Overweening Generalist

Friday, August 5, 2011

Trying My Hand at Some Bulwer-Lytton Sentences

The latest winner of this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest was announced recently. A friend relayed the information. A link announcing the winner is here. The link to all of this year's winners is here. I really liked the winner for Crime. See if you agree. Anyway...

So the winner is this: —"Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories."


                  Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), of questionable politics, novelist, 
                         actually began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night."             
                

This set me to wondering if I could stack up against this wonderfully horrid prose. A few I came up with:

--"Despite a whiff of fog on a partly-to-mostly cloudy day near the coast, highs in the mid-70s mid-town district, he longed for the warm embrace of his childhood doll, Mr. Snew-Poo."


--"Erin eyed the bodice ripper, and he eyed her back: 'Who knows what danger lurks in the minds of steadfast men such as me,?' he seemed to be saying, her medication obviously wearing off."


--"Like a woodpecker's steady peck, thoughts of his brief time in the abandoned Foto-Mat booth out near Route 7 drilled into his every pore, with an agonizing metronomic regularity."

--"Ms.Stone was livid and reviled and she saw the steaming fetid puddle of ooze blurp and burp and she came to the spinning, wondrous realization that the cough syrup she guzzled with her special friend was finally kicking in."


--"There must be a couple of hundred good stories out there in the naked city, and Bob, his heart filled with love for his fellow man, his love jammed up under his rib like a Super Ball, knew he could release that love, and it would find its way back to him like a bat uses echolocation, and he hoped his story would be one of those few hundred in the city that was naked."


--"Marcia, her favorite color being fauve, stared curare-tipped darts at the man entertaining her children, and he was clad mostly in a phlegmatic yellow, and he called himself Ronald McDonald."


Man! It's difficult to write such jaw-droppingly putrid prose. My hat's off to this year's winner, with her wind-turbine and chopped sparrow pieces of memories. 


Please feel free to try your hand in the comments!



1 comment:

Eric Wagner said...

Wagner based his opera Rienzi on a book by Bulwer-Litton. That opera inspired Hitler to create National Socialism.