Literary cats I have loved

                                              

Rusty

      No animal is as suitable for the dilettante as the cat.  Cats are intelligent, entertaining, and independent.  These characteristics also make them the favorite of many writers:

"I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course." ~ Mark Twain

      Many writers have included cats in their writings and some have made them the main character.  Following is a list of seven literary cats that I love and admire.  There are many others.  

Look for more literary cats in the future on this site. For more about cats including videos, quotations, pictures, gifts and just about everything cat, go to Cat Lover's Guide. 


1.  The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is one of the most famous literary cats.  He sits on a tree limb and taunts Alice with his wide smile and his wit.  Finally, his body fades away and only his smile gleams down at her from the tree. ". . . 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."
2.   Rum Tum Tugger, Old Deuteronomy, Macavity, Jennyanydots are some of the cats T.S. Eliot describes in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. These cats appear in poems and the poems were the inspiration for the long-running , Broadway musical "Cats."
3.  Mehitabel, currently in her ninth life, says she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra.  She is a cat who enjoys a good time.  Her motto is toujours gai. Her main confidante is Archy, a cockroach who in another life was a poet. He lives in a newspaper office where he types Mehitabel's stories and exploits.  Unfortunately, he can't reach the shift key and can't type capital letters or punctuation marks.  Archy is a philosopher, For example, " An optimist is a guy who has never had much experience."  Archy and Mehitabel tells their story.  It is a compilation of the newspaper columns of Don Marquis who wrote for several New York newspapers.  I have loved this book since high school.
4.  Dewey the Cat is the true story of Dewey, a yellow cat that appeared on the Book Return on a cold winter night in the Spencer Public Library in Spencer, Iowa.  Dewey became the library resident cat and a local celebrity. Vicki Myron wrote his biography and the book was a best seller in 2009.  It is possibly scheduled to become a movie. Isn't Dewey the perfect name for a library cat.
5.  Koko and Yum Yum are two Siamese cats belonging to detective James Qwilleran, the hero of mystery books by Lillian Jackson Braun.  The cats travel with Qwilleran, are fed delicacies, and frequently provide inspiration for crime solving.  
6.  Mrs. Murphy is another crime solving cat.  She appears in a series of novels by Rita Mae Brown and with another cat and a corgi often finds the clues to solve murders.  Rita Mae Brown's cat, Sneaky Pie Brown is credited as co-author of the books. 
7.  Hodge, a cat owned by Samuel Johnson, was immortalized by James Boswell in his extensive biography Life of Johnson.  A statue of Hodge was placed outside Johnson's London residence.

                                                    Bella, the sweetest cat!                                         


     

List of my favorite things

     1.  "Raindrops on roses. . . " No, just kidding, but I do like flowers, preferably those that are delivered to the door in a box.

My granddaughter performing in "Oklahoma" summer theater

      2.  Musical plays, especially on Broadway, where excellence reigns.  This fall, I saw my first New York Met opera at Lincoln Center.  Now, I'm a fan.  Bad opera is very, very bad, and I've seen a few, but the Met was wonderful!  Excellence is good.  Musical theater runs in the family.  My granddaughter
is a musical theater major in her college sophomore year.
     3.  Satirical humor.  Jonathan Stewart is my very favorite on television for satire and the New Yorker magazine cartoons come in second.
     4.  A well-written book and magazines and newspapers.  I've always been a news hound.  The NY Times satisfies that need best.
     5.   Teens, especially ones I used to teach.  They can be so honest and so hopeful.  Even when they are perfectly horrible, there's a vulnerability that's redeeming.
     6.  My dear husband who cheerfully puts up with all my weirdnesses and supports my causes. 
     7.  Strong, aromatic cups of coffee, but not after 3 pm unless I want to stay awake all night.
     8.  Computers and the Internet, the best technology of my lifetime, and iphones.  How did we ever do without them?
     9.  Foreign travel and U.S. travel to places new to me.  This summer I'm going to Greece for the first time.  I've wanted to go since seeing ancient ruins photos in my high school Latin book.
   10.  Visting and being visited by my beautiful, smart, thoughtful, kind daughter and her family.

   That's my current list--not in order of preference.  The list my change next week.  What's on your list?

