not the yertle you remember

Did you see the darling little turtle called "Taco" over at Cute Overload today? He seems to come when he is called, and crawls onto the hands of people who love him. Or her. How do you tell? The clip reminded me of how much I rather like looking at turtles, and Yertle the Turtle, and that great Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Yertle the Turtle." (I practised burping like Anthony Kiedis.)

So I thought, perhaps there must be other interesting turtle creativity? I did find some - in a most unexpected way.

I stumbled upon the Chelonian Research Foundation, "a nonprofit organization founded in 1992 for the production, publication, and support of worldwide turtle and tortoise research, with an emphasis on the scientific basis of chelonian diversity and conservation biology." So this is a scientific society with many goals concerning the wellbeing and understanding of turtles and tortoises. But - as is only right when appreciating the full compass of a living being - they also write turtle poetry.

The Chelonian Research Foundation rocks for writing turtle poetry.
Read it here. (I'm partial to Taylor Edwards' Agua de Beber.)

jeppe is napping

public domain

In 1886 a tabby tries to sleep in the Swedish sun. His master keeps pestering him. But his master is the great wildlife painter Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939), and a stripy cat in the dappled light is simply too much temptation for an Impressionist-leaning artist.

After classical training at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, Liljefors traveled throughout Europe, where in Paris he met up with the new approach championed by the Impressionists. What really mattered to him when he got home to the landscape of his youth was capturing the living creature in its habitat, factually portrayed and yet filled with its particular essence and energy.

Which, for a pet cat, would be lounge-o-rama time in a pleasantly leafy bush. Sleeping Jeppe, oil on canvas, 1886.

If you're interested to learn a bit more about Liljefors, here is a link to a fine article.

dog star

In the first century AD, the Latin writer Gaius Julius Hyginus wrote a collection of fables regarding the genesis of the constellations. Called the Astronomica, the work (along with its fellow collection, the Fabulae or Fables) are hard to find in translation now. Luckily Theoi.com was able to find a copy and give us access to a collection of myths which, as the site notes, "are not found elsewhere."

And it is there that we find recorded a few versions of how Canis Major and the "dog-star" Sirius supposedly came to be among others in the night sky.

the boss at about 6 weeks: baby pic of elizabeth

we can't remember taking this

Go ahead. Say it. Cutest kitten photo you've ever seen (at least this week).

Was I very deeply smitten ?

Oh, I loved like anything!

But my love she is a kitten,

And my heart's a ball of string.

-- "My Love and My Heart," Henry S. Leigh, from A Vers de Societe Anthology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), pp. 157-58.

diego on the BIG WATER

image courtesy b. o'brien! and copyright too

Yes, it's another installment of adventure for my favorite Pomeranian! That's Mt. Rainier in the background there, and he is in a canoe (that's a canoe, right, B.?) bobbing gently upon the waters of a bay in Puget Sound.

You know how I love Diego's rich red-orange color. Over the last century plus of recorded Pom history, colors listed include sable, chocolate, blue, fawn, and then of course black, white, and orange. There was a vogue in the 1860s for dyeing white Poms some bold colors. You may read an interesting and beautifully researched page full of info on the history of Pomeranian colors here - one of the pages at The Pomeranian Project.

white red squirrel

"Some girl cousins of mine in New Jersey have an odd pet," wrote Emily G. Hunt M.D. in 1897; "It is a red white squirrel."

She meant that it was an albino, though he had lovely black eyes instead of the pink ones you'd expect. The girls named him "Beads" in honor of them.

Albino or not, (Dr. Hunt continues)he is at any rate a most winning little pet, and there is no end to his pretty ways. As a cat and a kitten live with the same family, he has to bekept in a squirrel-cage; but he is let out a long time each day. Then Beads is quite happy. He climbs up the back of the chair and nibbles the hair of the person seated in it,gnaws the flowers in the windowsill, rushes up the stems of the callas, and scratches in the earth until it flies on all sides. He will rub his head and face and all his body in the earth, until his clean white dress is a sight to behold. After that he hops to the floor, and rubs his face carefully upon the carpet.

This is all part of a vivid short vignette complete with a portrait of Beads eating a cracker. You could find that in the periodical St. Nicholas, Vol. XXIV Part II., May, 1897 to October, 1897 (New York: The Century Co.; London: Macmillan and Co.), pp. 542-543. Or find it at this link (good luck!).

it's raining cats and dogs in san francisco

(One of my favorite quotes is Mark Twain's "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." I don't get there as often as I'd like, fog or no.)

I wish I had a chance to see The San Francisco Public Library's current exhibitions of pet-themed books and other publications. A humorous view has been selected for us in A Dog's Life (With a Special Appearance by Cats), while Berkeley artist Irene Dogmatic is featured in Dog Me Around. (Great interview with Irene Dogmatic here at Puptastic.) Of course I'd enjoy the children's books featured in It's Raining Cats and Dogs! Which makes me ask: What favorite pet-themed books do you remember from your childhood? (First to my mind: Dare Wright's The Kitten's Little Boy.)

gunn again, with a scene I know well

***Curator's edit 1/5/2012:  Rats!  The Dutch page is no more (as you've probably already seen).  However, "Apartment  Cats" by Thom Gunn is easily found online.  I cannot copy the poem here in whole, as I haven't gotten copyright permission.

The Girls wake, stretch, and pad up to the door. . .

Oh, okay, I give in to myself. I fought the temptation to also post on Thom Gunn's poem "Apartment Cats," but it's too charming. I have Girls, too, and they pad everywhere they blooming please each morning.

