.
....
Blythe was born in Suffolk. His family has lived here for centuries; even his surname comes from its river Blyth. He thinks his mother, who "read all the time", is responsible for his love of books. He devoured French literature and wrote poetry. He did not go to university but does not feel that he missed out. "I was brought up with all these very cultivated people, botanists and artists. None of them went to university." Working as a reference librarian in Colchester library, he met Christine Nash, wife of the painter, John Nash, and was first invited to their home, Bottengoms Farm, in 1947.
There was a run of spectacularly good summers in the late 40s. "It was Provence, or even Paris, in Suffolk," he writes, as he was thrust into a glamorous, rather bohemian world. He became friends with Sir Cedric Morris, who taught Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling and lived nearby with his partner, Arthur Lett Haines. "I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them," says Blythe. "What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way. "Christine found him a cottage near Aldeburgh, and Blythe was introduced to Benjamin Britten. They became friends and he edited festival programmes for Britten while wrestling with his first novel. One day he returned home and found a note pushed under his door inviting him for a drink at Britten's house. It was from EM Forster. "How he knew I was there I don't know." Blythe met Forster a number of times; they would go shopping together for groceries, and Blythe helped Forster write an index for his biography of his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton. ....
..... Blythe's first, Forster-inspired novel, A Treasonable Growth, was recently republished by Faber Finds. Another book republished by Faber, The Age of Illusion, a social history of life in England between the two world wars published in 1963, led to an editor at Penguin asking Blythe to edit a series of classics for the Penguin English Library. He began with Jane Austen's Emma, and chose one of his heroes, William Hazlitt, for his next volume.....
Blythe had no idea Akenfield would have the impact it did. Fifteen million people watched Peter Hall's film of the book, shown simultaneously on TV and in the cinema, in which Blythe had a cameo as a vicar. His portrait of village life captured a hitherto barely noticed revolution in the countryside: Akenfield marked the end of an essentially feudal pattern of farming by hand and horse that had endured for millennia. Within the lifetimes of the people he wrote about, physical hardship, poverty, deference and communities centred on the land and the church had been pushed aside by the juggernaut of industrial farming....
Upstairs at Bottengoms, on lopsided floorboards, is Blythe's desk. He writes by hand every morning, sometimes in the garden, and then types it up. He does not use a computer and has never driven a car. "Hopeless, you see," he says. Blythe is generous about contemporary nature writers, including Mabey, Deakin and Mark Cocker.
... Blythe loves writing but is less comfortable discussing how he does it. "I don't know how to describe it. When I'm writing I'm in a kind of dream," he says. "It's a bit like looking at your own profile in the mirror. You shrink from it." He is firm about one thing: he is not a nature writer, nor a country writer but a writer who lives in the country. This undercuts Mabey's belief that Blythe is a "first-class naturalist" but reflects the breadth of Blythe's passions. He is "heavily influenced by George Herbert and a lot of Christian poets and also just by simple village worship", but turned down the chance to become a priest; he is a writer and could not run a parish, he says, although he takes services as a reader and is a canon of the cathedral in Bury St Edmunds. He is not saddened by the loss of the church as the central organising factor in village life; the church, he says, has "always gone up and down" and its buildings "are beautifully kept, ancient and full of treasures. It's part of the pattern of life, prayer and music and great language."
Blythe describes his writing as the work of "a solitary man who is serene and not bitter and who loves nature and poetry and has a circle of friends, but mostly is by himself." He has never lived with anyone. Has he ever been lonely? "No, I don't know what it means."
