For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 110 and ABC Wednesday

("K" is for "Knockout"}
What springs to mind as I gaze at this week’s prompt?
Why, the work of Roberrt Burrns, of course.
“O would some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It would from many a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”
And that causes something else to spring to mind.

If you ever find yourself with a convivial group of Scotsmen knocking back a few at a local bar-room, and you’d like to win an easy bar bet, ask them – ask any patriotic Scot – “What does ‘Cutty Sark’ mean?”
You’ve got to establish ground rules, right off. No checking with Google. They’ve got to come up with the meaning by themselves. After all, it’s a remnant of Scottish history.

They’ll begin by saying it’s a brand of whisky, of course. (Maybe they’re even aware of the original Scotch name for the fragrant beverage: Whisky in Scottish Gaelic, "uisge beatha," literally means "water of life".)
All true, but that’s just a start.
Then they’ll mention the vessel on the bottle: “Cutty Sark” is the name of a ship, they’ll cry.
True again, but why is it the name of a ship? What does it mean?
Again, no checking with Google.
At this point you’re able to step in and dazzle everyone with the actual meaning.
Believe it or not, “Cutty Sark” means “mini-skirt.”
Here’s the story.

Surely you’ve heard of the tam o’shanter, the Scottish brimless cap. Well, that cap was named after a guy, Tam, who came from Shanter.
In a famous Robert Burns poem of the eighteenth century, Tam has had a few drinks at a local public house and he mounts his horse Meg to ride home.
On his way, he sees something astonishing. There’s a bizarre dance taking place on a local field, something involving witches and warlocks and other such types dancing about and jostling each other.
Tam is terrified; he knows they’ll kill him if they see him.
But he stays in place; he is beguiled by one beautiful young witch – as we might phrase it today, she was a knockout – who was dancing about in a skirt (a “sark”) that had been cut short – a “cutty sark,” in other words.

Suddenly the witches spot Tam on his horse Meg and come after him. He takes off as fast as he can go. He knows if he gets to the bridge over the local river he’ll be safe because witches, as everyone knows, cannot cross running water.
He just barely makes it. One of the witches grabs poor Meg’s tail and it comes off.
The poem ends like thusly:
“Now, who this tale o' truth shall read,
All man and mother's son, take heed:
Whene'er to Drink you are inclin'd,
Or Cutty-sarks run on your mind,
Think ye may buy the joys so dear;
Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare.”

For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 109 and ABC Wednesday

"J" is for "Juggling a Boulder"

I have to wonder how many bloggers, studying the above prompt, will be reminded of the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Albert Camus.

Surely the story is familiar. It compares the absurdity of so much of life today with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of juggling a boulder as he pushes it up a mountain, only to see it roll down again.
In the essay, Camus introduced his philosophy: the futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity - and the ability of a man to be honest - in the face of an often unintelligible world.
The world of Albert Camus was indeed unintelligible. He wrote the essay in 1942, during the Nazi occupation of France. At the time he was playing his part to nurture the French resistance movement and he helped publish “Combat,” an underground newspaper. That same year he wrote what is probably his best-known work, the novel “The Stranger.”
His group worked diligently against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre “Beauchard.” Camus became the paper's editor in 1943 and was in Paris when the Allies liberated the city.
After the war, Camus began hanging out at the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris with Jean-Paul Sartre and an entire world of amateur philosophers of that era. Although he leaned left politically, his strong criticisms of Communist doctrine did not win him any friends in the Communist parties that were so strong in those days.

I’ve always been fascinated by the answer of Camus to the philosophical questions he poses in his famous essay. He believes that man, like Sisyphus, is involved in an activity that is basically futile, a futile search for meaning, truth, values. His conclusion is surprising.
Since that boulder is going to keep on rolling back down, no matter what, he believes the struggle itself is, for many, enough. Camus wrote: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
(Also submitted to "Sunday Scribblings")

Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 108 and ABC Wednesday

"I" is for "Imagine"

Thousands of twelve-year-old students of English literature, from Mumbai to Singapore, stand ready, at the drop of whatever is called a hat in their language, to recite what may be the poet William Wordsworth’s most famous lines (and the weekly prompt, above, reminded me of them):
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
I was one of those twelve-year-olds once, though I had never been to either Mumbai or Singapore, and in my quavering, piping voice, I could recite at least some of Wordsworth’s poetry as well as any other pre-teener.

