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.
"Take metaphor, for example: everything is a metaphor in the hyperkinetic microscope of my psyche, everything is instead of something else. But you cannot extract yourself unscathed from the whole: the whole creates a system of pressures that distorts the metaphors, moving their parts around between metaphors, thereby establishing a continuum." —César Aira (as translated by Katherine Silver), The Literary Conference
This is really something: the Hamilton Public Library has categorized as non-fiction our book of imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations. As library patron Selway noted, "What higher commendation for a book of parables could there be?" This qualifies as a Retroactive Lifetime Goal. Here's a page from Franzlations, which symbolically shows that chickens' eggs are oblong in accordance with the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun. Chickens are famously linked to the sun, as the rooster announces each dawn.