The e-mail had arrived, like every day, advertising free books for my Kindle. I had a few minutes, so I double-clicked to open:
Posted: 08 Apr 2014 04:22 AM PDTI had seen Lovecraft's name often, though, strangely, it was mixed in my memory with L. Ron Hubbard. I remembered that Lovecraft had been one of the authors recently advertised by Library of America, a collection I respect, so I went to Wikipedia to learn more about Lovecraft. [Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!]
Complete Collection Of H.P.Lovecraft – 150 eBooks With 100+ Audio Book Links(Complete Collection Of Lovecraft’s Fiction, Juvenilia, Poems, Essays And Collaborations)
Orintage Publishing is proud to bring the complete works of … [visit site to read more]
The Wikipedia article included the sentence: "He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years." I had never seen the word, "straitened," and had no idea what it meant, so I sent the mighty Google forth in search of the phrase, "progressively straitened circumstances."
The results? Only 43, and most of them were sites referring back to the same sentence about Lovecraft that I had seen at Wikipedia. So resubmitted the search excluding the sites that referred to Lovecraft. I was given the five results shown below, three of which referred to a sentence in a book on WWII and two of which referred to a book called Ginger Man. There were also links to a review of a book called Julius Vogel: Business Politician and a web site calling itself "Granite State Games":
Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media
books.google.com/books?isbn=0765617773
David C. Earhart - 2009 - History
The progressively straitened circumstances both prescribed behavior appropriate to wartime and proscribed “unpatriotic” behavior, as every day came to ...
The Ginger Man - Shvoong
www.shvoong.com › Books › Novels & Novellas
Aug 29, 2007 - Undeterred by his progressively straitened circumstances, he seduces his tenant, the naive and timid Miss Frost (a frustrated, ...
[PDF] 188 REVIEWS Julius Vogel: Business Politician. By Raewyn ...
www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/1986/NZJH_20_2_09.pdf
of disappointed hopes and progressively straitened circumstances, remember his. •youthful scrapbook entry? 'The great merit of philosophy when we cannot ...
The Ginger Man Summary - eNotes.com
www.enotes.com/topics/ginger-man
The Ginger Man presents the slapstick, bawdy, picaresque adventures of Sebastian Dangerfield. Born in St. Louis, Sebastian is supposedly studying law at ...
GRANITE STATE GAMES
granitestategames.tumblr.com/
I had been required to abandon my late model automobile, and inasmuch as my options were limited in my progressively straitened circumstances, I had spent ...
Certain Victory Images of World War II in the Japanese ...
www.scribd.com/.../Certain-Victory-Images-of-World-War-II-in-the-Jap...
Apr 11, 2011 - The progressively straitened circumstances both prescribed behavior appropriate to wartime and proscribed “unpatriotic” behavior, as every ...
Disappointed at not finding a definition for the phrase, but intrigued by the rarity of its use, I searched for "straitened circumstances" and found a definition (one of 164 results) :
Adj. 1. in straitened circumstances - not having enough money to pay for necessities; hard up, impecunious, penniless, penurious, pinched; poor - having little money or few possessions; "deplored the gap between rich and poor countries"; "the proverbial poor artist living in a garret"My curiosity piqued about who would use such an old-fashioned phrase on the internet, I went back and linked to the tumblr site calling itself Granite State Games (granitestategames.tumblr.com). Unfortunately, the link no longer existed. But I did find there was a cached version and found that the site was created by David Carlton Boyd.
"It is but bare justice to Mr Swiveller to say, that, although the expenses of her education kept him in straitened circumstances for half a dozen years, he never slackened in his zeal, and always held himself sufficiently repaid by the accounts he heard (with great gravity) of her advancement, on his monthly visits to the governess, who looked upon him as a literary gentleman of eccentric habits, and of a most prodigious talent in quotation."
The Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens, Charles
(Also appearing in 35 other classic literature books in The Free Library at thefreelibrary.com.)
Boyd's writing style so intrigued me that I searched for "David Carlton Boyd," and then "David Boyd," at which point I came across the site http://voilacezanne.tumblr.com, a site self-attributed to David (Carlton) Boyd. And this site led me to the site http://bonjourcezanne.tumblr.com.
Lost to the journey and not the destination, I read the bonjourcezanne site and noticed that it mentioned in its afterword, "We concluded our inspection of this frenhoferian oeuvre...," using yet another word I did not know, namely "frenhoferian."
Oh, fair reader, how a few minutes to spare on the internet had turned into an afternoon of wandering! I searched for the word "frenhoferian" and found references to Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece but no definition of the word. My good Google was kind enough to ask if I had meant "frenhofer" so I clicked to search for the modified word.
In the results, I found a site with "Chapter One Who was Frenhofer? - UC Press E-Books ...," in which I learned Master Frenhofer is the old master painter protagonist in the book by Balzac called The Unknown Masterpiece. Going on to read "Chapter Two, Cezanne in the shadow of Frenhofer," I saw another word I did not know: furbelows, so I looked up furbelows and got this definition:
1 : a pleated or gathered piece of material; especially : a flounce on women's clothing
2: something that suggests a furbelow especially in being showy or superfluous
— furbelow transitive verb
Rhymes with FURBELOWAnd there my journey came to its end, though not because the journey itself had ended, but because my time had come to its end.
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