For today, random thoughts of this dilettante

     The big negative of being a dillettante is the sudden, unexplainable boredom for a project or subject that seemed so exciting only a few weeks ago.  I'm reminded of a college professor's description of the writer Samuel T. Coleridge, "He was a monument of incompleted projects." Even that early in life, those words struck a familiar chord for me.  
      I started but did not complete a recipe book, a poetry book,  a decoupage table, 
 organization of my zillions of photographs, scrapbooks for my grandchildren, and countless other things I've forgotten.  They are there though for completion later in life. . . perhaps.
     This enthusiasm, then boredom, then abandonment must be a psychological problem.  I have completed things, however.  I did teach school for 34 years, raised a successful daughter, sustained one marriage though not the first one.  So, it looks like I can manage the big stuff, but not the little projects. 
I really do want to finish that poetry book and the recipe book.  Maybe one day I'll get brave enough to put some of my poems on this blog.   Eureka! perhaps it is fear of failure that hinders me or laziness or whatever.
     Okay,  that's what I'm thinking about this hour.

Movies: A dilettante's delight: Jacksonville, FL, silent movie capital

The upcoming Academy Awards remind me that movies are a true dilettante's delight. Where else is there such variety as in the movies.  I've been a fan since elementary school when my family went to the drive-in theater several times every week.  Then television came along.  As an adult, I discovered that Jacksonville, FL my home residence was once a popular and exciting movie filming locale.  Conservative Jacksonville, FL a movie capital? Jacksonville producing more films than Los Angeles? Not possible, you say, but this was the case during the silent film era.          By 1916, movie making was Jacksonville's most important business. Between 1901 and 1921, more than 300 feature films were shot in and around the area. The very first Technicolor feature film,"The Gulf Between," was made in Jacksonville.       The Kalem Studio, looking for a place to film away from the wintry blasts of New York, was the first to arrive about 1908, and by 1914 had built the world's largest outdoor stage and a glass-roofed studio with a $20,000 lighting system. The studio's, "A Florida Feud," made in 1909 in Jacksonville was the first film shot in Florida. Kalem's films were very popular at the box office. After these successes, many other studios arrived in Jacksonville, among those named are the Edison Company, King Bee Film Company, Vim Comedy Company, Lubin Studios.                                                                                                                                                     The actress/script writer/ producer/critic, Gene Gauntier, who worked for Kalem Studios, has left wonderful descriptions of early filmmaking in Jacksonville in her autobiography, "Blazing the Trail: The Autobiography of Gene Gauntier" as they appeared in serialized versions in 1928-1929, Woman's Home Companion.          Jacksonville and Florida history buffs as well as film buffs will greatly enjoy her accounts.      The cast and crew of Kalem were housed in the Roseland, a big hotel on the St. John's River in Fairfield about fifteen minutes by trolley from Jacksonville. Rooms were also rented at the same time to the casts of variety acts playing at the Ostrich Farm, a block away on Talleyrand Avenue.       Most of the filming was done directly across the St. John's River from Fairfield at Strawberry Creek. The crew reached it by row boat. She describes the Jacksonville area as a "moving-picture paradise": "There were wonderful stretches of sand at Pablo and Manhattan Beach, facing the open sea, uninhabited and desolate, with their scrubby palmettos, which served as setting for many desert island scenes. There were fishing villages, primitive as even a picture company could wish, quaint old-time Florida houses with their 'galleries' of white Colonial columns, orange and grapefruit groves, pear and peach orchards which gave forth lovely scents when in full bloom; formal gardens and Spanish patios; the gorgeous Ponce de Leon hotel and gardens, and the picturesque old fort in St. Augustine."       She describes life at the Roseland and in Jacksonville as exciting and lively. What happened to the movie industry in Jacksonville? Many factors caused its demise. The local citizens did not approve of the free lifestyle of the movie people and the fact that they filmed on Sunday. Some of the movie companies were fly-by-night leaving stacks of unpaid bills when they hastily departed. Politics changed and those supporting the studios were not re-elected. Then World War I slowed the production of raw film to a trickle, and the influenza epidemic of 1918 closed theaters. When the dust cleared, the movie industry had moved to Hollywood.       The movie industry, however, has not entirely forgotten Jacksonville. Jacksonville has recently provided the background for many feature films and television shows. All those wonderful locales described by Gauntier are still excellent for filming. The City of Jacksonville Film and Television Office gives all the current information about making films in Jacksonville and Jacksonville film history.      The Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee has movies in Florida memorabilia: props, posters, lobby cards, advertising.

