GET ME REWRITE!

This piece appeared in the "My Reading Life" column by Elinore Standard in the June 24, 2005 Record Review.

Works mentioned: The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning, Wasted Beauty by Eric Bogosian, "Crimes Against the Reader" by Rick Moody in the April, 2005 Believer magazine, Corrupts Absolutely by Alexa Hunt, Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Poems by Julia Moore, "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and other poems by William T. McGonagall.


Even a competent writer is capable of coming up with a terrible sentence. “We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.” Really. This is from John Dunning in “The Bookman’s Wake” (p. 64) (Pocket, 1995) one in his Cliff Janeway, rare book dealer and private eye, series. Dunning’s knowledge of collectible books is always interesting and so are his plots and characters. When I came across the avocado sentence, I had to stop and re-read and then I got out a post-it and made note. Although Dunning,  can (usually) be counted on for good, sound writing, I wondered where his editor was.

And how about this: “…the frazzled doctor’s eyes are like slit-open gray prunes,” a passage from “Wasted Beauty” by Eric Bogosian (S&S, 2005), described in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review as written with “fresh, frank turn of phrase." Seriously?

Rick Moody, the writer and critic, was on the distinguished five-person committee that judged the unusually controversial 2004 National Book Award. The panel, headed by Moody, was criticized widely and harshly for selecting as finalists five little-known authors in the fiction category. Little-known (women!) authors are unlikely to sell, award or no award, and the more literary the writing, the less likely it is to become a blockbuster. Bad for sales, bad for business, bad for the corporate bottom line.

In a piece titled “Crimes Against The Reader” in the April, 2005, “The Believer” magazine, Moody looks back at the latest National Book Award and the ire it inspired. He talks about the politics of such awards and about what might be called “literary taste” and what we think of as “good” writing and “bad” writing. “We decide,” Moody says, “that Don DeLillo is certainly a better writer than Jacqueline Susann. We decide that though Jackie Collins may be amusing she cannot, in fact, write a palatable English-language sentence. We know,” Moody continues, “that Collins does not rewrite enough, and that even if she did it probably would not help. Whereas DeLillo’s published work is an irresistible resource for both perfect craft and sheer talent and imagination. His sentences sing and remain in the memory.” There is just no accounting for taste.

Alexa Hunt, pseudonym for a writer who has produced many romances, has a new mystery titled “Corrupts Absolutely” (Forge, April, 2005) and this sentence was cited in a recent “Publishers’ Weekly” review: “Mmm, I love hairy men,” she breathed, plowing her splayed fingers through the mat on his chest…”

This sort of sentence is enough to get a writer a “Bulwer-Lytton Award,” given each year by San Jose State as a mocking tribute to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals…” opening to his immortal “Paul Clifford” (1830). All readers of “Peanuts” are familiar with the “dark and stormy night” line that Snoopy kept pecking out on his typewriter. The annual “Dark and Stormy Night Contest, as it is also known, elicits thousands of entries that bring tears to your eyes. Ten finalists are chosen and then one distinguished winner. The $250 prize was won in 2004 by Californian Dave Zobel with this:

“She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight…summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp’s tail…though the term ‘love affair’ now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism…not unlike ‘sand vein,’ which is after all an intestine, not a vein…and that tarry substance inside certainly isn’t sand…and that brought her back to Ramon.”

Second place in the 2004 contest went to Canadian Pamela Patchet Hamilton who described her style as “Dave Barry with a feminist twist,” in this entry: “The notion that they would no longer be a couple dashed Helen’s hopes and scrambled her thoughts not unlike the time her sleeve caught the edge of the open egg carton and the contents hit the floor like fragile things hitting cold tiles, more pitiable because they were the expensive organic brown eggs from free-range chickens, and one of them clearly had double yolks entwined in one sac just the way Helen and Richard used to be.”

Rules for the 2005 competition may be found at www.bulwer-lytton.com (“where www means ‘wretched writers welcome’”). A link at this site took me to bad poetry and I have two suggestions along these lines, should you be interested.

First, is an anthology titled “The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse” collected by Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (Coward-McCann, 1930), a gem I’ve managed to hang on to through countless moves over many years. Not only are mediocre and minor poets included (although there are a good many of them); some of the great are also present, including Robert Burns, Byron, Keats, Emerson, Poe and a large selection from Wordsworth. Some of the most awful poetry is by the American, “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” Julia Moore (1847-1920), whose work is concerned to a large extent with total abstinence and violent (and early) death.

Second is the work of William Topaz McGonagall, Victorian poet and tragedian of Dundee, widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. (Julia Moore may be the runner-up). You can read some of his stuff, including the dreadful “Tay Bridge Disaster” on a great website devoted to McGonagall: www.mcgonagall-online.org. As a bonus, you can request the McGonagall ”Gem of the Day” by e-mail -- that is if you can stand to corrupt your computer with this vile poetry.

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