June 30, 2019

We can't let Gay Pride Month close without mentioning two independent characters:

I sure hope this story is from a reliable site:

'Zhenya Gay, born Eleanor Byrnes, was a famous childrens book illustrator and animal lover. She was also the long time companion and lover of Helen Reitman, aka Jan Gay. The couple met in about 1927 and began collaborating on children's books in 1930. Eleanor briefly took Helen's surname of Reitman as her own before the couple changed both of their names to Jan and Zhenya Gay in about 1929. They lived together in New York until at least 1933 and established a nudist colony together in Highlands, New York.'

This is Zhenya Gay:




Our kind of folk.

June 29, 1895

Emile Munier (June 2, 1840 to June 29, 1895) was a French painter, the son of a family involved in cloth manufacturing. He painted scenes of children and animals often, and below is one example. Both his wives were involved in the arts. He was a successful artist until a sudden illness ended his life.

"Catch" is dated to 1886.



Munier was a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 –1905), and like him, an example of the art that the moderns were rejecting. More paintings and a detailed biography is available at http://www.emilemunier.org/biography.htm.

June 27, 1884

Gaston Bachelard, (June 27, 1884 to October 16, 1962) French philosopher, is the author of, among other books, the Poetics of Space (1958, translated by Maria Jolas). Etienne Gilson's Preface gives us a sense of the dimensions of this French intellectual:

'....I wish I could make clear how his provincial origins and his familiarity with the things of the earth affected his intellectual life and influenced the course of his philosophical reflections Owing to his courageous efforts, Bachelard finally succeeded in giving himself a university education, got all the university degrees one can get and ended as a university professor, yet, unlike most of us, at least in France, he never allowed himself to become molded by the traditional ways of thinking to which universities unavoidably begin by submitting their students His intellectual superiority was such that he could not fail to succeed in all his academic ventures We all loved him, admired him and envied him a little, because we felt he was a free mind, unfettered by any conventions either in his choice of the problems he wanted to handle or in his way of handling them.' 

This book is available to read free online

His table of contents for The Poetics of Space gives us a sense of the intent of this exploration of buildings and people.

The House. From Cellar to Garret. 

The Significance of the Hut 

House and Universe 

Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes

Nests 

Shells 

Corners 

Miniature 

Intimate Immensity 

The Dialectics of Outside and Inside 

The Phenomenology of Roundness

The text of The Poetics of Space contains this quote:

...[W]hen they read Poe’s Tales together, both the phenomenologist and the psychoanalyst will understand the value of this achievement. For these tales are the realization of childhood fears. The reader who is ...devoted ...[to] reading will hear the accursed cat, which is a symbol of unredeemed guilt, mewing behind the wall. The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, that they are walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth behind them. And so the situation grows more dramatic, and fear becomes exaggerated. But where is the fear that does not become exaggerated. In this spirit of shared trepidation, the phenomenologist listens intently, as the poet Thoby Marcelin puts it, “flush with madness." The cellar then becomes buried madness, walled-in tragedy. Stories of criminal cellars leave indelible marks on our memory, marks that we prefer not to deepen; who would like to re-read Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”? In this instance, the dramatic element...exploits natural fears, which are inherent to the dual nature of both man and house. ... [T]he cellar dream irrefutably increases reality. 

Bachelard is full of delicate comments, like, "In a garden we grow more attached to a tree inhabited by birds."

June 26, 1915

Walter Farley (June 26, 1915  to October 16, 1989) wrote The Black Stallion (1941), which was an immensely popular children's book. He wrote many more and here is a publisher's blurb (found on books.google.com) for The Island Stallion (1948):

When Steve Duncan is asked to go on an archeological search on a remote Caribbean island, he never imagines the stallion he will find there. But the giant horse is unapproachable, showing nothing but fear and fury towards people. When the stallion gets caught in quicksand, can Steve get close enough to save the wild horse?

And we read somewhere that while Farley's own four children were growing up, "Horses, cats and dogs were always part of the household."

June 24, 1873

Hugo Simberg (June 24, 1873 to July 12, 1917) was a Finnish painter whose canvases show his symbolist absorption. In Finland he is very famous. Here is a bit of background:

A key figure of the symbolist movement, Simberg was known for his unique paintings blending realistic portraiture, landscape, and fantasy, with odd figures often featuring. Devils and trolls ....
After beginning his art studies in Vyborg, Simberg later became a pupil of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, one of the biggest names in Finnish art. Although the public found Simberg’s symbolistic and naïve depictions of supernatural beings odd, they gradually warmed up to him, and he was commissioned to decorate St John’s Church in Tampere, now Tampere Cathedral. One of the frescoes found in the church is a reproduction ofThe Garden of Death (1896) while a continuous fresco, The Garland Bearers (1906), depicts twelve young boys carrying a garland of roses, representing the disciples of Christ carrying the vine of life. Simberg also painted a red-winged serpent of Paradise on the ceiling, sparking off considerable protest, and as late as 1946, the bishop of Tampere Diocese proposed that it be removed.

