I nominate Des to write the Michelin Guide to Literotica.

[Que]

He is fairly well traveled here, and could easily holiday unubtrusively in the parts he has not familiar with yet.

This bit I think a new person would find rather helpful:

GB red in tooth and claw. Though I think people here are generally far nicer than the fearsome reputation of the GB would suggest. I know I haven't the seniority to be invited to the special Torture Annexe, with its Funk and KS Hall of Mirrors, but the public areas are well maintained and the signage is helpful.

We might have to have him translated into American for those of us that do not speak The Queen's English, but I got the gist.

Not quite sure what "red in tooth and claw" means. I suspect that it is a literary reference that my spotty education left out. In context it seems to categorizing that thread as part of the meaty, visceral parts of the life that is Lit.

 

[DesEsseintes]

'Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,


Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law—
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—'

From In Memoriam, Lord Tennyson's slightly homo-erotic elegy for his very special friend Arthur Henry Hallam.

Thank you for the nomination, but I can think of at least a dozen longer-serving and more eminent writers who could do a better job. I'll happily be a research assistant or something!

 

[Que]

Thank you for the nomination, but I can think of at least a dozen longer-serving and more eminent writers who could do a better job. I'll happily be a research assistant or something!

I've learned that persuasion is of no use with you, and I don't think you are given to bouts of false modesty, but you truly underestimate your facility for capturing the essence of things.

 

[Que]

'Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,


Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law—
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—'

From In Memoriam, Lord Tennyson's slightly homo-erotic elegy for his very special friend Arthur Henry Hallam.

The phrasing struck me as arcane enough to predate your scribblings, but I was ready to believe it might have been yours.

Do you keep a notebook of orphan phrases as you pen them, to include in some later work? I keep wishing I did, but I really don't.

Back when I had a wife to be annoyed with my leavings, she would stack up envelopes and the backs of memorandums she called my "scribble sheets." She did so not in an effort to support my prose, but because she figured I would be hollering for the "Green envelope with a phone number in a block in the lower right corner!"

It was always amusing to read something, months later, that I had doodle, know it was my handwriting but not remember when or why I penned a phrase