They rub my leg and purr;
One sniffs around my shoe,
Rich with an outside smell . . .

And so I went looking for a place to send you for the whole poem. What I found was an interesting multicultural jackpot - a Dutch poetry site's page on Katten, with English, German and French cat poems all together, untranslated. Apartment Cats is second down on the page.

"Gedichten over katten," the page is titled - "Poems on cats." Now I simply must find a translation of the 6th one down - Maurice Careme's Mon petit chat.

thom gunn cats

This weekend I took part in the Seattle Edible Book Festival, as I do most every year. This time my chosen book was Thom Gunn's Collected Poems and I attempted to do justice to "The Nature of an Action": "Here is a room with heavy-footed chairs, / A glass bell loaded with wax grapes and pears. . ." A simple, lovely fruit arrangement, right? Do you know how hard it is to get grapes to behave? (The pears were much more tractable.) Sigh.

Anyway I'm a Gunn convert, you've gathered, a deep fan of his elegant, sensual and immediate voice. I want to send you to his poem "Cat Island." Since it is still in copyright I cannot post it here, but poemhunter.com could.

Cats met us at
the landing-place
reclining in the sun
to check us in
with a momentary glance... (more)

There really is a Cat Island in the Bahamas.

dashenka's dad

Karel Capek, the Czechoslovokian best known for popularizing the word "robot" in his 1921 play Rossum's Universal Robots, was a wide-ranging writer with a great many interests. Among these were his pet dogs and cats, about whom he wrote with a philosophical yet warm and sympathetic pen. The best known of those works, if you can call it that on this side of the pond, is Dashenka, or the Life of a Puppy (1933). A biography of his wire-haired terrier, it is written in most attentive detail and with the same proud humor we all use in tales of what our beasts have done now - or so I gather from the very few English excerpts I have been able to glean.

That very scarcity of translation makes me extra thrilled to have found a blog offering Capek's Fables and Understories in English. Read Capek on a proud and naughty cat, on a small dog with a big attitude even after getting whomped by a bigger foe, or on a horse of dignity and mission - right here, you will enjoy it.

Do take a moment to surf the rest of the blog, for I'm positive you will find Capek a supremely likeable writer.

royal collection

He is a bearded young king in a most correct sporting cap; you are a pug in a babushka kerchief.
You are a white cat that, having been gifted to a young prince, has been named "Snowdrop" and is vaguely disgusted.
You are a darling tiny fluffy dog that your exalted owners have named, of all things, "Tiney."

Yes, you can see all that and more at the online exhibition "Noble Hounds and Dear Companions" courtesy of royalcollection.org.uk. Two images are my particular favorites, and I hope you will find them:

- the 1905 image from Queen Alexandra's collection, "Lieut. Watson and my cat," in which an obliging young seaman sticks the royal kitten upon his noggin, and a shipmate's hand comes in from the left to point this out, in case we might miss it. Funny, and nice to think everyone was having light hearted fun.

- the 1866 photo, "Queen Victoria and Sharp," which finds the lonely Queen (widowed in 1861) tucking her hand around a soulful dog which leans into her with eyes set towards eternity. An image that speaks volumes of love, sadness, and trust. You'll see.

the trials of briar

Oh, if only Briar would relax. He just seems so wound up.

joke

two rabbits, intent

public domain

Not much findable about this artist: Kobi (Japanese, active 19th century). Drawn with a brush in black ink, "with traces of pink watercolor" though I cannot see any, these stubby and intelligent-looking creatures reminded me of nothing so much as the fierce cats in Goya's Don Manuel Osorio de Zuniga of 1734. (You know that one - the little boy in red with a pet bird, and three ravenous kitties, one reduced to a pair of burning eyes in the dark.) That doesn't surprise me, since Japanese folklore makes the moon rabbit responsible for creating the elixir of immortality. Quite a responsibility, but these two look like they could take it.

You may see this piece at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

the easter bunny down under

Australia! Where Christmas is during the summer, and the water going down the sink might swirl the opposite way from up here in the US, but maybe not too. And where the rabbit is not a native species, and some would like to replace the Easter Bunny with the similarly-eared but endangered Easter Bilby.

The bilby (Macrotis lagotis) is rabbit sized, rabbit eared, has a long pointy nose and a long tail, and light gray fur with tan patches like a pale tortoiseshell cat. They don't drink much water, getting most of their moisture needs from their food: larva, tiny animals, fruit, bugs. They live in western Queensland. Efforts to breed them in captivity and reintroduce them to their native areas are going successfully. Want to see one and learn more? Look on this page.

"But how much fun is Easter without a chocolate bunny?" you ask. Oh, I bet it would be loads of fun with a chocolate bilby! (When I lived there as a little girl they had chocolate frogs called "Freddies." I loved them - especially in the dessert called "Freddy in a Pond," which was a frog at the bottom of a bowl of lime Jello.) And then you should visit easterbilby.com.

Happy Easter to you all, Museum friends!

yesterday was the cat's pajamas

No fooling: I know it was April Fool's yesterday, but me, I took off for a half-day vacation. I spent it lunching and window shopping with Robin and Finchy's mom.

Good thing too, because I was so stressed I'd been a real bag of cats lately. I've been busier than a three-legged cat in a dry sandbox. But we took off and found some little shops in Seattle that were just the cat's meow, though the prices were high as the hair on a cat's back. By the time I got home I was grinning like the cat that got the canary.

Awright, you're asking, what gives with the cat theme? Well, it's just that I've stumbled upon this superb list of cat-related idioms, and I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.