THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT (EPSILON)

When the redoubtable Esmeralda Birdbath, Executive Professor of English Literature and Gracious Living at Weekatonk University, assumed the Presidency of the Society for the Aesthetic Rearrangement of History, she at once sent Ferdinand Feghoot off to 2882 to learn whether her pet program—for the Butlerization of Literary Criticism—was to succeed.

“I must know!” she cried. “Return instantly, to this precise moment!” And she pushed him into the Society’s )(.1

A tense few minutes later, he reappeared.

“You have triumphed!” he announced. “In 2882, Samuel Butler’s great dictum that the true test of literary genius is not the ability to write an inscription but the ability to name a kitten dominates all literary criticism, and I’m happy to say that I, in the three weeks I spent there, won their much-coveted Samuel Butler Memorial Gold Medal by doing so. I and five hundred others were in the finals, and the names we chose had to reflect our kittens’ backgrounds and breeds. They brought me a delightful blue-point Siamese, a tom, and I named him instantly—Levi Strauss—to tremendous applause.”

“But that’s absurd,” she snapped. “A Jewish name could have nothing to do with that kitten’s heredity!”

“On the contrary, dear Esmeralda,” said Ferdinand Feghoot. “I called him that because of his blue genes.”

1 “)(” is used to represent a time machine.—Editor