Kestrell

I think we need one of these to go with the Enterprise pizza slicer
http://www.meninos.us/products.php?product=Salute

_The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ by E. T. A. Hoffman, translated by Anthea Bell (Penguin, 1999)

While I've been an avid reader of the works of E. T. A. Hoffman for many years, I had mostly focused upon his stories which are most often categorized as gothic horror, such as "The Sandman" and "The Nutcracker and the Mouse king," the latter being the story upon which Tchaikovsky based his ballet "The Nutcracker."

Hoffman was one of the German Romantics, so his fiction often makes use of fairy tale and folklore, but Hoffman also added his own preoccupations with music, alchemy, and automata. He was also fascinated by the life of the city, and I consider him to be possibly the earliest writer of urban fantasy. In addition, Hoffman was very interested in psychology, especially the individual's secret inner landscape of dreams, fantasies, and desires, which often make us strangers even to ourselves. Freud used Hoffman's work to illustrate his own concept of the uncanny, and Jung found Hoffman's work equally fascinating, to the degree that all of Jung's archetypes can be found in Hoffman's works.

All that being said, summarizing what _The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ is about is a near-impossible task, as Hoffman takes the strange and startling to new heights in this novel which is considered to be his masterwork.

The novel consists of two parallel stories, one the memoirs of the cat Murr, a cat who aspires to be an artistic genius, and the second that of the Kapellmeister Kreisler, a musician and composer who aspires to create sublime music. An editor's note explains that this was a typesetting error of a sort, as Murr had written his own memoirs upon papers which originally held the biography of the Kapellmeister, so the two stories had become mingled together. This creates a very startling palimsest in which, just as we are getting to some important incident which Murr or the writer of the Kapellmeister biography are about to reveal, the story breaks off and switches to the other storyline. For this reason, readers who are driven to distraction by non-linear narratives should avoid this novel like the plague. On the other paw, fans of postmodern lit may wish to try this novel, as it possess many of the earmarks of that genre, despite existing at least a century before the postmodern period began.

While Hoffman's intention was, to some degree, to use his feline hero to parody Goethe's melodramatic Romantic heroes, the doubled storyline cannot be reduced to pure parody for, if Murr's over-the-top self-glorification (really, Hoffman captures a cat's character wonderfully) serves to reveal the self-grandizing and self-absorbtion of the Romantic hero, the Kapellmeister's storyline serves to illustrate the struggle to use art as a light for revealing all that is best and oneself and the world, even as that world prizes pretty superficiality above emotional depth, petty power plays above artistic complexity, and reputation above authentic relationships.

The two narratives cannot be described as being merely polar opposites, with the cat's adventures serving merely as an ironic or ridiculous foil for the larger ideas contained within the narrative about the musician Kreisler. Kreisler's experiences are often Hoffman's, for Kreisler is a semi-autobiographical representation of himself which Hoffman used in a number of his stories. Hoffman was a musician and composer, aside from also being the master of the real tomcat Murr upon whom the fictional Murr is based, and Hoffman, similoar to the modern novelist Milan Kundera, creates narratives which are composed along the lines of music, with elements of harmony and melody, leitmotif, and variation.

So what is _The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr_ about? Some of the elements include: the artistic life, the uses of imagination and creativity, psychology, dopplegangers, the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic movement, sex versus love, passion versus pretense, not to mention the cat (and a bit with a dog).

For some more coherent literary criticism, see this post from The Lectern blog
http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/06/life-and-opinions-of-tomcat-murr-eta.html

1. For the Win (2010) by Cory Doctorow
http://craphound.com/ftw/download/

2. From Bricks to Brains:
The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots

by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (AU Press, 2010)

Available as a paperback or a PDF ebook
http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120175

About the Book

From Bricks to Brains introduces embodied cognitive science, and illustrates its foundational ideas through the construction and observation of LEGO Mindstorms
robots.

Discussing the characteristics that distinguish embodied cognitive science from classical cognitive science, From Bricks to Brains places a renewed emphasis
on sensing and acting, the importance of embodiment, the exploration of distributed notions of control, and the development of theories by synthesizing
simple systems and exploring their behaviour. Numerous examples are used to illustrate a key theme: the importance of an agent’s environment. Even simple
agents, such as LEGO robots, are capable of exhibiting complex behaviour when they can sense and affect the world around them.