I finished reading a short story today.
I’m so proud.
Anyway, I looked up two words while reading it, and, glancing at them again, I think they’re fairly representative of the author. So I thought of a little quiz. I give you the words and you guess the author's style. They are:
Shoat; hieratic.
Cool, huh? (Of course I only had to look them up to make sure they really meant what I thought they meant, I mean I’m not ignorant of them, especially in context, and anyway, even if I were – ignorant of them, that is – that’s no sin, is it?)
The prize? First person to guess the author wins an occasional poem from me (yay!). You get to determine the theme or content or whatever.
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From: Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor.
Sweeeet, I want funny poems please!
Love,
Chris
We have ourselves a winner! The story was (still is) "Revelation," by Flannery O'Connor. Thanks for playing. I'll do another as soon as I get to reading again. The response has been underwhelming, but I feel encouraged nonetheless.
Keep on writing Goedi, without regard to the underwhelming response. Actually, you write well enough to get paid for it, so I think you should start doing that. Baby needs shoes!
to ferret out the answer to this fiendish quiz, i googled "shoat" and followed the wiktionary link. there i discovered the following: "'A young, newly-weaned pig.' 1955: There would have been nature studies – a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita." when my smug "ha!" became "hmmm...," I wordwebbed "hieratic." a peculiar chain of links brought me to the third page of The Book of the Short Story, edited by Alexander Jessup and Henry Seidel Canby (D. Appleton and Company, 1903) whereon i found the following footnote: "The term short story seems to have taken to itself a meaning only partially indicated by the adjective short. For the sake of clearness in language, it is essential that the use of this expression as a symbol should first be made clear, and then justified. Such is the purpose of this discussion, and the attempt will demand a plain statement of that which differentiates the Short Story from the novel and from the narrative which happens to be short. For this last I shall henceforth in this essay use the word tale, and I shall use short story for all short narratives which differ in form or in substance from the novel, romance, or other long stories, and keep Short Story for a nineteenth century development." i was certain this was a clue to the blogmaster's diabolical guessing challenge! the wiktionary encyclopedia entry for "hieratic" had a link that had brought me to the hieroglyphic text of "The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor" from the Middle Kingdom and Egypt's 18th dynasty-- which was the first story in the aforementioned anthology and has to do with a sailor washing up on an atlantis-like island where a giant god-like snake demands he tell him something he doesn't know! what a fabulous riddle this was! what a mischievous con! it was perfectly clear now who the writer behind those two words was! a southern gothic catholic repressed snake-worshipping nabakov-wannabe! and just as i was about to post my answer chris the tiger pounced! that's okay, i'll beat him next time! anyway, i'm not into funny poems! it's not my thing! and i don't write e-mails either!
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