The Gammage Cup - References To "Real World" Culture

References To "Real World" Culture

The book contains several clever references to our world in the things that Fooley brings back from his balloon ride.

  • The names of the periods are derived from common abbreviations (Ltd. means limited, Co. means county, Bros. means brothers, etc. (that's one too))
  • Paintings are family trees and family trees are paintings. This is because Fooley brought back a painting of a tree in front of a house and when the villagers matched the list written in Fooley's book with the things he had brought back they thought it was a family tree and they called the family tree a painting because it was the last thing left.
  • Fooley also brings back the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb and it is the prevailing opinion that something that doesn't follow its rhyme scheme and meter is not a poem but a scribble.

Read more about this topic:  The Gammage Cup

Famous quotes containing the words real, world and/or culture:

    “The real pleasure of being Mick Jagger was in having everything but being tempted by nothing ... a smouldering ill will which silk clothes, fine food, wine, women, and every conceivable physical pampering somehow aggravated ... a drained and languorous, exquisitely photogenic ennui.”
    —Anonymous “Chronicler.” Quoted in Philip Norman, The Life and Good Times of the Rolling Stones (1989)

    “Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
    —Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
    —Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)