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Probably the first domestic to appear in a painting (circa 2000 B.C., Egypt), the ruddy-coated Abyssinian is a playful and spirited shorthair. It is also one of the most expensive: a pet-quality red Aby kitten can cost $800, and one promising to become a grand champion can fetch $3,000. The American Shorthair is sometimes incorrectly called the alley cat. Muscular and intelligent, plain or tabby-patterned, it is to most people the essence of the feline, a cat-cat, the kind that shows up for breakfast and moves in with the children. In the purebred version, shorthair...
...should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit...
...paintings like Dignity and Impudence, circa 1839, he projected Victorian ideas about social hierarchy and decorum onto animals-partly to satirize human behavior (though very lightly), and mainly to suggest that the divisions of the Victorian world were rooted in the natural order. Art may be the ape of nature; but dogs, so to speak, are the apes of morality. Animals want to be men and imitate the better aspects of human behavior-fidelity, tenacity, bravery, gentleness. They cannot make the last evolutionary step, but how consoling to see each doggy eye moist with the desire to do so! Such...
Atget was not a social recorder all the time, and many of his best images are of the single object, a thing in itself, conveyed in the most subtly pictorial manner. His photo of an apple tree in a bare winter field, circa 1898, has a wild, precise intensity whose only parallel, in painting, must be the apple trees painted by Mondrian as a young man. When he photographed a motif a second or third time (as he often did, sometimes decades apart), the images, of village houses in Châtenay or trees in the park at St.-Cloud...
Updike's life has bounced back nicely after a painful separation and divorce in the mid-'70s. He and his second wife Martha are approaching their fourth anniversary. They live in an eleven-room farmhouse, circa 1880, in Georgetown, Mass., a small town about 30 miles north of Boston...