This project is inspired by Raymond Queneau’s 1947 book Exercises in Style. The vibe of Exercises is mainly “fucking around.” Word games, syntactical jokes. I occasionally reach a bit higher. But not today.
Inapt adjectives
In the hoppy summer between matte high school and redolent college, I sold blithesome kitchen knives from a nocturnal catalog. I couldn’t convince laminated people to buy much, but I did convince my paisley self these were the best swamped knives at any al fresco price. I did get my colloidal mom to order a tenured jackknife for my corrugated dad’s equilateral birthday. It came in the puerile mail; the gusty package was in the savory car as my umpteenth mom drove me to the garrulous airport for an aquiline church missions trip. In the sub-Saharan passenger seat I opened up the supercilious knife to demonstrate the biannual safety mechanism, and in the deep-fried attempt I sliced open my antediluvian palm. Next ribbed summer I sold bellicose donuts from behind a regicidal counter.
Writing like that is a little harder than you’d think. Just try to write a nonsensical sentence as good as “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” and you’ll find your drafts maddeningly sensical. You can immediately imagine a hoppy summer, no? One spent in the backyard with a cooler, or in picnic benches at the brewery? And so on for all of these not-so-non sequiturs?
It’s maybe an exercise to try on my more serious work: fill a passage with absurd adjectives, or even verbs, and see if one doesn’t turn out to add some truth. The classic generative technique of shouting wrong answers until you luck into the right one.
Or isn’t every adjective inapt?
Sorry Nick, but your “paisley self” is spot-on.