Sarah Knudsen

@seknudsen.com

10 Followers 34 Following

Carbon-based fan of em dashes & the serial comma. Mostly reading, parenting, messing with data, and trying to get enough sleep (she/her)

A table, outdoors, with a grouping of items: 6 apples labeled with their varieties, an apple-sized rock (labeled "ROCK") and a small pumpkin (labeled "NOT AN APPLE")
AN EXPLANATORY NOTE by the German translator of this book drawn from an account requested of its author: "'As you supposed, the dedication is indeed to my three children, listed in order of birth, and then, as you could not easily surmise, to their fifteen cats (not, as you understandably inferred, to fifteen grandchildren). The allusion would be understood at once by close friends. Still, others can find a clue in the antonymic "Effable Three ... and Their Ineffable Fifteen." For those paired adjectives of course echo T.S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats" in his unforgettable Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967, twenty-first printing), which was read successively and often by each of The Effable Three. A further clue is provided by my confession, in the note on page 71, that in my middle years I became "a confirmed ailurophile."