....His reticence, he agrees, is in part a generational predisposition, "a matter of taste and feeling", but it may be more than that. Blythe adores Virginia Woolf's writing, and briefly met Vanessa Bell at Aldeburgh. Mrs Dalloway said that love and religion would destroy the privacy of the soul. "A lot of people in my stories say things like that," Blythe says. I start to mention that one small anecdote about his love life was revealed in a biography of the crime writer Patricia Highsmith. "I slept with her," he interjects. In the book he was quoted as saying that she breached the boundaries of their friendship by exploring him physically, on one or two occasions. "Well, it wasn't my fault really. She lived four miles from me and she came over every week for several years. I admired her enormously. She was a very strange, mysterious woman. She was lesbian but at the same time she found men's bodies beautiful. And I think she found me beautiful. But it was ridiculous, really. She also drank like a fish which I don't do."....
In the 1970s, Blythe nursed John Nash, and wrote The View in Winter, a prescient look at old age which he considers one of his best books. When Nash died, Blythe inherited Bottengoms. This autumn, the village school has not reopened its doors for the first time since 1870, he remarks lightly. There has been a hollowing out of village life, a kind of disenchantment, which he has captured in his writing.....
Friends have suggested alternative homes but, Blythe says, "I just tumbled into these places and stayed. I like routine and solitude, and the kind of order of reading and writing and thinking and drifting.
"I won't pretend that it's some great romantic thing. It's simply the countryside. I take it very much for granted. I'm not infatuated with it or anything like that. It's a normal place to live." Then again, he seems to agree that a still life in a still place must do something to you. "If you go for walks with a friend in the countryside, that is a lovely experience. But if you live as I live in the middle of nowhere by yourself, that's another experience. There's nothing mystical about it, but it makes me dream. If you're in this house, surrounded by fields every day, something happens to you. I don't know what it is."
A book he wrote is titled: Circling Year: Perspectives from a Country Parish (2001).
It includes this passage:
Regular worshippers at Little Horkesley will have observed that as well as having a devoted choir, we also have a devout cat. I say 'devout' although many believe that his regular-as-clockwork appearance when the bell tolls has something to do with there being Whiskas in the vestry, a soft carpet in the sanctuary, and soft laps in all directions. But as I say, who can doubt the goodness of this beautiful and well-behaved cat, and who can say that his deportment in church is not a lesson to us all.
November 5, 2019
November 5, 1879
James Clerk Maxwell (June 13, 1831 to November 5, 1879) was a Scottish scientist and though connected with Cambridge, and King's College in London, was happy and productive at his home in Glenlair. His contributions have been compared to those of Isaac Newton. One website summarizes this significance:
His paper On Faraday's lines of force was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in two parts, 1855 and 1856. Maxwell showed that a few relatively simple mathematical equations could express the behaviour of electric and magnetic fields and their interrelation.
And, to continue our purpose of establishing some to the reasoning behind Maxwell's reputation, we mention:
In London, [King's College] around 1862, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He proposed that the phenomenon of light is therefore an electromagnetic phenomenon. Maxwell wrote the truly remarkable words:
We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
At Cambridge Maxwell encountered the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Irishman George Stokes (1819 to 1903).
His paper On Faraday's lines of force was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in two parts, 1855 and 1856. Maxwell showed that a few relatively simple mathematical equations could express the behaviour of electric and magnetic fields and their interrelation.
And, to continue our purpose of establishing some to the reasoning behind Maxwell's reputation, we mention:
In London, [King's College] around 1862, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He proposed that the phenomenon of light is therefore an electromagnetic phenomenon. Maxwell wrote the truly remarkable words:
We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
At Cambridge Maxwell encountered the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Irishman George Stokes (1819 to 1903).
Stokes had written to him on 7 November 1857:
I have just received your papers on the dynamical top, etc., and the account of experiments on the perception of colour. The latter, which I missed seeing at the time when it was published, I have just read with great interest. The results afford most remarkable and important evidence in favour of the theory of three primary colour-perceptions, a theory which you, and you alone, as far as I know, have established on an exact numerical basis.
