Tuesday, October 14, 2008

A Letter To The Editor

Dear Sirs,

After perusing your latest findings ("An Introduction" [Wonderings, September]), and I must say much intense lucubration on my part, something odd has come to my attention. Though obfuscated as your article was with misconceptions and deconstructivist folderol and hokey shenanigans of razzmatazz and questionable merit, I still stared with gawky haste, incredulously, at the page when the whole roundabout hatful of solecism ended on the inglorious note of, “Grande Geoffrey And His Bestial Micro Media Flash Dancers.” I could not help but wonder, what in the world? Is this some type of code that I am not aware of? An acronym in disguise? And also, excuse the excoriation, but nobody reads Branch anymore, and just as many acolytes of Wellmeyer exist as kids there are who still play the original silver-box Nintendo Entertainment System. Referring to their findings in any but a facetious or sardonic, if not even mordant sort of way, just seems plain silly, even to an old timer like yours truly. Next time maybe you should just use Rudyard Kipling as your scimitar to slice up these unanswerable questions into little nuggets of frass, to give one even the remotest (dare I say foggiest?) notion, or your basic bare-bones rudimentary understanding, of this thing we humans do called being alive.

Yours Truly,
YT



Dearest YT,

Thank you for your kind words. We here at Autotelic Monthly wish to congratulate you on your speculating, and though you do intuit some of the substance of our meaning in the correct portion of our piece “An Introduction” [Wonderings, September], you do not completely comprehend the exact nature of your correct surmise, i.e. that the terminus of the aforementioned work is a type of acronym (actually a backronym, though of a rather bolwderized sort, just as a book is a Box Of Organized Knowledge according the late great Mr. Burgess.) So, at this time we would like to congratulate you on your Brobdingnagian accomplishment, and also reveal to you the initialism’s exact meaning, though some erudite pedants might refer to it as an alphabetism. GGAHBMMFD. Yes, that is it. That good old mnemonic device for remembering the notes on the magical scale of imagination. Or, as many of you may be more familiar with it, “Good Grades Always Have Been Making Me Feel Good.” Thank you for your interest.
—AM

PS—Rudyard Kipling was a pussy.