EPILOGUE: to a Friend,...

desiderata.english.special

Last Sunday I promised I'd write the Epilogue to A Friend, a Challenge, & A DOG, didn't I? And I had stated another time that a Writer's word is His/Her Bond, hadn't I? And I said I took a lot of liberties, didn't I, and so I took a special liberty uploading last Sunday's article UNEDITED.

Keeping my gentleman's word, this is the Epilogue that you have eagerly waited, for 24X6+12 hours 59 minutes 0 second (I'm copying Christopher's style in storytelling, but I can't be accused of plagiarising!).

I could have given this post a new title, "The Importance of Editing", especially relevant to those Readers who are using this Sunday column to upgrade their English writing.

The Editing process starts with reading your Draft of an essay you have just written, looking out for punctuation mistakes -- that is the commas, the semi-colons, the fullstops, the apostrophes, the spellings; and syntax -- that is the sentence construction, following proper grammar rules, Subject-Verb Agreement; and finally, re-arranging the various paragraphs if necessary so that the writing flows smoothly, and the points or arguments are coherent and logical.

So my Epilogue today will be best served by you Printing out a copy of last Sunday's article; later, printing another copy of today's article (Epilogue) and Compare and Contrast the two copies. That will make the Editing Process Crystal Clear, for I would have corrected all the mistakes found in the April 24, 2005's copy, which were made in haste as I had to meet the deadline in accepting Yan's challenge, remember? (http://yancorner.blogspot.com)

(So here starts the Edited Copy, hopefully desiderata has spotted all the mistakes and weaknesses, and then made the necessary and appropriate changes. My challenge to you, dear Reader with a sharp eye, is to spot any remaining mistake. The first 10 alert ones to write back (yes, you can do it via COMMENTS here) would get the honour to borrow my only copy, the collectible one, remember, with all those funny prime numbers?)




A Friend, A Challenge, & a DOG
desiderata.english

Prologue:

Treat today's post as a special, a treat, a trick, whatever, but it's NOT supposed to be written this way. It is written this way because of A Friend, A Challenge, & The Curious INCIDENT of the DOG in the Night-Time. This Dog is special because it's an imaginary one, and won an award called Whitbread Book of the Year for the author MARK HADDON. But I hesitate to sink myself completely into the book and make it public because it contains some four-letter worsd associated with the pubic area (if you know science like the protagonist in the doggone book, Christopher, this branch of Science is called Anatomy (a combo of a lady called Ana and a man called Tom, my take, not the Bio teacher's!) of the Human Body and your Biology teacher will be the best person to educate you about all the parts in detail, functions, etc, etc which stands for et cetera 2X, which means and so on, and so forth, which can also imply a strategy adopted by many writers they have run out of ideas to list ... get what I mean? So be forewarned that out of necessity to confront the TOPIC, i (in small here) humbly seek thy foregiveness and forebearance if the profane-sounding references hurt your sensitivities ... I guess it must be tolerable if, out of 100,000 words I write, only five words offend thy sense of wellbeing (as Christopher will be able to tell ye: only 0.0005 per cent, which is chicken feed compared with dogshit).

INTRODUCTION

This entry came about after I personally met with a Blogger friend (three or four weeks old)(Interruptus as in c. interruptus, as for the last panicky 10 minutes "lost" this essay up till before the first "sensitive" word, this one is of my own, when the PC screen went off with my creative effort so far ... I "Backed" several times, looked at Drafts too, but could NOT get this titled A Friend, A Challenge & a DOG until I typed the second attempt's title, saw the heavenly pointer Recover post, and I clicked, wallah, her I am continuing this post, though this inteeruption cost me 7 minutes ...) No, my friend, Yan (of http://yancorner.blogspot.com), is not three or four weeks old, it's our friendship. To distinguish myself when meeting up at the hotel coffee house, I said I would be carrying a copy of Time magazine and a copy of The DOG... I told her I was planning to write a review of this book in a coming Sunday's column. Being curious, as any press-related person, or any writer worth her salt would, Yan later bought a copy of The DOG, emailed me and pushed me into a corner to fix a deadline to uplink "our" reviews simultaneously, which is just exactly 1 hr & 30 minutes & 0 second from this sentence-end.

Now let's get to the

BODY

The DOG started early with a dead body -- its own bloody body!

"Fifteen-year-old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. What he can't understand are other human beings (emphasis is desiderata's). (Interruptus here again: I just pressed Shift+B to de-bold instead of Ctrl + B and I lost another 3 minutes typing the next 3 sentences again.) When he finds his neighbour's dog lying dead on the lawn, he decides to track down the killer and write a murder mystery about it. But what other mysteries will he end up uncovering?"

The foregoing is NOT my writing -- it's an exerpt from the book backflap flagging off to sell the book for RM35.90 at Kinokuniya (I mentioned the BookStore just in case I can go back to them to give me a free copy for doing this promo -- then I can lend out this KK copy to my readers who are broke or less welloff than me, who's quite nigh to poverty -- I sometimes spend a night in my car parked near a police station when I can't stay at all the 5- or 6-star or 1-star hotels along Jalan Bukit Bintang (why call it Bukit? when I see no hills there, the stars I can understand because Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, when making the blockbuster movie "Entrapment", must have stayed in one of the RM5,000 a nighter in a 7-starry deluxe suite, I envy 'em, the stars I mean, not the suite! As I said in one of my posts, the luxury of Blogging is you san digress as much as you want to, so Try It, blogging I mean, not digressing!)

