CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
Apparently, nothing written about Ireland can be called fiction, since "Ireland is an unreal place anyway, where the unlikely seems to happen more often than anything else." From Mrs. O' by Claude Marie Forde, 1958.
Back in the day, I had wanted to write my master’s thesis about my slant on Barbara Pym. My idea was rejected, the thesis advisor's excuse being: “Our library isn’t big enough.” I had been devastated at the time (as I didn’t have a backup topic). It took a great many years for it finally to hit me: the library wasn’t big enough for my thesis idea! What a compliment! That led to this unusual video.