This is dated 1895---

A nice bio sketch is here,(1908).  Simberg compares with Sargent if you look at his realist themes. We are quite pleased to have discovered Simberg. 

June 23, 1912

Alan Turing (June 23, 1912 to June 7, 1954) gets an interesting mention in Ed Yong's article (January 20, 2014) about the origin of animal stripes and other markings.

Let us quote from his blog post: Coloured Cells Chase Each Other To Make A Fish’s Stripes:

[An]... astonishing GIF shows a microscopic chase scene: A black cell flees from the touch of a yellow cell, and the yellow cell goes after it.

On their own, the two cells go round and round. But if there are lots of them, the yellow cells end up corralling the black ones into long bands. And that, according to Hiroaki Yamanaka and Shigeru Kondo from Osaka University, is why zebrafish gets its stripes......

Kondo’s work has a long pedigree that began with the English mathematician Alan Turing. When Turing wasn’t changing the face of computer science or breaking German codes in WWII, he was thinking about animal patterns. In 1952, he proposed a simple mathematical model involving two molecules: an activator that produces a pattern, and an inhibitor that blocks it. Both diffuse through the skin, and react with each other. By evolving small changes in how quickly these molecules spread and how strongly they interact, animals can produce radically different patterns, from cheetah spots to zebra stripes...

Turing’s ideas about “reaction-diffusion systems” were based on abstract maths. But in recent decades, scientists like Kondo have shown that many animal patterns behave exactly as he predicted.
...

To test ...[their ideas], Yamanaka and Kondo harvested two types of pigmented cells from the fins of zebrafish: black melanophores and yellow xanthophores. On their own, both types of cell move in random directions. But when Yamanaka and Kondo mixed the cells, they saw something astonishing.

The yellow cells speed up, and actively extended finger-like projections called pseudopodia towards the black ones. Upon contact, the black cells recoil and run away, only to be pursued by the yellow ones. And since the black cells are still slightly faster, the result is a continuous “run-and-chase movement”. (For context, the black cells move at just over 2 micrometres (millionths of a metre) per hour. They’re around 50 micrometres wide, so it takes them a day to cover their own length.)

If hundreds of these chases play out across a crowded skin, Yamanaka and Kondo believe that the yellow cells would collectively push black ones away, resulting in clearly defined stripes of dark and light. And that, of course, is exactly what you see in a normal zebrafish.

And it’s not what happens in mutant zebrafish with weird skin pattern. In the so-called jaguar mutants, which have fuzzy stripes, the black cells are less attractive to the yellow cells and less strongly repulsed by them. The two groups of cells move in the normal way on their own. It’s just their interactions that are different. Their lazier pursuits mean that they don’t segregate as neatly, which leads to fuzzier stripes.

Meanwhile, in the leopard mutants, which have spots instead of stripes, the black cells don’t flee from the yellow cells at all. Instead, they move towards them. The result is an embrace rather than a chase. Isolated black cells are killed off by the yellow ones, while those that randomly cluster together find safety in numbers and survive. The result: black spots in a sea of yellow.

At first glance, this seems very different to what Turing suggested. Rather than moving molecules that activate or inhibit the production of colour, you have moving cells that are themselves coloured. But there are similarities too. In Turing’s model, the two molecules react with one another, and both diffuse at different speeds. Here, the yellow and black cells certainly interact, and they move at different speeds.

But why exactly are the yellow cells attracted to the black ones, and why are the black ones repelled? How do the mutations behind the jaguar and leopard patterns change these movements? And why do the cell chases almost always go in an anticlockwise spiral?

And perhaps most importantly, how do these chases actually play out in the skin of a fish? ....

Reference: Yamanaka & Kondo. 2013. In vitro analysis suggests that difference in cell movement during direct interaction can generate various pigment patterns in vivo. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1315416111 

Yong judiciously points up the limitations of the current state of this research. Such circumspection is one reason we rely on this science blogger.  

June 22, 1913

Sándor Weöres ( June 22, 1913 to January 22 1989) was a Hungarian poet, treasured by his countrymen. Here is a biography sketch accompanying a set of stamps published in his honor last year. 

