T.S. Eliot and the Nonsensical Naming of Practical Cats
Oh, hai.
Rob May at Businesspundit is selling his blog, because he doesn’t want to sell out.
I never intended to make money blogging. It just sort of happened, once this blog hit a certain level. It was a nice side income, and has helped fund many of my other projects. But as blogging has become more competitive, and more and more people are trying to make money at it, I have realized that I am not interested in continuing. I have watched Businesspundit slip a little bit each year in the Technorati rankings, and I have realized that I lack a very important attribute of good writers - the ability to say what people want to hear.
This blog has never been about what readers want. It has been about what I want to say. And I know that I am weird and my views are not mainstream at all. People want easy. People want instant. People want to be told that they are right. People want to have their views reaffirmed. I’m a natural contrarian who believes that most trends are overhyped, that most people need more focus and discipline, and that conventional wisdom is usually wrong. Those topics will never be as popular as say… stupid cat pictures.
The overwhelming popularity of LOL Cats should not be surprising, nor should it be viewed as irrelevant nonsense. Were he alive today, Thomas Stearns Eliot would probably laugh out loud, himself. T.S. Eliot’s collection of poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, first published in 1939, inspired the ever-popular musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats.
The Naming of CatsThe Old Gumbie Cat
Growltiger’s Last Stand
The Rum Tum Tugger
The Song of the Jellicles
Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer
Old Deuteronomy
Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles
Mr. Mistoffelees
Macavity: The Mystery Cat
Gus: The Theatre Cat
Bustopher Jones: The Cat about Town
Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat
The Ad-dressing of Cats
Cat Morgan Introduces Himself
In this essay on T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats, Mary Beth Tinsley elucidates:
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats challenges the usefulness of accepted literary categories—genre, tone, theme—by its tendency to slip out from under their heavy-handed application. With this risk in mind, I shall examine Eliot’s Book as an example of satire, a descendant perhaps of the seventeenth-century “characters,” conveying through the manipulation of perspectives an oblique commentary on human society and its conventions.
Elizabeth Sewell reminds us of Eliot’s debt to the nonsense mode of Lewis Carroll. She sees the Book of Practical Cats as a receptacle for all the “love and charity” excised from Eliot’s serious existential statements—a sort of immersion in the otherwise destructive element, nonsense, as the ultimate way to reach heaven.
We here at the Snark Hunting naming and branding blog are huge fans of Lewis Carroll, T.S. Eliot, and Cats of all names. And this blog has always been and will always be about what the reader wants — i can has names?
