Procrastination Strikes Again!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, one of 19th century Britain's most popular novelists, coined such memorable phrases as "the great unwashed" and "the pen is mightier than the sword." His plays and novels did not survive the test of time.


However, the opening phrase of his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford (famous for being used by Snoopy) has become a literary icon. Or should I say a literary laughingstock. "It was a dark and stormy night..." Those seven words have become synonymous with wooden writing.


They are just the beginning of his 58-word opening sentence, and the impetus for San Jose State University's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Since 1982, the contest has attracted writers from across the country. Wordsmiths have strove to concoct the worst, most convoluted and verbose opening lines. Over the years, prizes in crime fiction, romance novels, purple prose and other sub-categories have developed.


This year's winner was Sue Fondrie:  "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."


My favorite nugget came from Mike Pedersen, the Purple Prose winner: "As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue." A periphrastic locution worthy of Thesaurus Girl herself.


Every year with the contest winners' announcement, I vow to submit an entry for the upcoming year. Alas, my penchant for procrastination prevails, and I have yet to plunge into that prose pool. A love of film noir, pot-boilers and Runyanesque slang impels me to the crime fiction category:


I figured her for a good egg, not a banana, but I guess my judgement took a powder at the sight of those never-ending gams, so she cheesed me and now I'm on the lam with just a gatt, a sawbuck and a vacant expanse of empty where my heart used to beat. As ever- BB


"I've been as bad an influence on American Literature as anyone I can think of." - Dashiell Hammett

Nostalgia

For my birthday, a good friend gave me a 3-CD set of the Grateful Dead performing at the Big Rock Pow Wow in May 1969. They were at their psychedelic peak. Songs like Dark Star, St. Stephen and The Eleven mixed with bluesy jams behind Pig Pen's vocals.

Three months earlier, I had my first Dead experience at the original Electric Factory in Philly. At 14, it not only changed my idea of music, but my outlook on life. I realized a different lifestyle than the one I had grown up with existed. Years later Garcia put it into words. He explained the concept he had learned from Neal Cassady, "Living your life as your art."

Listening to those songs again transported me back. Nostalgia has no hold on me, but I found myself awash in waves of it. My mind contemplated the yin/yang of  the sixties' final year- man walked on the moon, Woodstock, the Manson Family murders, Altamont...war, children, it's just a shot away.

It wasn't the momentous events that fueled the reminisces. My wistfulness sprang from lost innocence. Remembering the simple things - mastering changes between the G, C and that damned F chord. Riding my bike in the crisp morning air. Lying under a tree watching the light dapple through the leaves with absolutely nothing on my mind. The naive belief that the new generation, of which I was becoming a part, could build a bridge of positive change for the future.

The river of time has ravaged the trestles of that bridge leaving the detritus of cynicism and Weltschmerz in its wake.  Hearing the live muisc of what one critic of the time called "that band of hirsute simians" stirred embers of optimism in the bonfire of my soul. As ever - BB

"...how sad and bad and mad it was - but then, how it was sweet." - Robert Browning