Sándor Weöres (1913–1989) Kossuth Prize-winning poet, writer and literary translator, [was the] founder of the Béla Pásztor Award for young poets. His wife, Amy Károlyi, was also a poet and literary translator. His first volume (It Is Cold) was published in Pécs in 1934. Generations grew up on his colourful, tuneful verses. The best known are Bobita (1955) and If the World Were a Thrush (1974). As a translator his achievement is also astounding. His interpretation of works mainly directly from the original of authors in English, German, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian and Latin raised him to the pinnacle of literature translated into Hungarian.

Yes, there is a statue of Weores and his cat situated in an Hungarian park.




Sandor Weores translated The Wasteland into Hungarian, as well as the Tao Te Ching.

June 21, 1905

Karl Jaspers was careful to distinguish his own, prior, use of the term existentialism, from that of the French leftists. Jean- Paul Sartre  (June 21, 1905 to April 15, 1980) may well have been the main figure he wished to disassociate himself from. Sartre's history in the French resistance during the war has been over-estimated.

From his New York Times obit we quote:

Although he was once closely allied with the Communist Party, Mr. Sartre was for the last 15 or so years an independent revolutionary who spoke more in the accents of Maoism than of Soviet Communism. As an intellectual and a public figure--a man the police disliked to arrest--he used his prestige to defend the rights of ultraleftist groups to express themselves, and in 1973 he became titular editor of Liberation, a radical Paris daily. In addition he lent his name to manifestos and open letters in favor of repressed groups in Greece, Chile and Spain. He was a rebel with a thousand causes, a modern Don Quixote.

Sartre's ideas at any phase of his intellectual career are fairly described as "whining." Still, I find it perhaps a dreadful calumny -- the story -- that he named a cat, "Nothing." Just because something is repeated on the web is no evidence of accuracy.

June 20, 1913

Lilian Jackson Braun (June 20, 1913 to  June 4, 2011) put the cozy back in mystery stories and the flea comb back in the writer's desk set.





I am quoting her Washington Times obit.; the others, including The New York Times, didn't bother to look beyond the publishers' releases.


LANDRUM, S.C. (AP) - The author who wrote 29 books in the “The Cat Who …” mystery series almost quit writing after the third book was published because popular tastes had changed so much, but a casual conversation with her husband convinced her to try again.

Lilian Jackson Braun, who died last week in South Carolina, took an 18-year hiatus between “The Cat Who Turned On and Off” and “The Cat Who Saw Red,” published in 1986. She resumed because her husband encouraged her to return to writing after she retired from The Detroit Free Press in 1984.

Braun and her first publisher parted ways when she refused to add sex and violence to her fourth book, her... [second husband, of 32 years], Earl Bettinger of Tryon, N.C., [said]...On a rainy day years later, she asked ...[him] if he wanted to read the rejected book, “And I said, 'Lilian, everything about this book demands that you send it back to your agent.’”

So she tried again, and Berkley Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Books (USA), not only accepted her book but also reprinted her first three mysteries.....

Braun, 97, died Saturday of natural causes at the Hospice House of the Carolina Foothills in Landrum. She had lived in Tryon, N.C., for the past 23 years. She wrote 31 books, including two short story collections, and worked 30 years at The Detroit Free Press.

June 19, 1908

One blogger, careful in his documentation for the career of Charles F. Arcieri, says of this artist that he:

'....was born on November 11, 1884, in San Francisco, California. ...... He was the oldest of two children born to Joseph, a day laborer, and Filomena, both Italian emigrants. They lived in San Francisco at 5 Gavan Place. Fifteen-year-old Arcieri’s occupation was “boot-black” or shoeshiner.

'The 1907 Crocker-Langley San Francisco Directory said Arcieri was a Berkeley resident who was at 236 Oak. The 1910 directory listed Arcieri as a commercial artist at 45 Ecker..... Arcieri was listed as a San Francisco Institute of Art student in the University of California Register 1909–10 and University of California Bulletin, Register 1910–11.
'Arcieri’s marriage to Dora F. Gebhardt was noted in the San Francisco Call, June 18, 1908, and L’Italia, June 19, 1908.

'In the 1910 census, Arcieri and Dorothea had a five-month-old son, Joseph. Also in the household was Arcieri’s mother (a widow) and a lodger. They resided in Berkeley at 827 Delaware Street. Arcieri was the proprietor of a photo-engraving business...... Around 1913 the Berkeley residents moved to the Bronx in New York City.

'The 1914 and 1915 Trow’s New York City Directories said Arcieri was an illustrator at 951 Jennings. The following year Arcieri was at 1477 Longfellow Avenue.

'The New York Press, May 18, 1916, reported Arcieri’s real estate transaction, “Bryant Avenue.—John A. Steinmetz sold for Albert E. Hemp to Charles F. Arcieri No. 1554 Bryant Avenue, near 173d street, a three-story dwelling, 20x100.” A month later Arcieri purchased two houses. It was noted in the New York Tribune, June 18, 1916: “A. D. Rockwell, jr., has sold to Charles F. Arcieri two two family houses at 1484 and 1486 Bryant Avenue.”'

