Food for Thought for the Hungry Writer

This morning I was skimming through what purports to be a psychology textbook. The author dares to comment on every area of human activity and interaction, and most often, I found that I could agree with his keen insights and sometimes hurtful conclusions about our specie.

Included are many studies on family life, victim hood, childhood, and aggression. The larger human behavioral issues, cultural norms (and digressions there from), academic institutionalism, evolutionism and the like all weigh heavily on the author's mind. Yet he also delves into the individual issues like selfishness, greed, and lust for power. Human (and even animal) foibles and tendencies are addressed in this all encompassing handbook on life as we know it.

So engrossing did I find this manuscript, that I reached page 62 in one quick sitting, and there discovered the author's only error in judging the human condition. I found the following, rather insulting statement about writers:

"...the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

"Profoundly disturbed" was merely my first reaction to this nonsense. A writer should never hide behind misleading statements. He must never obfuscate, nor refrain from absolute frankness and honesty with his audience. As an example of my own determination to demonstrate an author's responsible approach to writing, I will continue my review of this "work" without including any of the disparagement or denigration it so obviously deserves.

As stated above, this tome is a complete anthropological study of man (and boy). Even more amazing, it includes insightful commentary on behavior relating to another of the higher mammals (panthera tigris, to be exact), and its hidden interactions with our own race of man. In some worlds of higher learning, this particular study has its own exacting denotation: for some reason, not stated, this psychological pairing is called "Calvin and Hobbes."

While full of fascinating, albeit often degrading, text, this volume, written by the highly professorial Bill Watterson, includes numerous illustrations (some are in color!!) which tend to magnify and even elucidate each poignant observation made. Some pages are so well laid out, that they are comprised with no text at all, and still succeed.

If I were to learn a lesson on writing from this book, perhaps the one best absorbed and applied would be that if we writers want to produce a great bathroom book, we should use less obstreperously redundant vocabulary,
and instead, draw more pictures!

This has been a (semi-) satirical review of "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection by Bill Watterson, but make sure you don't read this line first!