Fishing
“Dude, you went ‘fishing,’ not ‘bassing,’ right?”
Two fish are better than none. Too bad they weren’t, like, really photogenic or anything.
Lit notes
Some Shakespeare, and maybe, if I remember while I’ve got a text handy, a little Middle English, too. Plus bass fishing in Austin’s Town Lake.
Shakespeare in the original?
T&C done with the original language.
One of the beauties of Shakespeare’s Globe (link on the sidebar) is that it’s a living laboratory for trying to grasp the nuances of the language and stage presentation. At the outdoor Dallas Shakespeare Festival, the place is about the same size, but without the acoustics. Which just points out how cool the Shakespeare’s Globe is. But much of its work is pure supposition, and what I always enjoyed? Good scholarship, but pointedly accurate in claiming it was all conjecture.
Middle English?
I’m out of my element here, but the Franklin’s Tale, what I was thinking about as Tropical Depression Franklin got named, was Emily (a character in the Knight’s Tale), and then Franklin, The Franklin’s Tale… When I reviewed some of the material, I’m trying to recall, there was theory that the Franklin’s Tale was based on the astrology/astronomy (same thing back then) and a super high tide. One of those weird academic theories that fit the situation, although, I suppose, in a court of law, it would all be circumstantial evidence. No smoking gun, as it were.
The theory, don’t forget that Chaucer wrote about astrology/astronomy (same thing back then), was that there was a particularly high tide and that covered portions of the coastline, and that fits with the anecdote in the Franklin’s Tale, where this one guy has to make the rocks on the shoreline disappear. Which he does, by studying the arcane “sciences,” as they were referred to, at the time.
What started this detour into Middle English, the father of poetry today, was the name of the storm that cut my last fishing trip short, Emily.
I worked at wading my way through the Knight’s Tale, trying to get some semblance of what happened to whom. Two cousins, chasing the same girl, Emily.
“questio quid juris” (prologue)
“I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,
And wayke been the oxen in my plough.”
(Knight’s Tale, lines 886-7)
I was picking through the Prologue and came across the Latin quote. Then that couplet, which deals with the way it feels some days, “I’ve got a large field to plough, and the oxen are weak.”
The Knight’s Tale, as I recall, was probably written at a different time, possibly earlier, and then inserted into the Canterbury Tales. High style, very ornate, rather stiff, one might suggest. Courtly. Elegant.
“This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo
And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.”
(Knight’s Tale, lines 2847-8)
How it ends: battle to the end, the gods get involved, Venus trumps Mars, and one cousin wins the lady. Familiar plot twist at the end, but that might be me.
And Chaucer ties back to Shakespeare with that allusion to Troilus and Cressida, the Shakespeare version. Black comedy, the way I see it. But that could be me.
And some scandalous material?
Early Stuart Libels? A different F Word?
Cherchez les poissons:
Two morning bass. Afternoon, really. I mean, I started in the morning, but finally caught the girlfriend – again. It was fun, she’d chase the perch that were chasing my worm. Eventually, I fooled her. Only took about an hour or three. Boyfriend and girlfriend.
My girlfriend? The bigger one with way more attitude? I watched earlier, while she chased ca arp away, a fish that was clearly three times her size. She drove up from the depths and nipped at the carp’s fin. The Nature Geographic channel, right here. Territorial little wench.
Off to fish at the lake today.