Arcieri's art continued to get attention. The above information and possibly his illustration below were reported at this blog, where there are more instances of his illustrations.



More of the story, though not enough can be found here.

'Arcieri moved to New York City during the late 1920s and exhibited there with the National Academy of Design. The painter and illustrator favored lush colorful impressionistic landscapes and portraits. He specialized in figures. In 1933, Arcieri moved to Grantwood, New Jersey, continuing to exhibit with the National Academy of Design. He passed away in 1945.'

June 18, 1857

In the early part of the century which preceded our 21st, Henry Huntington, the railroad magnate, possessed 4 copies of Shakespeare's First Folio. Henry Clay Folger, President of Standard Oil, had 82 copies (later to be the basis for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.)

For Henry Clay Folger Jr. (June 18, 1857 to June 11, 1930) ) each First Folio copy was individual and an individual treasure. Here is an example of an particular copy of a print run being especially interesting: this is not from Shakespeare's writing, but Eric Rasmussen in The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios (2011) cites a manuscript of John Donne's. In one place in Donne's work, where there is a blot of ink, there is also an eyelash which has dried in the ink, and so centuries later Donne's lash is a touching reminder, of the mortality of the poet and that immortality which may transcend.

Rasmussen has another example, this incident about a Shakespeare Folio. Although it is not part of the Folger, the Shakespeare First Folio belonging to the Marquis of Northampton, preserves, near the beginning of "Love's Labour's Lost" a page with 5 cat paw prints. Apparently "a cat with dirty paws jumped up onto the volume as it lay sitting [sic] on a table or lap. It then appears that before it could take a full sixth step, the cat was snatched off of the book."

Eighty-two copies of Shakespeare's First Folio is a wonderful gift to the cultural world of the United States. We do wonder how much Folger might have offered to obtain such a amusingly marked copy as we just described: how much would the price have been to avoid Folger's Labour's Lost?

June 17, 1963

John Cowper Powys (October 8, 1872 to June 17, 1963) the British writer, the most gifted perhaps of a gifted family, inspired exasperated praise in the best of cases. He was an "irresistible long winded bore" in one accounting. And the creator of a "dangerous" realm where "The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched..." according to Margaret Drabble.

The life of the man who claimed these extravagant phrases was in its

.... early part ... standard Victoriana. John Cowper Powys was ...[the] eldest son of the Rev. Charles Francis Powys, vicar of Shirley, Derbyshire, whose sprawling brood of eleven so epitomized the Victorian age it could have been written into existence by Trollope, a volume per child. The vicar’s wife, Mary Cowper Powys, was a gifted amateur pianist doomed to creative frustration, like so many Victorian wives; the reverend had a tin ear, alas, and no time for suffragists. Mary Cowper’s was a dreary life. But she was descended from the poets John Donne and William Cowper, so art ran in her blood and in that of her children, five of whom became artists of one kind or another, and three of whom, John Cowper, Theodore Francis (“T.F.”), and Llewellyn, went on to become writers. John Cowper became something more; I’m not quite sure what.

Like his father and brothers, he was educated at the ancient and prestigious Sherborne School in Dorset, where he succeeded in keeping bullies at bay by aggressively playing the fool, a skill he honed by practicing on his younger brothers. After Sherborne, still in the family footsteps, he went to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. There he associated with few, bar one or two fellow misfits; he kept a revolver in his rooms as a deterrent to excessive socializing. After graduating with a second-class degree in History, he married and fathered a son, and—having failed dismally at various kinds of teaching—he signed on with the Oxford Extension public lecture program which, in 1904, sent him off on his first lecture tour of the new world. Although he never became in the slightest bit American, America was the making of him. He stayed for 25 years until, driven by financial necessity, homesickness, and the need to be near the graves of his ancestors, he returned to Britain. He died in the mountains of North Wales at age 90. 

Perhaps there is a glimpse of his appeal in this feline description from A Glastonbury Romance (1932):

Out of the midst of a dazed condition of his senses, John stared down at the abominable despair in the hollow eye-sockets of that decomposed cat-head. A whitish-yellowish cabbage stalk lay buried in the mud near it....

What we have here, and it must explain some of his appeal, is originality.

Drabble estimates:

(More bread and butter is consumed and more tea drunk in the novels of John Cowper Powys than in the whole of the rest of English literature.) He wrote poems, and essays, and gargantuan epic fictions, and manuals of self-help, and innumerable letters. Words poured from him, and he was famous for never rereading any of them. It is left to us, the readers, to lose ourselves in his creation, and to try to emerge from it and to make some sense of it. It is no wonder that mainstream literary critics have avoided him, and that a handful of scholars and addicts have clustered round his oeuvre. He is so far outside the canon that he defies the concept of a canon.

