Cat With Nine Still Lives

Photographer K.B. Dixon poses a wooden English cat, "rescued" from The Shambles in York, in a multiple lifetimes' worth of catlike poses. Cat fanciers might find all of them familiar.

September 5, 2024

K.B. Dixon

Culture, Photography

This small collection of photographs is an homage to an inspired cartoon that was published in the August 19, 2024, issue of The New Yorker. It was drawn by a biology professor at California Polytechnic State University named Ed Himelblau and titled simply “Cat With Nine Still Lives.” It is a single panel divided into nine equal parts telling the story of a goofy black cat clawing its way up onto a table and destroying a classic still-life arrangement in the process. The joke lurks in the wordplay of the title—the title I have “borrowed” here.

The cat in the still lives below is named “Shambles.” He is a mystifying memento from a long-ago trip to England. Carved of maple by a quasi-anonymous woodworker (J.S.W.) in 1988, he is named for the famous street in York where we found him—The Shambles. A medieval butchers’ row of half-timbered homes and businesses in the 14^th Century, this narrow winding passage was transformed in the mid-1950s into an historic preservation site and tourist destination.

Cat with box & oil can, 2024

***

Cat on box, 2024

***

Cat with bags, 2024

Sponsor

***

Cat with mug, candle, & duck, 2024

***

Cat with clock, 2024

***

Cat with pottery, 2024

***

Sponsor

Cat with books, 2024

***

Cat in dish, 2024

***

Cat with plant, 2024

K.B. Dixon

K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.