From the Washington Post, we hear of a cat named Max who’s become a fixture at the Carleton campus of Vermont State University, So much a fixture, in fact, that he got a Ph.D.
Click to read:
Max the cat has hitched rides on top of students’ backpacks, participated in campus tours and more than once has sauntered into a psychology lecture at Vermont State University’s Castleton campus.
The 5-year-old tabby is even listed on the staff roster at the university, where he has his own email address.
So it seemed like an obvious next step when the university bestowed an honorary doctor of ‘litter-ature’ degree upon him, making him officially part of the graduating class of 2024, in addition to being a staff member. Max wears many hats, said Rob Franklin, a photographer and social media manager for Vermont State University.
Last spring, Franklin had just started working at the university when he noticed the cat was everywhere, and he was treated like a celebrity.
“I was talking to a colleague outside Woodruff Hall – the main building on campus – when I noticed this cat wandering around and everyone greeting him,” Franklin said.
“I said, ‘What’s the deal with the cat?’ and I was told he came to the campus every day to socialize, then students would take him home when it got dark,” he said.
Max lives down the street from the main entrance to campus with Ashley Dow and her family, but he rarely hangs out at home, Dow said.
Ever since she started letting Max outside when he was 1, he’d head straight to the college campus and soak up the attention from students.
“He usually goes over in the morning about 8 when I go to work, and he’ll come home in time for dinner, or one of the students will come over and drop him off,” said Dow, a special-education teacher.
. . .Max had been roaming around campus and its 4,000 undergraduate students for four years – the same amount of time it takes to earn a bachelor’s degree, he said.
“We don’t hand out doctoral degrees here, but I thought it would be fun to give Max one,” Franklin said, noting that Vermont Public Radio covered the story.
He had a diploma made with corny cat puns, then posted it on Instagram in advance of the university’s commencement ceremonies on May 18. The photo in the post showed Max wearing a cat-sized graduation cap.
“With a resounding purr of approval from the faculty, the Board of Trustees of the Vermont State Cat-leges has bestowed upon Max Dow the prestigious title of Doctor of Litter-ature, complete with all the catnip perks, scratching post privileges, and litter box responsibilities that come with it,” the diploma reads.
He’ll have to be called “Dr. Max” now! Here’s a screenshot of his degree taken from the video below, which shows Max and his staff:
A one-minute video from Channel 10. What a great cat!
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The NYT has a piece on a new book about Louis Wain (1860-1939), the famous cat artist who supposedly went mad, and whose drawings of cats got more and more bizarre as his sanity waned. Here’s a group of his pictures, not in chronological order, but the most bizarre ones are from later in his life. (He spent the last 15 years of it in a mental hospital.)
And the piece about the book, called Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania. Click headline to read:
An excerpt from Reich’s review:
Arriving to explore this mystery — and to complicate it further — is “Catland,” by the writer and critic Kathryn Hughes. The title is both literal and metaphorical, a nod to the intertwined worlds the book explores: the imaginary place invented by the Victorian cat illustrator Louis Wain, and the lived landscape we continue to inhabit some 150 years later.
“Catland” is, at its core, an examination of a quickly modernizing, post-Industrial Revolution Britain, where everything was transforming, including cats — who went “from anonymous background furniture into individual actors.” In short order, cats lost their “weaselly faces and ratty tails” as their faces and eyes became rounder. (While Hughes refers to the quick genetic turnaround possible given cats’ reproductive behaviors, it is not entirely clear whether cats really looked like this or were simply represented as such by artists.)
. . . The commercial artist and illustrator Louis Wain’s art evolved alongside this emerging feline paradise, and his cats also grew both rounder in face and elevated in status — until, eventually, their society was as weird and complex as their owners’. At the height of his popularity, Wain’s cats were everywhere, doing everything — selling soap and boots in advertisements, being patriotic on postcards, riding bikes or bickering with spouses in newspapers and magazines.
Unfortunately, Wain’s business acumen was virtually nonexistent. His fortunes, like those of the cats and cat fanciers of his era, had significant highs and lows. (His worsening mental illness did not help financial matters, but it also did not seem to hamper his productivity or creativity.)