June 16, 1957

Raymond Pettibon, (June 16, 1957) is an artist who first gained renown designing album covers for records. One review of a show featuring his later work says:

If genius means anything anymore—for me it is the union of inexplicably keen insight with an uncanny capacity to say or show what others fail to articulate but everybody knows—then the artist Raymond Pettibon is one, the man of the hour at minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. Fittingly, two exhibitions this spring show an artist obsessed with the larger, grittier, and often hallucinatory contradictions of “this American life.”

We were drawn to his typical sentiments put in an, I assume, ironic placement, as in this drawing reproduced on Irena Jurek's website. I like subtle better than hallucinatory.

June 15, 1872

Thomas Caulfield Irwin (May 4, 1823 to February 20, 1892) ) was an Irish poet. Once wealthy, and ambitious, his poems earned him the title of "the Irish Keats." According to Geoffrey Taylor, in Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1951), there is little information extant about this writer, but he thinks it fair to deduce that Irwin was a classical scholar, and at one time, married, and with a son who died young. The poet traveled in Europe, Syria, North Africa. 

Toward the end of his life he was living in "squalid" poverty, and "more than a little mad." Then, Dublin remarked on his eccentricities more. These included not eating meat, pacifism, and a love for cats. The pacifism might be tossed over when it clashed with the cats. A missing cat, on June 15, 1872, prompted Irwin to place this ad in a Dublin newspaper:

Robbery! One Pound Reward. Stolen from the back drawing room at No. 1 Portland Street, North Circular Road, Dublin, between the hours of one and three o'clock, of Saturday 15 June 1872. A Large Dark Gray and Black Male Cat, the property of Mr. Thomas C. Irwin. This poor animal who answers to the name of Ton, and is lame in the left fore paw and weak in the left eye, can be of no value to anyone but Mr. Irwin, who had him for five years before he lost him through the cruel and desperate act of a miscreant. One pound will be given by me to whoever restores the animal uninjured, and at once, to above address, or who affords authentic information as to the party who entered Mr. Irwin's room and committed the robbery. 

Here is something Irwin wrote, excerpted, from "Hours I Remember Lonely and Lovely to Me"

Hours I remember lonely and lovely to me,
Living a life as simple as sunlight or tree
When with some beautiful white cloud in love I would be
...
Or grasses amiably waving in the warm wind of the sea....

Perhaps the above is tranquility recollected in turmoil? I am not sure when those lines were written but in 1881 Irwin was back in the papers asking for the return of "...two grey brindled striped Cats, male and female...stolen...[from No. 41 Stephens Green.]

Irwin died in Rathmines, in the Dublin spring of 1892. Thomas C. Irwin should be remembered too for writing this:

...
Around the stalk of the hollyhock
The yellow, long, thin-waisted wasp,
Emitting sounds, now like a lisp
In the dry glare, now like a rasp,
Climbed slowlily with stealthy clasp,
And vicious, intermittent hum;
Nosed awhile each sickly bloom
Withered round the edges crisp -
Then head-long vanishing grew dumb...

According to Taylor, Irwin's  six volumes of poetry, the last published in 1889, do not include many poems in obscure Irish magazines, uncollected and forgotten.

June 14, 1938

John Van Alstyne Weaver, Jr. (July 17, 1893 to June 14, 1938) is little recalled now but H. L. Mencken liked his poetry. Mencken wrote a preface to the 1939 volume In American: The Collected Poems of John V. A. Weaver. Weaver, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, spent time in Hollywood, and died in Colorado Springs. Among his screen writing credits is the screenplay for the 1938 film, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And Weaver co-authored The Far-Sighted Cat, with his wife, Peggy Wood. Though I have not read the book, it gets the author a post on this blog.

June 13, 1865

The Herne's Egg was the last play Yeats (June 13 1865 to January 28, 1939)  wrote. He finished it in 1938 and said it was influenced by his work with Shri Purohit Swami (1882-1941). They were translating the Upanishads together, on Majorca, at the time.  The Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats (David A. Ross, 2009) records some assessments of The Herne's Egg, including this by Helen Vendler: it is "essentially a rather arid and contrived piece of theatrical writing." Harold Bloom didn't like it either; he said it was "a monument to a mounting confusion and systematic inhumanity of the last phase of Yeats."

In the play we read: "The Great Herne knows 'every man's deed and will meet out a most memorable punishment:' in their next incarnation...[certain] men will be 'pushed down a step or two' and become cat, rat, bat, dog, wolf, or goose."