Well, back to the challenge, Yan, I'm midway to writing my 1,500-2,000 words now, and I get carried away with shooting off tangent, like the stars young Christopher often does in telling his detection story. He even mentioned my favourite snoop. Sherlock Holmes! (I'd mention his sidekick if he was fe-male, but a man sounding like the newest bigstore in town, Watsons (currently being feverishly plugged by Cheryl Samad in a TV series, saw that yet?). Mama mia, I digress yet again.

So as time is running against me, just 60 minutes & 4 seconds to 1100 hrs deadline I agreed with Yan (writers' word is their bond!), I come back to The DOG.

Strange numbers

When I started 2-1/2 weeks ago, I was jumping with joy after some 15 minutes because at the top of the pages appeared strange numbers like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17. This must be a collectible copy in my hands, maybe I can get a few thousand bucks on Ebay auction sales? You know, there are a lot of rich Americanos or Japs out there willing to part with USD (divided by 3.8 rinngit) and I can take a break from freelance 'riting (as LOne (of http://lonestar9/) pondered, serious? Yes, I'm very, very serious.)

My bubble burst when it was soon revealed that the top pagination resulted from one of Chris' skills of playing with prime numbers, and the conventional pagination is listed at the page-bottom. There flies my Greenback and myGoodfriend's Sushi out of the Malaysian window. mGf refers to one of many freinds and this particular one enjoys Jap cuisine, I like the petite girls since viewing one Dr Han Suyin in Love Is a Many-Splendour'd Thing...)

Then my temperature rose a little as part of my job reading the Doggone book was to see if it was suitable reading for lower secondary pupils at Chan Wa High. Though there is a character Mr Peters who is a vicar, there are other colourful figures who don't hesitate in swearing: What the fuck! or add an "s" for variety, Whatthefucks!? No, the question mark doesn't mean the hearer -- please, I didn't say listener -- was expected to answer, this is what is called a rhetorical question.

One can't really review a book adequately, that would be letting the cat out of the doggie's bag, wouldn't I? (Actullay, I'm running out of time, just another 44 minutes to go! See, I misspelt "actually" at the beginning of this sentence in my rush.) Just mention in passing Chris indeed threw in a lot of science puzzles and tricks (one I still couldn't figure out was relating to Probability, we'll leave that for another time and place, just that he made it easier with graphs and diagrams which litter the book, like poo?)

I checked the Chambers ENGLISH DICTIONARY which starts with A, a on page 1 and ends with zythum on page 1732, and found the following definitions:

fuck (old word, long taboo: all words, meanings still vulg.) v.i. to have sexual intercourse: to play around, act foolishly, etc, etc, and further down:

fucked exhausted

poo (slang) same as poop5 faeces: defecation.
(I have used poop3 before, in the full form, nincompoop)

To continue, after the neighbour Mrs Shears' dog was found dead, there were the usual arrival of the policeman, the questioning, and Christopher's determination to solve the murder mystery. It was definitely MURDER, for the poor dog had a fork speared through him (no, not the table fork, the big one from the garden's shed).

I'm now doing a hop-step-&-jump in story telling (not book-reviewing!) and hence summarise here some key obs (for observations as I'm running out of steam):

* Other potentially sensitive words and lines sighted are cunt, (the uncanny one of http://kennysia.com/), canORKnot?

** "Do you mean that they were doing sex?" said by Chris to one Mrs Alexander who mentioned earlier to Chris that "Your mother, before she died, was very good friend with Mr Shears."

*** And she said, "Are you tling the truth, Christopher?"
And then I said, "I always tell the truth."

CONCLUSION

Heaving a sigh of relief, I pen this paragraph:

"So I got to 451c Chapter Road, London NW2 5NG and it took me 27 minutes and there was no one in when Impressed the button that said Flat C and the only interesting thing that happened on the way was 8 men dressed up in Viking costumes with helmets with horns on and they were shouting, but they weren't real Vikings because the Vikings lived nearly 2,000 years ago, and also I had to go for another wee (desiderata thinks this qualifies as another potentially sensitive word and also the subsequent behaviour that follows Chris' need to behave naturally... , so I won't refer for its meaning, or demeaning, in da dick...) and I went in the alleyway down the side of a garage called Burdett Motors which was closed and I didn't like doing that but I didn't want to wet (desiderata: yet another red-face turning word!) myself again, and there was nothing else interesting.

Epilogue:

Please note that the last paragraph before this Epiloge is pretty long; Christopher is allowed to do this as he uses what we call Poetic Licence. I'll elaborate on what PL is on a later post; suffice to mention a famous example is that "double superlatives" Shakespeare used -- remember Brutus' putting a dagger into Caesar's back, described as "the unkindest cut of all..."? Please consult me first if you plan to use one, okay? As time does not permit, I'll leave this for next Sunday's desiderata.english, do I have thy kind permission, dearer Reader? (This is another rhetorical question.)

Just add a PS that today's writing was very much influenced by HADDON's writ(h)ing as a child gifted with with autism. So if any doeth offence, methinks it's Haddon's talent, not my fault.

PPS: I'm not editing this post as wrong grammar and spellings can be attributed to young Christopher. (If anyone spells this last bold-ed word as grammer, he/she would be sent to detention class for a week, and asked to write this word, properly spelt, a thousand times, and fined RM100!) Chow, have fund, oops, fun!