Tamanya running away from teapot

another shot from last night

bottles in the family

Top: Tamanya with her bottle. Not a bad image, but nothing close to catching her in the act. Even hearing it is hilarious: the sound of those tiny little fangs chewing on rubber, mixed with the sound of licking.

Bottom: doctorzamalek with his bottle, age… I don’t actually know.

another good kitten sign

An increasing number of naps even when I’m here. She’s slowly losing her fear that I’m going to vanish without a trace (though there’s the unfortunate fact that I’ll have to do just that in a little over a week, for awhile, in a prearranged trip). It also returns life in the direction of normal, since I can now actually get some work done during these naps.

Obama’s birth certificate now online at White House website

I report this with all due eye-rolling, but they really did post it: HERE.

What a pathetic pseudo-controversy. Of course, it still won’t end.

she’s a ball of energy

Ferocious appetite, diarrhea gone, so it’s safe to say the worm issue has been solved (on the first day the poor kitten was actually bleeding a bit from the worms). This achievement of basic health has unveiled a little dynamo. Her energy is almost limitless.

But I have to be so careful. I weigh literally hundreds of times more than this creature. I can’t move at normal speed, or handle cans of soup with normal carelessness when she’s around lest I drop one right on her.

Tomorrow the maids are coming, and I can’t be here due to meetings, so they had to be telephoned and warned not to sit on anything suddenly or step too suddenly. As a safety measure we agreed they would try to lock her in one specific room while they work.

In fact, Tamanya is moving so quickly now that it’s nearly impossible for the iPhone with its slow shutter speed to capture anything but blurs. So I am left with the photo below as tonight’s only somewhat intelligible image. Here she’s a bit frustrated, because she is trying to make a sheer vertical climb of me, and I am obstructing this goal with my left hand, because there is soup on the table and she’s not the only one in this house who needs to eat sometimes.

These images don’t even do her justice. This may be one of the cutest kittens I’ve ever seen, even more so in person than in photos. That wasn’t the case when I first saw her: then she was just a dusty, brown-looking kitten with fleas, with her right eye apparently missing (the doorman thought so too) and with some intestinal bleeding. It only took a few days to polish this little gem.

Tamanya has a feast

She did well again today, had a huge feast when I returned, and now is leaving me alone more than last night. Perhaps she’s getting used to the idea that I will be gone during the daytime on most days.

This food that the vet sold me for her is diabolically well-loved. She almost goes into hysterics every time the can enters the room. I almost wonder if they deliberately try to get kittens addicted to it early on so that nothing else will do. It’s not cheap!

from an email from my brother

My brother (the one in Toronto, not the one in Portland) sent an email that affirms Marcin’s earlier warning:

“Congratulations, that’s two cat rescues you’ve now been involved (Piddi and Tamanya). She’s very cute and the adolescent stage is even more fun than the kitten stage so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, although be prepared for lots of climbing and knocking over of anything that can be knocked over in the course of climbing.”

Hmm…

We always had animals growing up, but I was never the primary responsible party; that was usually my parents, or my youngest brother when he asked for baby ducks for his 10th birthday or found three kittens in an old farm building on the property where we lived. (Incidentally, ducks make excellent pets, much to my surprise. But you need some open land, and in a city it would be out of the question.)

My brother in Toronto who wrote this message is an excellent pet caretaker, however, and excels at keeping them entertained at all times with often bizarre toys such as a radio-controlled pterodactyl flying above their heads.

He refers to “Piddi” above (pronounced “Petey”). I’d almost forgotten that story. I was riding with my brother from Chicago back to Iowa City in 1995, and we stopped for gas/snacks at the so-called DeKalb Oasis, outside DeKalb, Illinois. This little kitten was sitting on the side of the overpass all by himself. We let him in, and he rode on my lap all the way back, eating up my popcorn along the way, he was so hungry. (And it was absurdly salty popcorn, I might add.) But we had no room for him at my place in Iowa City, so we let my brother take him. He was a great cat, though I believe he eventually died from accidentally eating a leaf of some sort that is toxic to felines.

