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Two weeks ago I said that I’d use this space to practice writing and now I’m finally going to do it.

Some background:  I’ve got a few books on writing lying around.  As reads, I found them more or less lacking – there’s only so much that can be said – but I never did go through the writing exercises.  It’s much like watching a video on tennis without ever hitting the courts.  I’m going to pull out the exercises that seem interested and see what can made of things.

Description & Setting by Ron Rozelle – Chapter 1, Exercise 3.  Summary: Choose 5 titles and describe the mood in a few words.

Commentary:  Mood is a tricky concept.  It’s pretty damn clear when a book has a strong, well-written, engaging mood but it’s not always so easy to define.  I take it as the type of sugar used in a cake, the fabric but not the design of a dress, the type of car without a make and model.   It’s the emotional and artistic ‘feel’ of a book not to be confused too much with tone, voice, or setting…

Book 1:  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I chose this as the first title because it’s easy or should be easy.  Also, it’s famous.

Mood: Subversive, existential, adventurous, addled, Gonzo, ludicrous, berserk.

It’s hardly profound to call it Subversive  or Gonzo.  Fear and Loathing practically defines the former and literally defines the latter.  It’s an absurdist, philosophical – hence existential – road trip but without the sentimentality of a Bildungsroman – no one grows as a person, no destination is reached.  It’s journalism but of a oddly exposed reproduction of our own twisted reality with a side of dangerous, primordial violence.  It’s complete fiction but wrapped around dreams of debauchery.  It’s about freedom – not the sort people die for, but the sort people die of.  It’s freedom of the luxuriously unclean brand, a misunderstood monster lurking just beyond the gates of town, somewhere in the desert, somewhere beyond the trip.

 Book 2: Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Also somewhat famous, also easily defined

Words: Paranoid, imperialistic, survivalist, fraternal, greedy.

TSM is the novel about greed.  It’s a byword for goldlust and the inhuman violence that exists just beyond civilization.  It would be almost as subversive as Fear and Loathing if it was any true, but it’s not.  At their core, people are not half so violent or paranoid as the TSMs and Lord of the Flies’ would suggest.  People made civilization after all.  They have the capacity for teamwork and temperance, hence TSM becomes a book of mental illness, in part, and the struggles of survival, in part, and a historical documentation of a time and place, again in part, but more aptly an exploration of poverty and imperialism.  It is the story of an expatriate, of the least civilized sort, brought by necessary and temperament to an older poorer world to extract temporal success and economical revitalization.  The reality is none of the protagonists would have ever been rich no matter how much gold they might have dug up.  They were exports of their home nation, in return for global might.  They were part of the Imperialistic deal.  TSM is a story of mercantilism and globalism hidden in story of madness and exile.

Book 3:  Spook Country

I just recently read this.  William Gibson is always a favorite even though I largely disliked this particular offering.

Words: Chic, near-futurism, interconnection, consumerism, realistic modernity

A more difficult book to categorize than the others.  Spook Country is about futuristic artists exploring the edges of philosophy and modern geo-political issues managed by stylish hipster spies.  It’s a world on the verge of yarn where every person is an iconoclast, a unique mold, and every location, a vaguely implausible simulation.  Instead of paranoia, there is exuberance in the potentiality of a new modality – words that largely mean nothing but represent the intellectualism and frontfacing-neostalgia for what comes next.  There is no sentimentality, no real nostalgia, only models and artists playing at a thriller.  Everyone is far too talented.  It’s a book about interesting words put together so very well without plot to care about.

Book 4: Too Many Cooks

A Nero Wolfe novel.  Just finished it the day before yesterday.

Words: sybaritic, cultured, Victorian, inevitable

Nero Wolfe is not a hard-boiled detective.  He is not Phillip Marlowe getting punched or Sam Spade being shot at.  He spends more time describing food and serving choice beer than doing much of anything.  In this particular novel, Wolfe leaves his home – a rare occurrence – to attend a meeting of master chefs at a high-class vacation ground in Virginia.  As with most mysteries, those with recurring private investigators anyway – the crime was solved and everyone knows its going to be solved and even the characters themselves seem to sense that things will come to a positive conclusion soon enough.  Sure there is some protest, but only a little, and only to show that they care about the story.  The real adventure is in the bulbous , snobby Wolfe reluctantly solving crime with the assistance of his snappy, but oddly well-mannered, assistant.  It is all very Victorian in practice – just enough violence to titillate and procedural in execution – but exceedingly polite and infinitely knowledgeable in all the proper things.  It is a gentleman’s adventure concluding happily at the estate house.

Book 5: Friday (by Heinlein.) 

I’m still reading this one actually, but I can guess at Heinlein’s mood and I’m far enough to have a mind on how it turns out.

Words:  martial, lewd, engineered conscientiousness

Without summarizing too much, Friday is about an artificial person (super-person but organic not robotic) who serves as a courier in a variety of cultural unique and dangerous situations.  As with everything Heinlein writes, there’s a young boy’s sense of war embedded into the words with a juvenile sense of seduction and sexuality in equal measure.  Heinlein is the cleverest, most enjoyable terrible writer I’ve ever come across.  His group marriages and social biases are terribly heavy-handed, his characters, oversexed, undersexed, or paperthin, and his plots verge on the preposterously grandiose  (or ‘juvenily’ militaristic), but I keep reading.  He taps the male consciousness in full, the part that comes in around age 13 and never quite leaves.  The mood is adolescent in the sense of being like an adolescent – simplistic, but clever – and futuristic like a newspaper article written for laymen just in time to make the cut.  It’s all so optimistic and clean.

And that’s enough for this week.   Perhaps another next week.  Adieu.