Posted March 22, 2013, by Mary Grabar: Dissident Prof's cat frequently serves as her muse by providing comedic relief in her battles with academic radicals by running down the stairs to her office and dropping mice (the toy kind) at her feet. She is forced to take her mind off for a moment from the latest outrage, like "sex week" and reviews of The Vagina Monologues, for the necessary praise and petting to bolster his self-esteem (especially because Sparky, having been orphaned, never learned to hunt real mice). Sparky's Hamlet-like (Hamletonian?) indecisiveness at the door one dark and rainy evening led her to remember a book of verse called Poetry for Cats: The Definitive Anthology of Feline Verse by Henry Beard, and then a particularly misanthropic professor she had in graduate school, and then the tragic loss of Shakespeare and Eliot from the canon, and then sundry other things like the brilliance of A Confederacy of Dunces, dissidents (what are they?), The People's Cube... It ended up with this essay in Minding the Campus, "Cats, Comedy, and Common Culture."
The above photo is of Sparky helping the Dissident Prof unpack from her trip to New York City for the National Association of Scholars conference, which she blogged about on these pages. She was happy to see a mention at National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog and a post at the National Association of Scholars site.
Thank you to George and Ashley for spreading the word about Dissident Prof. No doubt you can appreciate the literary qualities of cats.