Of course the scientific spirit is restless. The following is a quote by the son of George G. Stokes, about his father:
He was much interested, as also was Prof. Clerk Maxwell about the same time, in cat-turning, a word invented to describe the way in which a cat manages to fall upon her feet if you hold her by the four feet and drop her, back downwards, close to the floor. The cat's eyes were made use of, too, for examination by the ophthalmoscope, as well as those of my dog Pearl: but Pearl's interest never equalled that of Professor Clerk Maxwell's dog, who seemed positively to enjoy having his eyes examined by his master.
The citation for this glimpse of scientific domesticity is Volume 1 of Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the Late Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bart, edited by Sir Joseph Larmor, (1907).
This quote, not as precisely cited, gives a bit more detail:
While at university in Trinity College, Cambridge, James Clerk Maxwell, who would go onto become arguably the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century, was reportedly well known for the activity. In a letter to his wife reflecting on this reputation he’d earned, Maxwell wrote, “There is a tradition in Trinity that when I was here I discovered a method of throwing a cat so as not to light on its feet, and that I used to throw cats out of windows. I had to explain that the proper object of research was to find how quick the cat would turn round, and that the proper method was to let the cat drop on a table or bed from about two inches, and that even then the cat lights on her feet.” He was not the only prominent scientist to be intrigued by the question of how cats, when falling from a height, seemingly were able to defy the laws of Newtonian physics and change motion in mid air to land on their feet. At around the same time, the eminent mathematician George Stokes was also prone to a spot of “cat-turning”. As his daughter relates in a 1907 memoir: “He was much interested, as also was Prof. Clerk Maxwell about the same time, in cat-turning, a word invented to describe the way in which a cat manages to fall upon her feet if you hold her by the four feet and drop her, back downwards, close to the floor.”
Maxwell sounds a bit defensive, as if well aware of the imputation he was not kind to cats. His wife, the daughter of a Scottish academic, probably did not need reassuring on this point.
I have just received your papers on the dynamical top, etc., and the account of experiments on the perception of colour. The latter, which I missed seeing at the time when it was published, I have just read with great interest. The results afford most remarkable and important evidence in favour of the theory of three primary colour-perceptions, a theory which you, and you alone, as far as I know, have established on an exact numerical basis.
Of course the scientific spirit is restless. The following is a quote by the son of George G. Stokes, about his father:
He was much interested, as also was Prof. Clerk Maxwell about the same time, in cat-turning, a word invented to describe the way in which a cat manages to fall upon her feet if you hold her by the four feet and drop her, back downwards, close to the floor. The cat's eyes were made use of, too, for examination by the ophthalmoscope, as well as those of my dog Pearl: but Pearl's interest never equalled that of Professor Clerk Maxwell's dog, who seemed positively to enjoy having his eyes examined by his master.
The citation for this glimpse of scientific domesticity is Volume 1 of Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the Late Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bart, edited by Sir Joseph Larmor, (1907).
This quote, not as precisely cited, gives a bit more detail:
While at university in Trinity College, Cambridge, James Clerk Maxwell, who would go onto become arguably the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century, was reportedly well known for the activity. In a letter to his wife reflecting on this reputation he’d earned, Maxwell wrote, “There is a tradition in Trinity that when I was here I discovered a method of throwing a cat so as not to light on its feet, and that I used to throw cats out of windows. I had to explain that the proper object of research was to find how quick the cat would turn round, and that the proper method was to let the cat drop on a table or bed from about two inches, and that even then the cat lights on her feet.” He was not the only prominent scientist to be intrigued by the question of how cats, when falling from a height, seemingly were able to defy the laws of Newtonian physics and change motion in mid air to land on their feet. At around the same time, the eminent mathematician George Stokes was also prone to a spot of “cat-turning”. As his daughter relates in a 1907 memoir: “He was much interested, as also was Prof. Clerk Maxwell about the same time, in cat-turning, a word invented to describe the way in which a cat manages to fall upon her feet if you hold her by the four feet and drop her, back downwards, close to the floor.”
