The subject line above was the title of an email I got from Monica that resulted in an exchange that would fit well on this forum since it is pretty barren these days in comparison to the number of posts other forums around here get. So, with her permission, I'm copying and pasting the relevant parts of the exchange here:
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[from Monica]:
A new book just came into the library called “Wither’s Legacy.” I was thinking that Wither probably didn’t leave much of a legacy (hard to say).
This new book is a horror fiction, the main character, Wither, being a nasty witch. Funny how the name Wither just isn’t applied to pleasant, well-adjusted, normal members of society. :-)
[reply from Stanley]:
Subject: The Saracen, the Fairy, and the Objectivity Room
Now you’ve got me wondering about something like this:
Miss Hardcastle comes back from a trip to Edgestow and tells her friends at Belbury, “I’m back! I’m back. Oh I was gone for hours and hours and I had this wonderful little tea with a sweet woman named Jane and everything all around was white because there was heavy fog and it’s always foggy and never Halloween, but they say Alcasan is on the move...”
Frost: You’ll have to hide longer than that, Fairy, if you want to fool us
Wither: It’s all in Nietzsche! What DO they teach them in the Objectivity Rooms these days!
Interesting possibilities, eh?:-)
[Monica]:
Subject: The Last Scrabble
And the only laugh I’ve had at work today. :-) Interesting indeed, although a little retch-producing imagining Lucy as Miss Hardcastle. I don’t think even you (with your Susan-as-Jane ideas) would suggest Miss Hardcastle would be what Lucy would have become if she’d given in to her vanity back on an island in VDT.
But there’s something about using those nasty THS NAMES and their associations that is so shuddering when translated to Narnia:
Imagine the not-so-humorous scenario:
And when Fairy and Wither looked at Alcasan, he no longer appeared to them as a drooling, disembodied head. He appeared as something far more terrible, and he told them things that I cannot write here. And it was not the end of the book, but the first chapter of a story that goes on and on and in which every chapter is more hideous and frightening than the one before.
Yuck!
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Well, that last bit was not to be surpassed -- all I could do was lol!
--Stanley