S. Pepys, dilettante extraordinaire

An English street

      Samuel Pepys ( peeps) is not just the man with the funny name.  He was a wonderful dilettante.  Though he lived in the 17th Century (1633-1703), we know all about his daily life.  He kept a secret diary from 1660 to 1669 and stopped writing only because he was going blind. He wrote the diary in code and left it by will to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it is still preserved in the Pepsian Library.  
      The diary is a complete picture of his time and his inner life.  He was in a position to know all that was going on in his world, and he had a great curiosity about people and experiences.  He rose from genteel poverty to become Secretary of the British Navy.  He was said to have served this office and all the ones leading to it with utmost integrity.  In his private life, he was a patron of the arts,  lover of the theater, skilled musician, collector of books and curiosities, and an interested friend to great minds of his day. He loved good food and wine and the companionship of women.
      He married the love of his life when he was 22 and she only 15.  The marriage was childless.  He wrote much about his wife and his marriage in the diaries, their fights, his infidelities, and their social lives.  
       His diary entries are straight forward.  There is no guile or attempt to hide the truth.  Of course, he was writing for himself.  It is a little strange that he wrote for himself and wrote in code, but willed the diaries, six bound volumes, to a college library.  The code was not a difficult one to decipher, but the ordinary person picking it up and his wife would not be able to read it.  
      You could say that Pepys was one of the first English bloggers.  Many books and articles have been written about Pepys.  There is one current blog about Pepys that you may like to examine.  It records much that is in the diaries:


Readers in the Mist, a blog of New Mountain City Library of  New South Wales, Australia


       

Confessions of an ex-English teacher

The junky bookcase in the computer room

My dear husband Dan posing before New Year's Eve dinner

      One passion I have had since grade school is books.  My sister used to call me "Books" because I always had one, was looking at one in stores or reading one.  Through the years, I have kept quite a collection of ones I've read or wanted to read.  I've given many of them to library book sales and to friends, but I still have two walls of  filled book shelves in my house.
      Halloween, when kids were coming around for trick or treat, one little boy looked through the open
front door at one book shelf and asked, "Is this the library?"  I like to read books and almost always have one going, and I like to look at them and hold them.  Some day, I might buy a Kindle, but I'm not ready yet. It might be too hard to stick in my pocket, the car glove compartment, or on the hammock.
     I have a small collection of first editions that I keep in a closed, fairly dust-free cabinet.  Most of them are modern books, but I have one or two that in 100 years may be worth something. My favorite was given to me by my mother-in-law, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" by T. S. Eliot.  It was the inspiration for the Broadway play "Cats."
     In this blog, I will occasionally write about a book or an author.  I'll never get over being an ex-English teacher.
                                      A Book of verses underneath the bough,
                                      A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou
                                      Beside me singing in the wilderness
                                      Oh, wilderness were Paradise enow!
                                
                                  (E. Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

For the latest on good books see the blog, BookSlut.

Orchids for me

     One area I'm currently dabbling in is orchid growing.  Here in Florida, I have mostly ideal
conditions for growing orchids without a greenhouse.  I do have a nice screened back porch that orchids seem to like.  The thrill of growing them is to get them to bloom.  I have been successful at that.
      As with any plant, the secret is to read about their ideal environment and growing conditions and then try to duplicate that.  Orchids like lots of humidity, which, believe me, we have plenty of in north Florida.
Humidity can get to 85% + on hot summer days.  If there is a period of drought, mist the orchids in the morning and evening.  Even though they like humidity, they don't like too much water.  Water them when they look dry or at least once weekly.
     I do plant them in an orchid medium, which is mostly bark, but I add soil to it.  When temperatures
go below about 50 degrees in the winter, I bring them inside.  Orchids don't like direct sun, but they do like lots of light.  So, inside, put them in front of a window, but don't forget to open the shade or blind to get optimum light.

Defending my honor

     Some people consider a "dilettante" flighty and incapable, and there might be an element of truth in this.  I'll go with the flighty.  Even though I have moved from subject to subject. I have learned something about each one.  Moving like a bee from flower to flower has its virtues. I have greeted each new venture with enthusiasm and excitement.  This has kept me from 
becoming stale.  I don't want to be like some of my friends who are afraid to try anything new or even to let a new idea enter their heads.  Being a dilettante has kept me youthful.  


Read "In Defense of Dilettantes" from Liverputty.  You'll have to agree dilettantism has advantages:

First Disclosure

     "Dilettante" is used here in its broadest sense--dabbler, amateur,  person with a superficial interest in an act or branch of knowledge.  
     I've been a dilettante most of my adult life--a starter of projects, student of many subjects and master of none of them.  Unfortunately, equipment from old interests still clutters my house.  Who knows, I may want to use the photo enlarger again, the bead tools, the zillions of cookbooks, the toy car collection, violin, notebooks of poetry.  You begin to see the problem.
     This blog is yet another interest which will introduce you to many fascinating subjects, 
people, and places.  You too may become a dilettante.  It is not boring.