Zygomatic Monotreme

hislolita asked: Josh says thank you for the suggestion, but he has discovered the perfect ending. If you would like to read it, he will be at the following week (not this upcoming) writer's group. He's also going to share a new short story idea, heh.

Excellent! I’m looking forward to it! Unfortunately, I gave my copy of this version of the story to Chazz after he came in, since he missed most of what Josh read. I was reading ahead as Josh was reading, simultaneously hearing the story in his voice and in my imagined narrator’s voice, but I purposely stopped reading at the end of the next-to-last page.

And I’m so glad YOU read your story. As I said, I could not imagine anyone else being able to wrap herself around the language as naturally as you did. But now I wonder in what voice I would hear it if I read it myself, and how it would flow.

It’s been a few weeks since I read anything for the group. I did “The Hoarder” and my two (rejected) submissions for “Machine of Death”, plus my Little Red Riding Hood rewrite “Lil”, but nothing since. I’ve been in a funk lately. Maybe writing will help bring me out of it.

masterslittleprincess asked: The communication on tumblr is both inconvenient and potentially complicated. I dislike it, but, I do like the site itself. The site you're on seems quite different from this one.

Those entries were part of a '30 day challenge' which is basically an internet meme of sorts that promotes a pseudo self analysis, if not strictly because you're the subject of your writings. (Which is something unusual with me. I tend to have my characters experience emotions vicariously for me.) I did enjoy it because I'm not an open person, and it was a way for me to make a few statements without me feeling irrelevant. Perhaps I should do another because I enjoy writing exercises. I haven't been writing enough lately. (As you can partially see.) The character based posts are labeled as such, and I usually write in a third person for those. They're basically a series of vignettes that are set in a particular universe that I mull upon every so often with the notion that someday, I'll actually garner the initiative to write a book. (A traditional Russian novel, that is in English. Oh the irony.) I'm resigned to this being wishful thinking.

I'm just glad to discover that someone actually enjoyed the posts/my writings, even if it is/was only one person, haha. (: I try to embody Nabokov, and oddly my favorite poet, Housman. I have a fixation with details, and as you earlier said purple prose, so once again, thank you so much. I'm surprised you remembered at all. I'm actually still without BOTH of my favorite books by the way, due to errors of judgment. I struck up a conversation with a man on a greyhound bus while I was traveling to Washington, and somehow I ended up lending him The Catcher in the Rye. He read it adamantly, to the extent that his overhead light was on nearly the entire duration of the night. The next day, we switched buses, and he failed to return the book beforehand. Oh well, I guess he really did love it, which isn't a bad thing. I could easily get a new one but the particular cover I had rarely seems to be in stock around here... which is unfortunate. As for Lolita, it was given to a past love interest, and for some reason, I just don't presently possess the heart to buy it again.

PS- I feel like an old man. I'm not very fond of my generation either. Ah well.

Tumblr does seem to have many peculiarities, among them an almost non-existent commenting system.  From what I could gather from my hurried trip through the customization page, you have the option of allowing people who follow you to “ask questions,” or allowing anonymous people to do so.  I think.  Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention.

I must admit: I don’t get tumblr.  (I believe Insanity Wolf had something to say about that.)  The blogging platform I use is more suited to my needs as a writer and memoirist, especially with its structure that allows easy access to past entries indexed by date, by title, and by subject.  As someone who has watched both my father and my mother’s mother vanish into the fog of Alzheimer’s, I know that I will not be able to count on my remarkable memory forever, and someday I too may slip into the great forgetting.  So I’m trying to remember things now before they are forgotten forever.  There are so many other memories belonging to other people that I wish I had been able to capture, but those memories died with their owners.  Still, if you ever decide to write a long-form blog, I highly recommend Blogger.

I must also admit (and that is one of my greatest faults: I am compulsively honest, even when it serves to my detriment) that I am not familiar with Housman; I may have been exposed to him at some point in the past, but he did not set any hooks in my brain.  Nabokov I only had passing familiarity with when I purchased a 30th anniversary edition back in 1989; I blew through the book rapidly, but it made less of an impression on me then than it did when I re-read it last year, when I was truly astonished by his style and his structure.  (He engaged in what I call multi-temporal foreshadowing:  The book is written as a memoir by a character who is known to the readers to have died shortly after completing it; we are told the fates of most of the major characters within the first few pages, and yet Humbert cleverly provides hints of future events throughout his narrative, unaware that his future readers know far more about the ultimate outcomes of events than he believes he does.) After reading it I found myself wanting to learn more; and eventually I found myself in possession of a 40% off coupon for Barnes & Noble while standing in front of their sole copy of “The Annotated Lolita,” an exhaustively end-noted version of the book thoroughly researched with the assistance of Nabokov himself.  A week later I found myself in possession of a 40% off coupon for Borders; and, as they were out of the particular book I was looking for and the coupon was scheduled to expire on that day, I realized that there was no other book I would rather buy than another copy of “The Annotated Lolita.” So now I have two, plus my original. 

(Of course, I believe this purchase came a week or so after you had posted that you were without a copy, so I had that in the back of my mind as well.)

Which version of The Catcher in the Rye are you without?  My original, bought in 1986, was a paperback with a burgundy cover and yellow text; after I thought I lost it, I bought a replacement with, I believe, a white cover with colored stripes along it.  I think one of my roommates in Delaware back in 1991 had a facsimile first edition hardcover, with an ink sketch of a carousel horse.  (I THINK it was a facsimile.)

Like Housman, I am also not familiar with Baudelaire - I had to Google the new title of your tumblr to learn its origin.  (And the less said about the number of times I’ve seen the first two words of your title on my tabs list and wondered why I had a Justin Bieber song among my tabs, the better.)

Blah.  I am dealing with the consequences of having a blocked and collapsing chimney in my hundred-year-old house - not the least of which is that my furnace will not run without an unblocked chimney.  Like Pooh, I  found myself wondering how someone could just turn the heat off on me like that, especially since I’ve been scrupulously paying my utility bills.  But in the end it was just part of my house trying to keep me from dying while another part was trying to kill me.  So now I have that to deal with.  What fun. 

Take care.  Hope all is well with you.  And remember that there is a copy of the annotated edition of Lolita waiting for you if you want it.

- H

My blog is actually here:

http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/

Fun fact:  “Zygomatic Monotreme” was actually my third choice for my blog name.  I’m using it here because both “anothermonkey.tumblr.com” and “myoclonicjerk.tumblr.com” (my second choice for my blog name) were already taken.