I cannot pronounce on the play but I rely on the verdict of the Encyclopedia Britannica regarding this art. They said The Herne's Egg was William Butler Yeats' "most raucous work."

June 12, 1892

Djuna Barnes, (June 12, 1892 to June 18 1982) the American writer and artist, was the product of multiple generations of artists; she had an avante garde childhood in upstate New York. She managed to be at the centers of artistic progress during the first half of the last century. Barnes is better known now than during her lifetime and she made a splash THEN. Barnes's interview of James Joyce was published in Vanity Fair magazine, in 1922. She was subsidized off and on by the art patron Peggy Guggenheim. T. S. Eliot was so impressed with her novel, Nightwood, (1936), a classic of lesbian art, that he edited it, wrote an introduction for it, and made sure Faber and Faber published it.

Here is the ending of a poem she titled "Suicide":
....
They gave her hurried shoves this way
And that
Her body shock-abbreviated
As a city cat.
She lay out listlessly like some small mug
Of beer gone flat.

This is from The Book of Repulsive Women, published in 1915.

June 11, 1926

John Aspinall (June 11, 1926 to June 29, 2000) is commonly described as a gambler, but he made a fortune running gambling facilities in Great Britain, which is different than being a gambler.  With this money he opened two zoos (Howletts Zoo and Port Lynne Zoo), which are now open to the public.  In 1980 there were two incidents which were part of a string of sad incidents at the zoos. Brian Stocks and Bob Wilson were both handlers there who were killed by a female tiger (1980).  Her name was Zeya.  She was killed after the second death.  Aspinall had extreme right wing views, and was a friend of Lord Lucan.

June 10, 1959

Eliot Spitzer (June 10, 1959) as attorney general of New York did an industrious job of administering justice. This may have led to his being setup in a prostitution sting. Regardless the huge hypocrisy of the American people can be relied upon to turn on a public figure who does what they themselves do. Spitzer is probably the model for the "Good Wife" show's bad husband.

In 2013, five years later, Spitzer left his wife for a political spokesperson, Lis Smith. According to usually unreliable sources, the new couple adopted a cat together.

The Daily Mail says:

Eliot Spitzer's ex-girlfriend, 33, gets the cat in break-up - two years after their affair ended the disgraced former New York governor's marriage

Ex governor and girlfriend Lis Smith have split up after two years together

....
Relationship cost Smith her political spin job and [him] his marriage to Silda

Now it appears his ex has kept the cat the couple adopted together in May.

....The couple adopted the gray grimalkin together - then named Silk - from an LA shelter earlier this year.

In May, non-for-profit Operation Save the Who Datt Fur Babies, posted a picture of Smith, 33, cuddled up with the cat under the caption 'Guess who Silk was adopted by? The ex Governor of New York! This baby is so lucky!'

Now it appears Smith got custody in the break-up after she posted on Twitter another picture of her posing with the cat, who was re-named Cersei after the Game of Thrones character, just hours before news emerged of the split.

Smith even created a Twitter account for the cat whose bio reads 'director of rapid response at@Cats­For­OMalley.'

Smith and Spitzer, 56, have agreed to go their separate ways after their two-year relationship. A spokeswoman for the former governor, Lisa Linden, told NY Daily News that the break-up was amicable.

'Given how hectic both their work and travel schedules are, they decided a few weeks ago to take a break in their relationship,' Linden told NY Daily News.
"They remain very close and continue to care for each other,' Linden added.

At least they didn't stay together for the cat's sake.

June 9, 1843

Bertha von Suttner (June 9, 1843 to June 21, 1914) won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1905. She organized and attended peace conferences her adult life, and even wrote a novel, Lay Down Your Arms,(1889) to express her convictions. Her life is more interesting than her ideas, and fortunately we have her autobiography, Memoirs of Bertha von Suttner: the records of an eventful life. (1910 is the date of their English publication).

Bertha von Suttner (née Countess Kinsky) was of "gentle birth" as it was phrased in her era, but her father was impoverished. In 1873 she took a position as governess for the wealthy von Suttners. When the son fell in love with her, the von Suttners refused permission for the marriage. Bertha then went to Paris (from her birthplace, Prague) having answered an ad Alfred Nobel posted for a housekeeper/secretary. She was with Nobel only briefly, but the books say she influenced his ideas, and they corresponded the rest of his life. After a few weeks in Paris Bertha returned to Austria and secretly married Arthur Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttner. She in time was officially, then, a baroness and a countess. 