Maxwell sounds a bit defensive, as if well aware of the imputation he was not kind to cats. His wife, the daughter of a Scottish academic, probably did not need reassuring on this point.
November 4, 2019
November 4, 1740
"Let not the reader start, at that expression, The soul of a cat."
The author of these words wrote them in the 1770s. He was the vicar of Broad Hembury in Devon. His name was Augustus Toplady (November 4, 1740 to August 11, 1778).
Our excerpts below are designed to follow his argument about the abilities of man and those of the Creator. It is not about humility. His point is the nature of man. (Another way of asking about the nature of the human, and divine, the physical and mental.) A subtle reading of his arguments reveals he is not arguing against free will. But that subtlety is not captured below.
His argument as we review it in his collected works, is contained in this question:
For what is brain but matter peculiarly modified? And who is the modifier? Not man, but God.
He will drag in St. Paul.
We cannot resolve this question, with certainty, any more than the other. We may, however, even on this occasion, address every one of our human brethren in those words of that great philosophic necessitarian, St. Paul : and ask, who maketh thee to dilffer from the lowest of the brute creation? Thy Maker's free-will, not thine. And what pre-eminence hast thou, which thou didst not receive from him? Not the least, nor the shadow of any. —Now, if thou didst [not acquire, but] receive it as a distinguishing gift of his free and sovereign pleasure, why carriest thou thyself proudly as though thou hadst not received it [but created your talents yourself.] ....
He starts with the jokes. (Toplady is half Irish).
It seems most agreeable to the radical simplicity which God has observed in his works to suppose that, in themselves, all human ‘souls' are equal. I can easily believe that the soul of ...[a] woman has naturally the (unexpanded) powers of Grotius, or of Sir Isaac Newton: and that which conduces to raise the philosopher, the poet, the politician, or the linguist so much above the ignorant and stupid of mankind, is not only the circumstance of intellectual cultivation, but (still more than that) his having the happiness to occupy a better house, i. e. a body more commodiously organized, than they.
Toplady is still funny after centuries. (He and Wesley had previously crossed intellectual swords.)
The soul of a monthly reviewer, if imprisoned within the same mud walls which are tenanted by the soul of Mr. John Wesley, would, similarly .... reason and act (I verily think) exactly like the bishop of Moorfields. And I know some very sensible people who even go so far as to suppose that, was a human spirit shut up in the skull of a cat, puss would notwithstanding move prone on all fours, purr when stroked, spit when pinched, and birds and mice be her darling objects of pursuit.
Augustus Toplady was an Anglican priest and scholar. Most people know his hymn, "Rock of Ages." Fewer recall he thought animals (possibly) had a life after death.
The author of these words wrote them in the 1770s. He was the vicar of Broad Hembury in Devon. His name was Augustus Toplady (November 4, 1740 to August 11, 1778).
Our excerpts below are designed to follow his argument about the abilities of man and those of the Creator. It is not about humility. His point is the nature of man. (Another way of asking about the nature of the human, and divine, the physical and mental.) A subtle reading of his arguments reveals he is not arguing against free will. But that subtlety is not captured below.
His argument as we review it in his collected works, is contained in this question:
For what is brain but matter peculiarly modified? And who is the modifier? Not man, but God.
He will drag in St. Paul.
We cannot resolve this question, with certainty, any more than the other. We may, however, even on this occasion, address every one of our human brethren in those words of that great philosophic necessitarian, St. Paul : and ask, who maketh thee to dilffer from the lowest of the brute creation? Thy Maker's free-will, not thine. And what pre-eminence hast thou, which thou didst not receive from him? Not the least, nor the shadow of any. —Now, if thou didst [not acquire, but] receive it as a distinguishing gift of his free and sovereign pleasure, why carriest thou thyself proudly as though thou hadst not received it [but created your talents yourself.] ....
He starts with the jokes. (Toplady is half Irish).