I found the poet himself of interest. What exactly, I would occasionally ask myself, are his Wordsworth? :-)
He had famously once defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.” He was blown away by the beauty of nature, by a kind of suspended reality, and by the reconciliation of man with his environment, which gives his work an elegant, slightly modern tinge.
But it seemed to me that, no matter how interested you might be in this chap who sort of launched the Romantic Age in English literature back in the late 1700s, the story of his sister is even more fascinating, and more baffling.

In my view, she, Dorothy Wordsworth and the conditions of her life, are a few of the main reasons why we have a feminist movement today.
From time to time, writers like Virginia Woolf have wondered what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. Just imagine...
“Her brother Will had some wild-oats adventures as a youth and finally became a successful actor who lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wit in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the Queen.
“Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers.”
Will Shakespeare had no such sister. Will Wordsworth did.
His sister was a writer. Dorothy Wordsworth's works came to light a century or so after her death when literary critics began to re-examine women's role in literature.
But Dorothy had a negative view of her own works. She did not believe what she wrote should be published; that was for men, that was for her brother.
She literally lived for him. And with him. When William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802 Dorothy of course continued to live with them. There was nothing else she could do; she was thirty-one years old and in 1802 that was considered to be too old for marriage.
So everything she did, everything she wrote, was to support, to be of service to, her brother. She did not really exist away from him.
It’s interesting to speculate just how many gifted women writers there were a century or two ago – or three or four centuries ago - who were never given a chance to actually write, to express themselves, to publish their work.
(Also submitted to Sunday Scribblings.)

For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 107 and ABC Wednesday

"H" is for "Handyman"

“Drink to me only with thine eyes…”
If you’ve ever asked yourself what type of person writes poetry – (tho perhaps you haven’t) – the answer is simple.
All types; all kinds.
Take, for example, my old friend Ben J.

Ben started out very low on life’s ladder. He was a bricklayer and a sort of general handyman.
And he wound up as one of the greatest writers – playwright as well as poet – in the history of English literature.
Like most bricklayers of 400 or so years ago Ben, whose last name was Jonson by the way, was unable to go to university, so he decided to educate himself. He became one of the best-educated men in the country.

Ultimately, Oxford University, which earlier wouldn’t have allowed him to so much as deliver a pizza to the back door, granted him an MA.
When he wasn’t occupied writing poetry and plays, he kept busy by getting in trouble. He was a kind of psychological train wreck (which wasn’t all that easy hundreds of years before trains). If you check out his rap sheet it’s almost unbelievable:
He killed two people. You'd have to search for quite a while before you could find many other poets about whom you could you say such a thing.
He had killed a soldier in man-to-man combat in the Low Countries, and he killed another man in a duel. He was also locked up in the poky from time to time just for “leude and mutynous” behavior, which seemed to sort of sum up his life.
(It’s worth pointing out that the report of his heroic man-to-man combat experience while he was in the army came from him; no one else ever mentioned it.)
As for the duel, that actually happened, and Ben was in trouble. It was not trivial; he could have been hanged for such a killing.
He managed to get off by using a legal ploy, something that says a lot about Elizabethan life. He got off by pleading “benefit of clergy.”
It worked, even though there were few who knew him who would ever have described Ben Jonson as clergy, or even having much to do with clergy.
You see, there were so few educated people in England at that time that authorities decided it would be best not to execute a person if he could prove he could read and write. In that case he would be considered to be “clergy.” Ben did well in this test: he aced the exam. He got off lightly: he was just branded with the mark of a felon.

This tough guy was capable of magnificent writing. Check out this week’s prompt. How many bricklayers do you know who could write a poem as light and lovely as “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” which Ben did.
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine.
Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not ask for wine."
If Ben Jonson were around today, my guess is he would probably be described as “deviant”; he would be a writer of plays for off-off-Broadway, and he would usually be dressed, even for formal occasions, in worn-out jeans and a dirty T-shirt with an offensive motto printed on the front, and he would be sporting a huge bushy beard, with minuscule bits of whatever he had for breakfast embedded in it.
Jonson was Will Shakespeare’s friend/competitor/nag and general pain-in-the-neck.

