The following is the "about the author" piece Jon wrote for his children's picture book, which is due today in creative writing class, and which he finished at 5:15 a.m. It is reprinted here totally without permission.
Jon is a procrastinator. He stays up until the wee hours of the morning before an assignment is due finishing it. This seems like a bad habit but when one considers that Jon’s friends stay up until the wee hours of the morning an assignment is due playing Halo, and just don’t turn in the assignment, Jon’s habits don’t seem so bad. He also writes run on sentences, which just keep going and going like the energizer bunny, but they usually wind up somewhere, but sometimes wander off on their own and get lost like a kid at a carnival, and are never heard from again, unless for some reason or other they should decide to come back which is almost never the case, at least not with sentences, although it is not unheard of, once in a blue moon, for one to sneak back up on the original subject, like a lion stalking its prey through the tall grass, waiting, watching, and then, Bam! it pounces, and the helpless read may not even know what hit them in the confusion about whether or not the sentence is talking about Jon again and was that exclamation mark punctuation or just an interjection trying to give the reader false hope before the sentence, swerving like a drunk driver weaving in and out of lanes, careens on in a new direction, guided not by the subject or even the author but rather by its own near sentience, its will to live pushing on, trying to delay the inevitable visit from punctuation, that grim reaper of the sentence’s, whose scythe-like question mark and bullet-like periods are as inevitable to the sentence as death to a human, but of course there is one hope, one way to cheat that dark angel of truncation, whose grisly power was once so great he could stop a sentence with merely the word stop, this fate can never be outrun forever but it can, like Frankenstein or Dracula, be turned not into an end, but merely an interruption, this dark power lies in what those who dare to speak its name call, The Ellipse…
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3 comments:
That's what I call a sentence. Direct, to the point, if there was or was even supposed to be a "point", which, as we all know, involves impossibly complicated notions of stasis and movement and direction and intentionality that can only ever exist as a construct of a language that is necessarily circular and therefore incapable of reference to anything but itself, which is not to say that meaning cannot or was not conveyed to the "reader" by the "procrastinator", which, parenthetically, reminds me of a joke I should tell you sometime, but it's long and it's late (that's what she said) so let me just congratulate Master Jon and ask that we also be given the opportunity to read the book that went along with the comments we have been illicitly privy to through the good and noble offices, I presume, of Bopeep, who may have it in her power to post the illustrated version of the text for which we eagerly await?(.)
Hey, Jon,
That was one funny, clever, fast- talking essay about nothing. Are you studying to be a politician? If you are, you will win any debate hands down with jargon like that. Keep up the good work. Itwas great fun to read. Thanks to your Mom for passing it on.
And now we know exactly where Jon gets it from...
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