It seems most agreeable to the radical simplicity which God has observed in his works to suppose that, in themselves, all human ‘souls' are equal. I can easily believe that the soul of ...[a] woman has naturally the (unexpanded) powers of Grotius, or of Sir Isaac Newton: and that which conduces to raise the philosopher, the poet, the politician, or the linguist so much above the ignorant and stupid of mankind, is not only the circumstance of intellectual cultivation, but (still more than that) his having the happiness to occupy a better house, i. e. a body more commodiously organized, than they.
Toplady is still funny after centuries. (He and Wesley had previously crossed intellectual swords.)
The soul of a monthly reviewer, if imprisoned within the same mud walls which are tenanted by the soul of Mr. John Wesley, would, similarly .... reason and act (I verily think) exactly like the bishop of Moorfields. And I know some very sensible people who even go so far as to suppose that, was a human spirit shut up in the skull of a cat, puss would notwithstanding move prone on all fours, purr when stroked, spit when pinched, and birds and mice be her darling objects of pursuit.
Augustus Toplady was an Anglican priest and scholar. Most people know his hymn, "Rock of Ages." Fewer recall he thought animals (possibly) had a life after death.
November 3, 2019
November 3, 1957
At the turn of the century before last, people who, suddenly having found they could talk about sex, confused talking about it with having it. I am thinking about Wilhelm Reich, whose orgone box gained some fame.
Reich wrote this bit of explanatory prose: "[I]t is correct to connect the basic biological reflex of orgastic superimposition with the simplest plasmatic functions in order to understand it." He seems to be pointing to the fact animals repeat a few basic forms in a variety of ways, but then he mentioned something very silly about cats, and I found in myself little patience for unraveling his errors. He said:
Everyone has seen a cat lifted by being held up by the skin of the back. The body of the cat seems doubled up, the head brought close to the pelvis, head and legs hang down limply...
Reich could only be pointing to the way a cat hangs when picked up, not by the skin of the back, but being lifted, the way its mother did originally, by the skin of the back OF THE NECK. No one has seen what Reich described, for anyone trying it, would find the cat could twist in its skin and sink its teeth into the hands of the psychologist. Nor can we assume Reich merely spoke carelessly, and actually MEANT the skin of the back of the cat's neck; his subsequent description is also wrong: the cat's head is not hanging near its pelvis, when lifted in the only humane way possible, the way mother cats do it. Reich is ignorant about cat behavior.
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 to November 3, 1957) would be a forgotten bit of cultural history were it not for the harshness of his treatment by the FDA. They made a martyr out of him and were very cruel. Our quote is from Wilhem Reich Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (1960).
Reich wrote this bit of explanatory prose: "[I]t is correct to connect the basic biological reflex of orgastic superimposition with the simplest plasmatic functions in order to understand it." He seems to be pointing to the fact animals repeat a few basic forms in a variety of ways, but then he mentioned something very silly about cats, and I found in myself little patience for unraveling his errors. He said:
Everyone has seen a cat lifted by being held up by the skin of the back. The body of the cat seems doubled up, the head brought close to the pelvis, head and legs hang down limply...
Reich could only be pointing to the way a cat hangs when picked up, not by the skin of the back, but being lifted, the way its mother did originally, by the skin of the back OF THE NECK. No one has seen what Reich described, for anyone trying it, would find the cat could twist in its skin and sink its teeth into the hands of the psychologist. Nor can we assume Reich merely spoke carelessly, and actually MEANT the skin of the back of the cat's neck; his subsequent description is also wrong: the cat's head is not hanging near its pelvis, when lifted in the only humane way possible, the way mother cats do it. Reich is ignorant about cat behavior.
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 to November 3, 1957) would be a forgotten bit of cultural history were it not for the harshness of his treatment by the FDA. They made a martyr out of him and were very cruel. Our quote is from Wilhem Reich Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (1960).
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