Writing Style

Matt,
Thank you for your kind appraisal of my writing style, though truth be told buddy I think you're giving me more credit than is due. After all, you're the one who is pursuing a masters in this craft so I'm hardly one to critique your own writing style, which by the way I hope to get a more in depth exposure to the intricacies of Matt thorough your prose. You make me sound like Moses, Einstein, and Galileo all rolled up into one autonomous whole. Voltaire and Rousseau (again with the French!) I am not and only a few short paragraphs does not a writer make.

In response to my penchant for the obscure, this is merely incidental. I've always believed that this reveals my true personality in the purest light. Nowhere have I drawn more inspiration and direction to the very scope and utility of my obscure nature than in the 1975 film version of "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka is superlatively well done down to the twisted verbiage and non sequiturs from the myriad of literary references from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde. Odgen Nash, John Masefield, and John Keats, who might have otherwise been relegated to literary obscurity by today's tech-savvy youth where the printed word is itself becoming obscure, have been forever incapsulated in this celluloid fragment of cinematic achievement. It's from such very obscure references like these, from films and books, poetry in particular, where the obscure becomes the material and the material becomes immaterial. The one constant vestage of my prose is that is will always be "clear as mud." Clear as mud. That's not just prose and poetry, that's life with it's cascading contradictions and complications. Thank God nothing is simple and easy. What would we write about? I ask you that.

To the matter of my French tastes. Well the first serious books I ever read, while everyone else was reading Tolkien and Rowling, I was reading Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Maupassant, Sand, ect. I was, if not a true great, great, great, great grandson of the Enlightenment, I was at least a virgining one. That, and I like French cooking for which I can think of no better reason to obtain a mastery of the French vernacular than for the mastery of French cuisine. I have always wanted to see wanton Paris. The city is inseparable to the country itself: elegance, effervescence, the very definition of refinement. From Versailles to the Vergennes. The only other revolution I admire more than ours and the French is the Russian. It is from that vantage and the tragedy from the assasination of the Romanovs in that clandestine cellar in a merchant's house in Ekaterinburg in the summer before the Great War ended, that I immersed myself in the flagrant genius of the Russian tome. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy notwithstanding, their poetry rivaled only by that of the powerful music of Tsychaikovsky and Glazuov recalling the ripeness of the Russian soil. Tom Clancy can only give you techno-thrillers and Soviet glorification. I'd rather have the Russian empire and her Romanovs. Bohze Tsarya Khrani (God Save the Tsar).

The third aspect of my prose comes from the fact that all writers are historians just as all historians are writers. No greater understanding of story telling and record keeping is unsurpassed than in the lexicon of historical language. The past gives us the anchor in the centrifuge of the present. Remember the epoch from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "A civilization cannot be conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

Writers of today are the scribes of the present. We must never cease our vigil, not even briefly, for we may enter into the fearful state of complacent intellect. The greatest wisdom we can obtain from this lesson is that humans are an amnesiac lot.

Thanks again for your encouagement. Hope this is what you wanted. I haven't written anything in years. I'm a little rough and unpracticed, so I'll be obliged if you and our readers will indulge me a little.

-John