1. The Bulwer Lytton fiction contest (award given to what could be a worst opening sentence in a novel – sometimes hypothetical novel – the award is named for the man who began his book with “It was a dark and stormy night.”)
2006’s winning sentence is, for example:
Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
Some other winning sentences:
Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life.
Another winner:
A small assortment of astonishingly loud brass instruments raced each other lustily to the respective ends of their distinct musical choices as the gates flew open to release a torrent of tawny fur comprised of angry yapping bullets that nipped at Desdemona’s ankles, causing her to reflect once again (as blood filled her sneakers and she fought her way through the panicking crowd) that the annual Running of the Pomeranians in Liechtenstein was a stupid idea.
This one, the winner for 1985, is, I believe my favorite:
The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakably–the first of many such advances during what would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career.
Here is the “lyttony” of prize winners. Each sentence is deliciously awful, spectacularly bad … I also love how some of the prize winners have shown up at the awards ceremonies, full of good and self-deprecating humor about their own badness (kind of like Halle Berry going to accept a Razzie for Cat woman – and being all hysterical and good-natured about it).
2. My second favorite literary award is the award for Bad Sex in Fiction. Here’s a list of past winners.
(More here.)
Unlike the Bulwer Lytton award, which rarely features writers anyone has ever heard of – we get some heavy hitters in this award. Updike, Tom Wolfe, etc. No one is spared. Obviously it’s difficult to write a sex scene well. This award celebrates those who not only do not write sex scenes well – but who tip over into spectacular badness. You gotta go read some of the entries on that website. I refuse to put them on my site because, frankly, I’m sick of sexually inappropriate Google searches … Ha!! But seriously, some of the sentences … You CRINGE when you read them they are so bad.
One of my favorite things about this award is also the good humor with which (most) authors treat their nominations. People show up for the raucous awards ceremony, they admit their own badness, they laugh at themselves … so much fun. Sean Thomas who won in 2000 accepted his award, saying sincerely, “It’s an enormous honor and I’m gratified.” Ha!! (Also, with a bit of scanning you’ll be able to find his winning sentence on that site. It’s just soooo funny. Soooo bad.)
There are some authors who have been nominated 3, 4 times. Ha!! There must be a strange sense of pride in that.
So. Iain Hollingshead is this year’s winner. Here is a very funny essay by him – about his whole experience. I just love his honesty and humor about himself:
My own extract, in comparison, felt rather tame. But it was very badly written indeed. So bad, it seems, that the judges had little difficulty in declaring me, dear reader, the recipient of the 2006 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
“Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman…”
Um, not if you expect this night to end the way you had planned, buster.
Emily – HA! I know!! hahahahahaha
Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaahhh
I mean, come ON. hahahaha
A… Sony Walkman?
Those must have been some damn fine drugs.
Something about her being small and compact. In which case, you might as well go modern and compare her to an iPod.
Oh, these are fun. It’s not easy to write that bad, although I remember when you and your readers came up with some hilarious “academic” writing a while back.
Emily–iPod, indeed. Wouldn’t that be the man–a sorry, tiny, little man.
DBW – oh yeah! The Bad Academic Writing award – that was aweeesome. Let me see if I can find that one – so so funny.
Here’s one page with some great gems on it.
One example of many:
If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now-all-but-unreadable DNA” of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.
GENIUS.
Heteroglossic wilds!!
This is the main page of the Bad Academic Writing contest.
It’s mind-bogglingly boring to read – but also hilarious.
//To this end, I must underline the phallicism endemic to the dialectics of penetration routinely deployed in descriptions of pictorial space and the operations of spectatorship.//
That’s the kind of thing we all made fun of when we wrote this group essay about Christo’s orange gates (which, in reality, I really liked).
Oh, those academic ones are great. I remember making a joke about them on a Douglas Adams site over a year ago and having the very pompous and snobbish MJ Simpson accuse me of “anti-intellectualism.” It’s funny how completely lacking in self-awareness that guy is, to the point where he didn’t even realize his response became party to the joke.
ha! yeah, really.
Also – there is nothing “intellectual” about ANY of those sentences. hahahaha They’re just gibberish as far as I’m concerned. But very entertaining to read.
Worse than gibberish, they’re totally pretentious, phoney and forced. The people writing them think using big words make them come off as smart when they really just look like jackasses. Any tool can flip through the pages of a thesaurus and write that crap. A smart person doesn’t have to.
You are clearly just a normativeally challenged victim of the heterocentric je ne sais quoi of today’s enervating ennui.
And such an anti-intellectual that I have no idea what you just wrote.
Me either.
Neither.
duh.
OT – I followed your link to the Cristo group essay and saw a comment by Big Dan under one of the posts and felt a little tug at my heart. :(
:(
I miss him. What a great humorous person.
I think my favorite bad sex excerpt for this year has to be the Thomas Pynchon piece that ends with:
“Reader, she bit him.”
Bwahahaha!!!!
I want to know who goes around finding these passages and how can I join them?