How much did Wain actually influence the new cat aesthetic? Despite the author’s claims to the contrary, his work seems less a propellant than a reflection of the zeitgeist — as seen through his own increasingly eccentric perspective.
Indeed, “Catland” is populated by other characters who, in the author’s own telling, were at least as deeply involved in shaping the emerging cat world. There’s Harrison Weir, who organized the first Crystal Palace cat show in 1871, and “kick-started the modern cat-fancy,” and the clergyman’s daughter Frances Simpson, who had enormous influence on cat culture. Alongside her involvement in breeding, showing and judging, she became an authority whose feline-adjacent endorsements, pronouncements and opinions appeared in countless publications and in a column called “Practical Pussyology” (a lost Prince B-side if ever there were one).
. . . The sensitive should brace themselves: Stories of cruelty, violence and animal hoarding abound — difficult, but necessary, context. (Hughes does not bring us to the present moment, but the perceptive reader, particularly one well-versed in cat rescue, TNR and animal welfare, will find plenty of parallels to our current moment.)
Similarly, those looking for a straightforward biography may at first be disappointed, but cat lovers, and even the cat-indifferent, are encouraged to put their trust in Hughes. “Catland” is a delight. This is history as told by someone whose knowledge of and infectious enthusiasm for her subject is matched by obvious delight and warm, expressive writing.
In Louis Wain’s last illustrations of cats, his favorite subjects were freed from their constrained Edwardian interiors, romping through imagined landscapes and, in some kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic instances, freed from their own forms. Perhaps Wain truly was both of and ahead of his time. In either case, it’s easy to see how much has changed — and strangely, how little.
It’s $25.59 in hardcover (Amazon link above), and would make a great Christmas present for the cat lover with a penchant for the bizarre. Here’s the cover:
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From SK Pop, a Website, we learn of the passing of a beloved cat whose existence I didn’t know about. I can’t copy most of the text, so I’ve put a few screenshots and tweets below. Click the headline to read:
Screenshots of text:
“I am devastated to share that Cala has passed away. I adopted Cala thinking she was young and full of life ahead of her, however, Cala had gotten sick and was not recovering.”
Here’s that video, which explains her passing:
@cala_and_elizabeth Cala will live on forever thanks to all of you 🧡🐱 #RIPCala #igomeow #catsoftiktok #cattok #orangecatbehavior
Cala’s popularity:
A tribute from The Kifeness:
. . . and a few Instagram comments by Cala lovers (her Instagram page is here):
“I wonder if she was meowing so much because she felt her time coming or felt the pain,” @pomkckase stated.
“Her meow did seem like it came from a place of experience. She was a wise old cat,” @woldprospect stated.
“She will stay my favorite singer forever,” @edanmore_ said.
The cat’s official Instagram page, under the username cala_and_elizabeth, had amassed over 500K followers. Other comments online read:
“She will always be remembered, her beautiful voice will live on. Sending you all so much love right now,” @louietheraccoon stated.
“This is the kind of news that really breaks my heart I send my love to her family,” @uriel.calderone said on Instagram.
Multiple Instagram users also attached gifs of people crying. Others also shared loving tributes, which read:
“Thank you so much for the legacy you’ve imprinted on my heart,” @dougggdimmadome said.
“You finally crossed that bridge kitty,” @mikejamesb3 stated online.
RIP Cala:
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Lagniappe from a news site (click to read and see a one-minute video:
Can artificial intelligence tell when your cat is in pain? The Japanese app CatsMe! claims it can. Tokyo resident Mayumi Kitakata, concerned for her 14-year-old cat Chi, turned to CatsMe! in March to help decide when to visit the vet. Buzz60’s Maria Mercedes Galuppo has the story.
The video will tell you that the app uses facial expressions correlated with pain to give an idea whether the cat is in pain. It’s not using pain itself, but something correlated with pain, so I’m a bit dubious. If it worked, vets all over the world would be using it.
h/t: Divy, Karl, Winnie