Bertha was interesting; her whole family was interesting. She has this to say about her brother, Arthur Franz Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau, whom she never saw after 1872:

My brother was still alive, to be sure, but, except for an exchange of letters once in a great while, we were quite out of touch with each other. So in these recollections I have had nothing to say of him. He was an odd fish, living perfectly aloof from mankind and isolated in a small Dalmatian city, occupying himself with floriculture and chess. His company consisted of a number of cats. Solitary walks along the seashore, the reading of botanical and mineralogical works, were his only passions. ....[H]is death....occurred a few years ago...

Bertha herself, Nobel laureate of peace, died two months before the outbreak of World War I.

June 8, 1903

Marguerite Yourcenar ( June 8, 1903 to December 17, 1987) a French writer, has been called a lover of cats. I don't know how accurate that is, but we have this picture of her with one. Her biography mentions her fantasy about revisiting events in her life, and a scene with "some cats I picked up...in an Anatolian village."

One biographer, Josyane Savigneau, (Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life ), quotes this interesting line of Yourcenar's: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.‎" Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951) is her best known book. The much honored writer became the first woman to be a member of the Academie Francaise in 1980.

June 7, 1954

The prolific and brilliant writer Louise Erdrich, (June 7, 1954) gained fame early in her career, (Love Medicine, 1984) and has since, consistently received critical attention and awards. She was a runner-up for the Pulitzer, with Plague of Doves (2009) and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, (2016) for LaRose.

Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (1994) collects various interviews with this literary couple who often co-wrote their fiction. This quote, from their early married life, suggests certain power dynamics:

'I have children, smart beautiful striking eccentric daughters. We play. When they have to go to bed I talk to Michael who has never said a boring word to me in our eleven year relationship. If he is on the phone, I pet the dog or my cat.'

The dog....My cat.

Not simpler times, the decade of the 80s, but more approachable perhaps.

June 6, 1523

Emanuel Swedenborg's life and writings once had a rather odd hold on the modern imagination. I say odd for one thing because nothing I have read indicates his ideas were so compelling or challenging that he should have been  widely influential. He seems to have been a genuinely humble guy, given to mystical experiences. And talking about what he learned. He warned people to be careful they were transmitting the result of divine help, and not something personal. Just a nice guy. Swedenborg held the tether of reason lightly but his ideas were hardly world-changing. His dates (January 29, 1688 to March 29, 1772) overlap Blake's slightly (November 28,  1757 to August 12, 1827) which I mention since the latter is an example of someone whose experiences resulted in astounding art and life events. But Swedenborg, -- a nice guy. Yet, he was influential on many: Kant, (though he pretended otherwise,) and the father of William James, who found Swedenborg enthralling, for example. 

The first Swedenborg temple in the United States opened on January 5, 1800 in Baltimore. More recently we find mention of a Swedenborgian pastor in Portland Maine, named Wilma Wake. Her website, swedenborg.org is where she published a sermon titled "The Near Death Experience and Love," (March 14, 1999.) In it she talks about her cat Marty. She had Marty declawed after he scratched her.

So on June 6, Sweden's national day, (on June 6, 1523, Gustav Vasa,was elected king of Sweden, and a new dynasty and identity began) we ask, about one of their most famous sons, was Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedenborgian?

June 5, 1934

William Gillette (1853 -1937) was an actor and playwright. He was the earliest to portray Sherlock Holmes on stage. Gillette made the deerstalker hat and curved pipe crucial elements of that persona. His fame was such that such caricatures like this below were widely recognised in the early 20th century.





William Gillette, an American, was one of the charter members of the Baker Street Irregulars, which Christopher Morley convened in New York City, for the first time, June 5, 1934.

June 4, 2019

June 4, 2019 is National Hug Your Cat Day.
I got this information from Simon Tofield.
His cat is in this animated graphic.
The thing I love about Tofield is, alone among famous cat creators, his cats somehow manage to remain feline regardless of the anthropomorphic fringe.

Most artists can't keep that balance.

June 3, 1967

Ben Holt and Knud Andreas Jønsson co-authored a study which throws the current taxonomic picture of cats into question. The funding for this study was approved by the
then head of zoological studies at Imperial College London, the Professor of Conservation Science, Eleanor Jane Milner-Gulland.

It was in her capacity as Director of the Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment Initiative, that Milner-Gulland lead this initiative for Imperial College that brought together environmental researchers and teachers from around the world.

Milner-Gulland was born in Cuckfield, June 3 1967. Her father is Prof. Robert Rainsford Milner-Gulland. In 1993, she married Prof. Martin Stewart Williams, with whom she has a son.

Her bibliography includes:

Conservation of Biological Resources, 1998;
Wildlife Conservation and Sustainable Use: a handbook of techniques, 2007;
Animal Migration: a synthesis, 2011,
and many articles in, as they say, peer-reviewed journals.