Ben regarded with amusement his pal Will’s efforts to turn himself into a gentleman. It would seem Ben especially got a kick out of the Shakespeare coat of arms, with its “Not Without Right” motto. We know this because Jonson proceeded to write a play that features a character who has received a coat of arms (which he got through bribery); the character, by the way, is a clown.
His coat of arms has a picture of a boar, with a three-word motto beneath: “Not Without Mustard.”
Everyone who was in any way connected with the theatre in London at that time undoubtedly found that hysterically funny. It’s probable that Our Will wasn’t as amused.

As a totally irrelevant side comment, Pocahontas – yes that Pocahontas – was in England and was actually in the audience for one of Ben’s productions.
Ben Jonson died on Aug. 6, 1637. His story ends in this way: once he was safely dead, the country decided that he was one of the foremost men of letters of his age and he was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
(He was one up on his friend Will; Shakespeare was not buried in Westminster Abbey.)

Ben was buried under a slab on which was carved the words, “O Rare Ben Jonson!”
He was rare; there were none rarer.
(Submitted also to "Sunday Scribblings.")

ABC Wednesday, Magpie 106 and Three-Word Wednesday

"G" is for "Grocery Store"

A few years ago – quite a few years ago – your friend Berowne was a 19-year-old student struggling to put himself through college by working in a grocery store.
The year was 1941. Politicians, the media, everybody was then assuring us that the Great Depression was finally over: jobs were available.
So I got one. I learned the skill of stacking shelves with cans of Campbell soup and other sundry items – and not just sundry; the other days of the week too.
Though the depression was over, no one had gotten around to notifying whoever was responsible for figuring out what an adequate salary should be. My pay was thirty-three and a third cents an hour. You worked three hours to make one dollar.
It may no longer have been the Great Depression, but as far as I could see it was a pretty good imitation.
Anyway, as I mentioned, I eagerly learned the art of filling the grocery shelves and the even more demanding skill of building displays.
Ah that, building displays, that was the exciting, intellectually-challenging work! Just putting cans of soup on the shelves was small-time stuff; being able to build an effective display was the major leagues.
Surely you have, at one time or another, gone into a grocery store and been greeted, just as you entered, by the sight of a magnificently-constructed display of toilet paper, or boxes of macaroni and cheese, or perhaps by a huge, awe-inspiring structure made up of large cans of tomato juice. It’s something you don’t forget. In some stores the displays are so crowded it's hard to navigate through them.
It is at least possible that you may have taken a moment to appreciate the engineering skill that must have been involved in such productions. That’s why anyone who could plan and construct a truly effective grocery display was always in demand.
And usually for a lot more money – forty cents an hour, in some cases. Anyway, to get on with my story, I was the new guy in one grocery store and during my very first week there I was startled to learn that I was to be given the assignment of building an important display.
It was to be in the front of the store, the most important spot, and should be built to a height of some ten feet. A blockbuster, in other words. My guess was, they were testing me, trying to see what the rookie could do.
In addition, the display was to be made up of huge jugs of Dad’s Old-Fashioned Root Beer, a prestige item in that store. These came in cases, four jugs to a case.
I went to work. Le Corbusier himself never planned better or worked harder to produce an architecturally perfect construction. I first set up a huge rectangle of cases of Dad’s stuff as a base, then built on these cases, using the ancient pyramids as my example. Up, up went the cases, and then, toward the top, I threw caution to the winds and used the jugs themselves for the crowning glory of the display.
It was superb – “magnificent” might almost have been an appropriate term for the structure. Until…
It seems that some of the cases that I had used for the base of the display had been empty; someone had removed the jugs. I had had no idea. When the base collapsed the result was disaster.
The massive juggernaut came hurtling down, the large number of jugs crashing on the cement floor. I stood there transfixed. My eyes were crinkled in panic; I was unable to utter a sound.
The store in that area was suddenly flooded with Dad’s Old-Fashioned Root Beer, up to everyone’s ankles.
After the screaming and shouting had died down, the manager of the store thanked me for my service and wished me well in my next job.

