Pound it out
Last night I finished memorizing “The Cook’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is the final poem in a set known as “Fragment I” of the Canterbury Tales, written in Middle …
chaucer
Desperado
A friend sent me this amazing aphorism after I told him that my life plan was, over the next five years, to exit the practice of law and become an …
My first dollar
It isn’t as easy as it sounds, transitioning from a full-time lawyer to a full-time itinerant bicycling minstrel of medieval Chaucerian poetry. Most people are like, “Dude, nothing to it. …
At Trumpingtoun, nat fer fro Cantebrigge
Trumpingtoun. Trumpington. This village was the site for one of Chaucer’s bawdiest stories, The Reeve’s Tale. In sum, two students revenge themselves on a thieving miller by screwing his daughter …
Fear of poetry
If you want to scare people, tell them that you would like to recite a poem. It’s worse than telling them you’d like to sing them a song, or telling …
One Chaucer at a time, or A Tale of Two Cities
On Saturday I rode down to Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade to do a Chaucer recitation. This would have been my first one since the covids closed everything down. Pedaling …
Vanity project
When I got the invoice, Greg said, “It’s a bit pricey for a vanity project.” Actually, it wasn’t. It was the bargain of the century. Greg Leibert had designed from …