I’ve never been a fast reader. Nowadays my reading goes in fits and starts, but even when I was younger and was able to devote longer uninterrupted stretches to reading (on car trips and such), I was still never able to achieve the rate of literary consumption I witnessed in some of my friends.<\/p>\n
That said, those books I did<\/i> read influenced me greatly. Once I had finished a book I enjoyed, I would go back and reread chapters, passages and dialogue that I particularly liked. Many books I’ve reread more than a couple of times. Borgel<\/i><\/a>, by Daniel Pinkwater, is one of those.<\/p>\n My aunt sent me the book as a gift around the time it was first published (c. 1990). It languished on a shelf for a month or two before I picked it up and dug in. It’s difficult to overstate how much I enjoyed it, or how much of an influence its been on certain parts of my personality.<\/p>\n It was my first encounter with Pinkwater’s writing style of studied randomness<\/i>, a style which has informed my own writing and sense of humor. It’s a difficult concept to define. The idea is to construct a humorous expression or situation from the most obviously random elements possible. It works because we find the absurd and the unexpected funny, and the randomness is consciously pushed to the extreme for maximum effect.<\/p>\n The best way to illustrate it is through example. In the book, Borgel, the protagonist, gets into a conversation in a language he doesn’t speak at all. His conversational partner later informs him that he’d claimed to be a politically corrupt sardine who wants to eat the tires off motorcycles (“I said that?” “Like a native.”).<\/p>\n Some might say the sentence is a spontaneous emanation of the author’s mind, that he has an innate mental nimbleness to be able to construct phrases like that, and that may well be the case. But I suspect he does something similar to what I’ve done many times: Consciously<\/i> piece together the expression so that the elements are sequenced in the most random manner possible. “Politically corrupt” as a modifier of “sardine” is about as different as it gets–the adjective doesn’t apply in any normal sense to the noun. And the action–“eat the tires off motorcycles”–is set off from the first part of the phrase to an equally random degree. It takes practice, intuition and a good grasp of the relationships between various categories of objects and actions in order to able to pull it off. And Pinkwater, in his writing, constructs such superlative examples of studied randomness… I can only hope to approach his level of skill one day.<\/p>\n