Milner-Gulland claims the British avocations of horse riding, dog walking, languages, and travel as hers.

But enough personal detail. What about the results of the research she promoted? We quote:

'A cat is, of course, a cat. Lions are cats too, as are leopards, lynxes and so on – the “Felidae” family contains 41 species in total. But what about other closely related species such as hyenas or mongooses? These animals are not in the cat family: they are cat-like “Feliformia”, but are in their own separate families.

'So why are some species grouped together in the same families and others separated into different families? It might surprise you to learn that there is no general answer to this question, despite the fact that we now know a lot about evolutionary relationships for groups like mammals. Science has moved on and so should the way we classify life on earth.

'The science of “taxonomy” categorises species (such as Homo sapiens, in the case of humans) into broader groups such as orders (for example primates) or kingdoms (for example Animalia). Current approaches date back to 18th century Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus saw all living things as creations of god and sorted them into hierarchical groups according to how similar or different he perceived them to be.

'Evolution hadn’t even been theorised in Linnaeus’s lifetime. These days, we have a huge amount of DNA and fossil data to map out how, and when, one species branched out from another. Modern taxonomists therefore aim to base their decisions on evolutionary relationships, but the process remains subjective and there has been no attempt to standardise practises across all species on earth.

'Taxonomic groups such as birds and mammals represent “classes” under current classification systems, which are then subdivided into orders, families and genera. Our research uses the latest evolutionary trees for birds and mammals to demonstrate that current taxonomic classifications are highly inconsistent.'

These conclusions bolstered a stellar scholarly reputation. In fact in 2015 Milner-Gulland moved from Imperial College to Oxford University. Now she is Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has been a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, since 2015.

June 2, 1938

Curiouser and Curiouser:The Evolution of Wonderland is the name of a website which I believe, undertakes to track changes in the attitudes toward Lewis Carroll's classic. A charming scholar named Lauren Millikan created this website and so to her we owe this information about the book illustrator Helen Oxenbury (June 2, 1938). There we learn--

'Helen Oxenbury ...was born Ipswich, England... She is a beloved and critically acclaimed children's book illustrator. Her Alice, which portrays Alice as a spunky and confident child of the modern era, won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1999. To learn more about Helen Oxenbury, follow this link to Readingrockets.org (including a video interview!). Below you will see all of the Oxenbury illustrations from chapters 5, 6, and 7. ...'

And here we switch to the graphics Millikan uses, to illustrate Oxenbury's art. Please note also I have copied Millikan's copyright note at the bottom, which I think I shall begin copying myself--not using HER name, of course.

With of course Carroll's text:

" 'All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. Cambridge: Candlewick Press, 1999, is the edition we follow Curiouser and Curiouser:The Evolution of Wonderland, in using.

And lastly the copyright notes I intend to follow myself:

'This image was created by me by taking a digital photograph of this artist's illustration. If you own the original of this image and would like me to take down this reproduction, please contact me at Lauren.Millikan@alumni.carleton.edu.'

June 1, 1878

A summary of John Masefield's informative years says:

'John Edward Masefield [June 1, 1878 to May 12, 1967] was born in Herefordshire, England. His idyllic childhood was shattered by the premature death of his mother in 1885 and father in 1891. Thereafter, Masefield and his siblings were entrusted to the guardianship of a domineering aunt. Though exhibiting literary pretensions and no little talent, his new guardian determined that he enrol in the Merchant Marine.

'Masefield’s maiden voyage to Chile in 1894, aged only 15, proved disastrous. His constitution had always been weak: too weak, indeed, to suffer a 32-day storm off Cape Horn that he had to endure. Depleted in strength, he became gravely ill soon after arrival and was deemed unfit to continue duty. He was returned to England via the Panama isthmus. Masefield’s aunt, however, insisted that he continue in the service. Against his wishes, he sailed for New York in the spring of 1895. It was his final voyage as, on arrival, Masefield resigned.

'He did not return to England until 1897: this American adventure was revelatory as, while there, he committed himself to a literary vocation. On returning to London he met and formed an enduring friendship with W. B. Yeats, and began the prolific literary output that would characterise the rest of his life.'

In 1912 Masefield wrote a story in verses he titled "Daffodil Fields." In an account in the volume The Poems and Plays of John Masefield: Poems (1922 edition) the poet says he got the story  from a footnote to Sir John McKenzie's Travels in Iceland. The footnote says the events described happened in the 11th century. All we will mention now is this picture of what may have been a medieval cat

'Old Mother Occleve stretched her sewing flat. "It's nine," she said. Old Occleve stroked the cat. "Ah, cat," he said, "hast had good go at mouse?" Lion sat listening tense to all within the house.'
John Masefield, became poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1930.