| quest, logic, target, suburb, close quarters. ||
Image from the Internet.
The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed!
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.
13 comments:
Troy's on a quest to find a home,
A base from which he then may roam.
Just starting to define his target,
Beginning from a rural market.
Should he seek for a city venue?
Busy streets, constant to-do.
But would it be some claustrophobic,
In close quarters, no room to kick?
In between, Troy finds the suburbs,
Family homes, with lots of cupboards.
Logic says it's the best of both,
Open space with a city close.
So where will friend Troy sink his roots?
The basement 'neath his parent's roof!
What a happy surprise--to see a fine poem from Owen waiting to greet me! One with a sad but humorous twist to end Troy's quest, at least for the present.
Hey, my friend! How are you feeling?
FLN: for Sandy ~ I really can't add anything about Nashe's personal life. You asked about preparation for the clergy back then, but I don't recall that he was interested in those orders. Of course you know his father was a minister, and he himself wrote satirical pamphlets (the Martin Marprelate series) favoring the anti-Martin or conservative side of the C of E quarrel between the official episcopal (hierarchical) vs. the non-conformist (congregational or Presbyterian) factions.
He is on record as taking his bachelor's degree. Cambridge required students at the time to immerse themselves in the classics and maths. They could also do bible studies, but Henry VIII specifically forbade canon law studies, presumably because he wanted it understood that church law was a settled issue.
I wish I could tell you more, but it's a sad fact that we don't have know much of the personal lives of many of the period's authors.
Playwrights were not as valued then as they are today. Their work was considered pop & lowbrow. Only rarely were the plays published, often in quartos printed from notes scribbled by pirates in the audience. When Ben Jonson published his plays in nicely bound editions as his "Works," he was considered pretentious.
Shakespeare was lucky to be so popular we have many quartos to compare versions, and so beloved that his actors assembled his plays and published them in a folio after his death.
~ OMK
Re. "Prentious" scoffers of popular entertainment of the 1600s...
When the modernist school were asked about Hobbits
They scoffed and sneered as was their pretentious habit
"These fantasy quests target the merely literate
In their suburban bungalos and manicured estates "
"Give us beasts from the minds of the highly logical
Not balrogs and dragons of the phantasmagorical."
To JRR Tolkien they would give no quarter
"To the closed minded set, I'm no great supporter."
WC
Before I even do the jumble, Hooray! So good to see you back, Owen.
OMK, thanks for the extensive reply. Wilbur, you've united Hobbitdom with modernism, an admirable feat.
Well, my goodness, what a treat--a delightful Owen poem. And then a second treat, a complicated fun Wilbur poem! Woohoo! And there were all the Jumble words, along with the solution of those poor quarters bunched together in that pinball machine.
And then the additional gift of Ol'Man Keith's historical Nashe narrative. Many thanks for that too.
Have a great Saturday, everybody, and thanks again for the poems, Owen and Wilbur.
Wilbur ~ I guess we do this in every age, from the highbrow Elizabethans to your anti-Tolkien scoffers.
Perhaps our most recent example shows in how comic books (known as "funny books" when I was a kid) needed to be transformed to "graphic novels" before getting wider acceptance.
- or -
Maybe it was changing the name of "Race Music" to Jazz and Gospel and R&B?
- or -
Maybe it was the elevation of TV (aka "video streaming") to the status (nearly) of big-screen movies?
Take your pick!
~ OMK
Sandy, the modernists "scoffed" at "fantasy" as OMK referred. Tolkien said "I don't like their stuff, either". LOTR was voted most popular 20th century work.
And... Misty's friend Margie could tell us all about "Beasts".
WC
Well, I meant you united them on the page, Wilbur. No mean feat.
Hmmm. I have a friend Margie? Really? Hey, my memory's not great these days.
Who is this Margie, Wilbur?
Is this a reference to the white elephant in the Animal Crossing series?
We mustn't let the date go by w/o remembering D-Day. This is the 76th anniversary of that momentous day, not a neat number like 75 or 100, but still worthy of some brief attention.
Is it too political to point out that what makes it different from many other victorious battles is that it was itself "political"?
D-Day was a turning point in a war not merely between major national powers but between opposing political systems.
The English-speaking Allies were evolved liberal democracies, and they took the lead in the western battle against fascism & Naziism.
Our hard-won supremacy on the Normandy beaches helped to define us even further as we left any lingering vestiges of our own feudalism and authoritarianism behind.
Our soldiers (of the "greatest generation") came home even more opposed to rigid class structure, racism, and militarism than before the war began.
I sometimes think the "D" of D-Day should stand for "Democracy."
~ OMK
Thank you for this inspiring D-Day description and discussion, Ol'Man Keith. And I especially like your ending.
Misty, far away and long ago, do you recall these
Beasts
Eloquent take on D-Day. As I posted before, the alliance of Nazi Germany and Japan* was of two like bedfellows. And, re. the former, I had a very political comment that went right under the CC radar, to wit:
[The Corner]spurred me to start rereading Speer's "Inside the Third Reich". I hadn't read it since before 2016.
And since I'm safely in the J, the parallels today with the rise of Nazi Germany are eerily familiar. There was a book that I picked up in the old Barnes and Nobles discount rack at least 30 years ago whose premise was about a long range plan to bring German Nazism to America.
I doubt I still have that book because of too many moves. Another author often found on that discount rack was Lawrence Gardner who authored "Bloodline of the Grail" which professed to tell the real story behind "The DaVinci Code".
Fanciful? How about Jesus was married TWICE and the Merovingian Kings were descendants. Not to speak of the Stuarts.
WC
* Ironically, another book next to the bed is "The House of Morgan". Tom Lamont, a very prominent figure from the 20s and 30s talks about the violent quashing of liberal democracy in Japan in the 30s.
What I meant above was that the B&N discount rack was full of wacky books
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