There’s another rescue I was involved in, however. While visiting my friend Michael in New Mexico a few years before that, I also found an abandoned kitten, and even named him: “Cito,” a good male kitten name I think. But since I was just visiting, I left that cat with Kate and Michael to keep at their rural New Mexico place.

Michael Witmore named direct of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Fantastic news for our friend Michael Witmore at the University of Wisconsin. (If you don’t know Michael but read my books, you’ll find him mentioned in the epilogue to Circus Philosophicus.) Looks like a wonderful opportunity, and I can well imagine him doing great credit to the position.

His books are listed near the bottom of the announcement. But you might try Shakepsearean Metaphysics to get a taste of his philosophical side.

Michael Witmore Named Folger Director

Michael Witmore, a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern literature as well as a pioneer in the digital analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, has been named director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the sixth in the library’s seventy-nine year history. He takes office on July 1, 2011.

Witmore’s appointment was announced today by the Folger Board of Governors and the Trustees of Amherst College, who administer the Folger under the will of the library’s founder, Henry Clay Folger. He succeeds Gail Kern Paster who retires at the end of June after nine years at the Folger’s helm.

Of the appointment, Paul Ruxin, Chair of the Folger Board of Governors, says, “We are very excited that Mike has accepted our offer to serve the Folger as its next director. I believe he is someone with the potential to be a truly “transformative” leader, who can take the Folger to new levels of excellence in all of the areas to which its mission statement dedicates it.”

“One of the things that Shakespeare does best is to make life more vivid. The humanities also have a vivifying force, delivering the diversity and complexity of human experience to our collective powers of sympathy, critical thought, and imagination,” notes Witmore. “As humanists, scholars, actors and audiences, we will continue to find Shakespeare and the period in which he lived important: the Folger will be an exciting place to see that future unfold. It is an institution whose unique cultural and intellectual strengths I admire and whose impressive resources I look forward to stewarding in the years to come.”

Witmore is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, where he has taught since 2008. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition, Witmore directs the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a group of humanists who use computers to assist in traditional humanities research; currently, they are mapping the prose genres of Early English Books Online using techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics. He is co-winner of the Perkins Prize for the Study of Narrative as well as the recipient of numerous fellowships, including an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, research and curatorial fellowships at the Folger, and a predoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. He was awarded (but declined) an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship for the academic year 2011–2012. Witmore earned an A.B. in English at Vassar College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

His most recent book, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (2010), a collaboration with noted writer and photographer Rosamond Purcell, was inspired by a painting in the Folger reading room that Witmore saw while here on a research fellowship. It is also the subject of a Folger exhibition in the fall of 2012, tentatively entitled Very Like a Whale, which Witmore will co-curate.

Witmore is also the author of Shakespearean Metaphysics (2008); Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (2007); Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (2001); and co-editor of Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800 (2006), having produced numerous articles, book chapters, and website resources. He currently has several books in progress, including Shakespeare by the Numbers and Other Tales from the Digital Frontier, with Jonathan Hope, and Wisdom and the Book of Experience. He is also textual editor of The Comedy of Errors for The Norton Shakespeare.

Of her successor, Paster says, “The appointment of Michael Witmore as the next director of the Folger is a brilliant one. He is a Shakespeare scholar with broad interdisciplinary interests, great creative energy, and an eloquent understanding of the critical role the humanities will play in our nation’s future. I know he is the right person to lead this great library into the heart of the twenty-first century.”

cat warning from Poland!

I’m sure Marcin is probably right about this, unfortunately. After opening with warm congratulations about Tamanya’s progress, he continues as follows:

“Let me warn you though: probably in a couple of weeks she’ll turn into a full fledged innocent commando-saboteur destroying everything on her way just for fun and out of sheer playfulness. And she’ll reach everywhere. It might get annoying – you’ll be dealing with a happy, well-fed, full of energy and nasty teenage cat prankster.”

As the proud owner of a crazy chinchilla that runs around on his piano keys, Marcin surely knows what he is talking about.