The Idler, Thursday, December 27

Debt of gratitude

LOOKING further at some of the top entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest for the most prolix, cliché-ridden and absurd opening sentence to a bad novel, one comes to realise what a debt of gratitude the literary world owes the English Department of San Jose State University, California.

Some of it is so bloodcurdlingly awful, it lifts into a class all its own, rather like the clunking poetry of William McGonagall, the Victorian aspirant poet laureate who was so bad his work now has its own website.

Some more examples from Bulwer-Lytton (also known as the Dark and Stormy Night Awards, after the opening sentence of a 19^th century novel by Bulwer-Lytton).

·         The shallow cave behind the mighty river's thundering waterfall seemed more like a damp, cold, misty, poorly lit hallway leading from the shower room in some cheap-dive gym under the Elevated train where mugs who couldn't crack the glass jaw of some washed-up palooka on their best sober day still deluded themselves that they could be somebody; and yet, Bill thought, "at least it's got runnin' water."

·         Inspector Murphy stood up when he saw me, then looked down at the lifeless body, crumpled like a forlorn Snicker's candy wrapper, and after a knowing glance at Detective Wilson pointed to the darkening crimson pool spreading from the stiff's shattered noggin, and said, "You settle it, Gibson; does that puddle look more like a duck or a cow?"

• The blood seeped out of the body like bad peach juice from a peach that had been left on one side so long the bottom became rotten while it still looked fine on the top but had started to attract fruit flies, and this had the same effect, but with regular flies, that is not say there weren't some fruit flies around because, after all, this was Miami.

• The smooth hand I was caressing felt as if it belonged to a Persian monk that had been rubbing moisturising body oils on his fellow monks all day (but not in a gay way, come on, he's a monk for God's sake), when in all actuality the hand belonged to a body that I had just pulled out of the Potomac for forensic investigation.

• Primum non nocere, from the Latin for "first, do no harm," one of the principal tenets of the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians, was far from David's mind (as he strode, sling in hand, to face Goliath) in part because Hippocrates was born about 100 years after David, in part because David wasn't even a physician, but mainly because David wanted to kill the sucker.

• The drugged parrots pelted the village like a hellish rain of feathered fanny packs stuffed with claws and porridge, rendering Claudia's makeshift rabbit-skin umbrella more symbolic than anything else.

·         They still talk about that fateful afternoon in Abilene, when Dancing Dan DuPre moonwalked through the doors of Fat Suzy's saloon, made a passable reverse-turn, pirouetted twice followed by a double box-step, somersaulted onto the bar, drew his twin silver-plated Colt-45s and put twelve bullets through the eyes of the McLuskey sextuplets, on account of them varmints burning down his ranch and lynching his prize steer.

There it all is – exquisitely horrible.

McGonagall

AND HERE'S an example of the work of the above-mentioned William McGonagall, the Scottish bard who spent his time trying without success to soft-soap Queen Victoria into appointing him poet laureate.

Beautiful silvery Tay,
With your landscapes, so lovely and gay,
Along each side of your waters, to Perth all the way;
No other river in the world has got scenery more fine,
Only I am told the beautiful Rhine,
Near to Wormit Bay, it seems very fine,
Where the Railway Bridge is towering above its waters sublime,
And the beautiful ship Mars,
With her Juvenile Tars,
Both lively and gay,
Does carelessly lie

By night and by day,
In the beautiful Bay
Of the silvery Tay.

McGonagall today has a vast following on the internet. Let those Dark And Stormy Night authors not be discouraged.

 

Tailpiece

 

HOW MANY surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly coloured machine tools.

 

Last word

 

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. - PB Medawar