I Before E Except After C

Sebastian,

Just looked over your most recent revisions to the book, and everything looks great. At this rate, it should be in the stores by our original target date of May 31! I do have one minor quibble with something in the third paragraph on page 371, which I've reproduced below and want to make a point about:

'Dierdorf thrust his broiling McStewart again and again into Shandrine's star-spangled yumcave, reveling in the sensation that the syrupy seed which brewed like tasty New England cider deep in his rampaging keeblers was about to erupt into that tamed shrew like the whole of Mount. St. Helens shooting millions of gallons of hot orange semen through a single plastic straw.'

Sebastian, I wonder here about your description of the lava of Mount. St. Helens....are we sure that lava is necessarily orange? Obviously we tend to think so because of the images we've been fed through years of educational films in school and on the Discovery Channel, but if I'm not mistaken, it is merely the heat from the lava which makes it appear orange on standard film, which cannot correctly interpret colors of such an intense nature. Therefore, we might be best in going with the word 'red' here. Write me back with your ideas!

—Thisha

Thisha,

Thanks for your observation about the paragraph on page 371, but I think you might be mistaken. Boiling hot lava which is released into the air after a volcanic eruption is often a different natural color than magma, which is merely lava in its underground state. While magma is most often a deep red, exposure to air and light usually makes the lava appear orange. Because a thing's appearance is, in essence, its reality, I still believe that Dierdorf's sperm should be described in terms of orange lava bursting its way into Shandrine's quivering and grateful dew closet.

I appreciate your comment, though!

—Sebastian

Sebastian,

I think I have to take issue with something you wrote in your response to my suggestion of yesterday afternoon....you state that "a thing's appearance is, in essence, its reality." Not true! We've both read Bertrand Schopendutel's

Philosophy for the Very Sleepy

, and I know for a fact that your own master's thesis went to great lengths to uphold his central arguments, so how can you suggest that illusion equals actuality? If this were the case, consider your own statement on page 517 of the book:

'To Theo, whose mind often drifted while he gadoogled new choodle back to more innocent and youthful days, Tilly Sue's curve-a-lots looked in the moonlight like two jiggling servings of gelatin, each capped with a ripe purple grape placed lovingly in the center by Auntie Dee, grapes which, like Tilly Sue's jaunty nipples, were perfect to suck on or even eat whole.'

By your logic, then, Sebastian, dear, the bosoms of your adventurous heroine literally are an edible dessert or snack! For is this not Theo's perceived reality? Please clarify yourself so we can move on to other editorial business.

—Thisha

Thisha,

Your rather nebulous comments about my interpretation of Schopendutel's work notwithstanding (I could prove my Dartmouth hypotheses easily by referring you to one or two texts on sensory semantics which currently sit on the bookshelf behind me), I was alarmed to discover, while looking over the galley proofs you sent me this morning, that you changed some text on page 844 without my approval! Chapter ninety was originally launched with the following sentence:

'Lord Thistentop tried in vain from beneath the bouncing Lady Shapiro to signal that the grinding of her cultured gumdrop onto his nose was causing him some muscular distress and loss of oxygen, but, unable as he was to extricate his index fingers from her roundum, he was unable to point, gesture, or otherwise motion for her to go easy just long enough for him to get some relief.'

Looking now at the galleys, I find that you have radically, and injudiciously, altered this sentence to read as follows:

'Lord Thistentop tried in vain from beneath the bouncing Lady Shapiro to signal that the grinding of her cultured gumdrop onto his nose was causing him some muscular distress and loss of oxygen, but, unable as he was to extricate his index fingers from her roundum, he was unable to point, gesture, or otherwise motion for her to go easy just long enough for him to ACHIEVE some relief.'

Obviously this will not do. The phrase 'get some relief' is a far more accurate composition; your implication that he must somehow 'achieve' the relief is preposterous. What Lord Thistentop is 'achieving' is the eating of his girlfriend's choodle; any other accomplishment on his part can only be a mere by-product of his reactions to the spelunking act. You would have him transmogrify into some sort of mythic superman who can both 'achieve' the giving of oral pleasure to Lady Shapiro's yumgina AND 'achieve' a second of freedom from the greedy snuzzer that is swallowing half his face at the very same time! Because of the awkward juxtaposition of the lovers' limbs, and the rather unique weight ratios which result from that juxtaposition, such freedom is not his to win; it must be given, or gotten by the whims of chance or the interruption of a manservant or maid of some sort. Please make the necessary corrections before we discuss anything else you deem to be "incorrect."

—Sebastian

Sebastian,

Just on my way out of the office for the evening, and wondering what exactly this line in chapter 116 is supposed to mean:

"Nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, NUH, NUH, GUH, GUH,

YOWP!!

