I was gratified to hear that not everyone has completely forgotten my nom de plume from what seems so long ago: my dear friend Sam Rasnake has added to a growing body of literature on Finnegan Flawnt (FF*), the publishing phenomenon at the end of the last literary decade, the man who never made it past his own doorstep and yet somehow wrote a decent roundelay of micro prose in the spirit of the gentleman-writer, like a contemporary of Jane Austen and Benjamin Franklin (whom he most uncannily resembled).

Sam Rasnake (according to himself)

Sam’s wonderful letter “Dear Wigleaf” now re-appeared at FF’s former friendly literate hangout Fictionaut. In the comments section, I gave away more secret information on Finnegan:

…it is most gratifying to FF, he told me in one of his dispatches, which always bear the heading “URGENT”, but never contain much of anything, to be remembered thus. FF‘s note in this text is wonderful. we need to remember the dead if only because we’ll be dead once ourselves. there are fewer and fewer dispatches, btw, and they’re delivered to my door by smaller and smaller animals — the last message from him was written on a grain of rice and carried by a cricket which died from exhaustion after having delivered the note. it contained the flash writer’s credo: “keep it short.”

Read the letter and the complete comments here and enjoy the myth, the grave, the dug-up grave and the enduring myth around all of it.

And Sam: I dub thee honorary Gastarbeiter, thank you.

Cheers from the bunk—
Marcus Speh

Vincent van Gogh: Grave Digging in the Regen Cemetery (1890)

*FF is not the creator of the otherwise infamous «#ff » movement on Twitter, a social media site. #ff actually stands for “follow friday“—it is an irrational, global trend started by a Catholic user after a bit of bad fish.