ABC Wednesday and Magpie 105

"F" is for "False Alarm"
Young Berowne phones home:
Mom, I just heard. They accepted me at UCLA! I’ll be starting in the mid-winter semester.
Yeah, it’s great. It means there’s a lot to do. I haven’t even decided on a major yet.
Oh, I’ve just been out riding my bike. I spotted this phone booth so I thought I’d give you a ring with the good news.
Well, it’s a state university so the tuition shouldn’t be too bad. I hope we’ll be able to handle it. I’m excited; I feel my life is just about to begin. No more of that high school stuff; I’ll be a college man!
What? No, I hadn’t heard. I’ve been out riding my bike. So there was some kind of bombing? Where? I never heard of it.
The whole Pacific fleet of the U S Navy? Oh, that’s just wild talk. They have these incidents and then try to make something big out of them – sells more newspapers. They say things like that to try to encourage Roosevelt to get us into war. It's a false alarm; don’t listen to ‘em. Anyway, I’ve got to concentrate on getting ready for college. Getting ready for college, Mom; isn’t that great?!

Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 104 and ABC Wednesday

"E" is for "Effort"
I’m not sure why, but this week’s prompt reminded me of an old French drinking song…
(Usually sung by old French drunks.)
So, in the interest of fostering better international relations, and since civilization is going to rack and ruin anyway - :-) - here are some angelic lines: :-)

Ah, ah, ah! disait le trottoir.
Qu'est-ce qui va s'passer ce soir?
Disait la mariée, ohé.
Qu'est ce qui va s'passer ce soir?
Disait le trottoir.

Ah, ah, ah! disait la serrure.
J'savais pas qu' c'était si dur,
Disait la mariée, ohé.
J'savais pas qu' c'était si dur,
Disait la serrure.

Ah, ah ah! disait la pendule.
On avance et on recule,
Disait la mariée, ohé.
On avance et on recule,
Disait la pendule.

Here's the rest of the story: with a little effort it's kind of fun to try to figure out the meaning without an English translation nearby...

For Three-Word Wednesday, Magpie 103 and ABC Wednesday

"D" is for "Discussion"
Berowne has been having another discussion with his muse.

Here is a rare picture of her – rare because she does not usually seek publicity. Berowne is a bit upset because his muse has been absent for quite a while.
Berowne: “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been waiting around for weeks for you.”
Muse: “Well, if you think about it, I wouldn’t have been anywhere – on earth. We muses, or musi, live not just in a separate world but in a separate universe.”
B: “Oh, come off it. Stop trying to make yourself into something special and supernatural. We all know you’re just a figment of my imagination, not someone of flesh and blood, and what that means is that you should show up when you’re needed. You don’t seem to know the rules.”
M: “True, I don’t. Are the rules printed out somewhere? And do they mention pay, benefits, vacations and so on?”
B: “That’s rich. You seem to have just been on vacation for almost a month. What is this, France? At times I just don't feel I have control. But let’s get down to work. Willow has just posted another enigmatic prompt; to answer it I need inspiration.”
M: “Inspiration? Ah, that’s an angry equine – a horse of a different choler.”
B: “H’mm. Good thing I don’t depend on you for puns.”
M: "One of these days it’s going to come out that you depend on me for everything. What I was going to say, before I was so boorishly interrupted, is that what I do is come up with ideas. Most of them are like the children up in Lake Woebegone – above average – but I have to admit that maybe some of the ideas are not that great. However, they’re just ideas. Inspiration is something else. As Jack Nicholson might have said in ‘A Few Good Men,’ you can’t handle inspiration!”
B: “Oh, I could handle it all right, if you’d just come up with it. Anyway, here’s this week’s prompt. What do you make of it?"

M: “Good heavens! Where did you get that?”
B: “I didn’t get it; it’s a prompt. You’re familiar with it?”
M: “Why of course. To us it’s famous. It’s a tribute to us, to me, to the literary muse! It powerfully exemplifies our lives, our struggles. Pushed down, kept in the background, often ignored, we nevertheless manage to bring forth gems – note the powerful symbol of an avant-garde ruby that represents the razor-sharp product of our labor.”
B: “I have to admit I’m impressed. It’s true, I haven’t been as appreciative as I could have been for your efforts. And I know I’ve been a bit churlish in the past…”
M: “A bit?”
B: “But this wonderful picture changes things. I’ll be properly grateful for the invaluable work of my muse in the future.”
M: “Good. Now, could we get back to that discussion of pay and benefits?”