Tuesday, March 22, 2011

WHO KNEW? #1

At the same time as sending us the story about Sammy Hagar, our pal Wendy castigated me for posting yesterday’s Space Cat On Mushrooms that is seemingly a Photoshop mash-up of a set of children’s stories by Ruthven Todd that have a long and noble tradition.

“Ruthven Campbell Todd (Pronounced 'riven') (14 June 1914 – 1978) was a Scottish poet, artist and novelist, best known as an editor of the works of William Blake. He wrote also under the pseudonym R. T. Campbell. He was involved with the surrealists at the time of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. During the 1930s, he friendly with Wyndham Lewis, contributing to the Lewis issue of Julian Symons's Twentieth Century Verse, and recruited him to keep the dozing Ezra Pound, whose portrait Lewis was painting. A character based on Todd was included in Symons' first detective story, The Immaterial Murder Case.) During World War II he was a conscientious objector. He moved to America in 1947, where he held a position at a university in New York, and ran the Weekend Press during the 1950s. He contributed to children's literature, with the fifties Space Cat series.”

1 comment:

ShaneFlipside said...

Mick, Shane here. I grew up on the Space Cat books. They were my favorite books when I was 6 or so (First and Second Grade). Nice to see the author was a surrealist! Far less realistic than even Space Cat were the series by Lobsang Rampa that contained one book supposedly dictated to him by his cat. Since believing i Rampa already requires belief in transmogrification I guess nothing was too far out.