" whimpered the Mona Lisa as the Venus de Milo inserted the last of the snow cones.

Obviously your failure to make 'snow cones' into the one-word 'snowcones' is a rare typo of some previously undiscovered and unimagined sort, no doubt with a fascinating backstory about how it came to be. Or was it simply the result of a sudden brain fever, or even a momentary detachment from your senses due to your recent bout with hookworm? Glad I spotted the goof; that would have been a real doozy for an unsuspecting reader to encounter!

—Thisha

Thisha,

You disappoint me, good lady. Casual research on the internet reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that to join the words snow and cone into one in an attempt to express the notion of the iced dessert treat we all remember from the halcyon days of childhood is to admit to oneself and the entire globe that one is a moron. 'Snow cone' as a two-word sentiment has been used in no less than four hundred and sixty works of American book-length fiction in the past seventy years, including Adam Jayjay's bestselling, oft-translated

Meet Me Under My Wangie

, while 'snowcone' (I am ashamed to even type the word onto parchment) has reared its stillborn, misspelled head exactly once, in the year 1934, mentioned as an intermission snack on a tattered advertising flyer promoting a Brooklyn wrestling match between a pair of gentlemen presenting themselves as Archibald 'The Running Screamer' Lopez and 'Appendix Man'. Feel free to file this information away so that you won't put any other author in the awkward position of noting the blunders of his own editor!

—Sebastian

Sebastian,

Looking over the ending of the book once more, I'm afraid I discovered a massive, infinitely embarrassing miscue on your part lodged firmly in the final sentences. I have taken the liberty of making the appropriate repairs to your misguided verbiage, and the book's finale now reads, more correctly, as follows:

"Gadzooks!" shouted the monster with six penises, soaping himself up for another go at the twins. "I've heard of the rings of Uranus, but this is freaking ridiculous!"

As you may or may not remember, Sebastian, your original version of the finale had the monster with six penises

yelling

his final exclamation, which I'm afraid is an error on a par with western Europe's policy of appeasement toward Adolf Hitler. I know that I don't have to go into the details of this rather shocking linguistic miscalculation, and the less said about it the better. I'm just glad I caught it in time to thwart the titanic embarrassment your writing might have caused, both to the general public and here in the office.

—Thisha

Thisha,

I have gone ahead and changed the final sentence of

Lo! A Hard-On!

back to its original form, and shredded your rather bizarre note, choosing to pretend that the moment in time when you decided to play God and invent your own grammatical reality simply never happened.

Dearest Thisha, I am beginning to fear that the neglect foisted upon your own suffering thelma these many months by all American males in your age bracket has perhaps caused you to become unhinged as a professional editor, rendering you unable to complete this project with any sort of acumen. Take, for example, your freakish, lost-in-space suggestion that I change even a single sacred letter of the book's opening sentence on which I labored for so long:

'Dexter removed his fleshy gavel from Sister Freda's mouth just long enough to baste it with more lemon juice, and, in a divine burst of inspiration, he applied a little tarragon to the aforementioned love-ladle, an improvisation he felt would definitely add a Taste-of-Tuscany zing that had been missing in their marriage for almost seven years.'

How humiliating it would have been for me if the book were to someday be picked up by my third grade teacher Mrs. Pleats, only for her to find that you had tried, in your dictatorial manner, to replace

that

with

which

between the critical forty-fifth and forty-sixth words! Would I have ever been able to show my face in my beloved hometown of Edges' Corners again? I thank Vishnu that I was able to throw my body in front of the speeding bullets of your editorial gaffes in time to save what surely will become my third consecutive Bram Stroker Award Winner come October.

I am suggesting to Paul Vorpsch and the rest of the gang on seven that the final galleys of the book be submitted to his office instead of your own. Best of luck with your time off work.

—Sebastian

Sebastian,

Concerning the

that

versus

which

issue, put this in your pipe and smoke it, bro: Restrictive clauses are essential to a sentence, and nonrestrictive clauses are nonessential; failure to distinguish these by proper punctuation results in ambiguity, as when a restrictive clause is accidentally set off by a comma; nonrestrictive clauses are merely descriptive or additive, and are always set off. The chief use of the distinction between

that

and

which

is that it helps in distinguishing between restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, a far more important matter than any arbitrary preference of pronoun; the punctuation, however, remains decisive in indicating the distinction, as in the difference between the sentence "I went spungo on the face

which

was beneath my snuzzer" and the sentence "I went spungo on the face

that,/I> was beneath my snuzzer" and the sentence "I went spungo on the face, which was beneath my snuzzer".

Thank you for your addled but well-meaning input, and may I wish you a very prosperous New Year.

—Thisha

Thisha,

Um, I'm a little confused. Are we ever gonna do it, or what?

—Sebastian