3.07.06: It Was A Dark and Slushy Night... ‹ Blog

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—and most fools do.
Dale Carnegie

It Was A Dark and Slushy Night…

March 7, 2006

The problem with reading is that, every now and then, you come across a real slushball—that’s my own personal term for a piece of writing so bad it must have been skimmed off the editor’s slush pile by mistake. And the problem with reading three books a day is that your chances of finding a slushball significantly increase. This week, things have definitely been taking a turn for the slushy—although, to be fair, some of the weirder things I’ve read have just been… well, weird. Either it’s time to break that three-book-a-day habit, or I need to start getting more selective with my reading material. Just look at the stuff I’ve been coming across…

Worst opening paragraph ever, from J. D. Landis’s Longing:

On the day Robert Schumann was born in this formerly peaceful, formerly populous town on the left bank of the River Mulde, the loudest cries were not those of his mother, Christiane, being delivered of her sixth child. Her screams were eclipsed by those of her remaining neighbors, some of whom lined the streets and some of whom stood in their windows and all of whom screamed with even more passion and certainly less pain than Christiane Schumann. For who should be riding through town on his way across sweet Saxony, which hung like a plumped penis from the groin of Prussia, but the Emperor Napoleon (who could be heard gaily singing the aria “Gia il sol” from Paisiello’s Nina) and his brand-new, politically correct, lobster-and-sour-cream-ravening eighteen-year-old bride, Marie Louise of Austria, his second choice as a broodmare after he had been embarrassingly rejected by ripe Russian Anna, the fifteen-year-old sister of Czar Alexander. Napoleon had occupied Marie Louise’s country, as he was soon to remove his Léger-tailored suit to occupy Marie Louise herself (with—finally!—an heir, the future King of Rome), and had installed the cunning, ruthless, altogether magnificent Metternich as Chief Minister and Marriage Broker at the same time he disinstalled his own creamily Creole Empress Josephine, though he would never, nor would he want to, banish from his memory the rammish, faithless smell of her.

It was tempting to keep reading just to see how the author could top that intro; the temptation to go slam my head against a brick wall, however, was stronger by far, and the action much less painful. So off goes the book to the library’s return slot, and off goes this paragraph to the Sticks and Stones section of the Bulwer-Lytton web site (ETA: …which provides, alas, a broken e-mail link, and so will never include this rancid example in its archives). And off go I on Tony’s ass if he ever dares to take his constant Josephine comparisons so far as to call me “creamily Creole.” Oy.

Speaking of weird sentences, here’s one I came across on Wikipedia, in the article on Elisabeth of Bavaria:

On September 10, 1898, in Geneva, Switzerland, Elisabeth, aged 60, was stabbed to death with a file in a pointless act.

I… am confused. How do you stab someone pointlessly? Isn’t that blunt force trauma instead?

This one’s not an example of bad writing, but it is a funny coincidence. Just after the Widget’s arrival, I come upon this sentence, in the “Write A Purpose Statement” section of Overcoming Writing Blocks:

Are you trying to put a second widget in every American household?

Why, yes I am!

And a special mention goes to the otherwise excellent Trial by Ice, whose author spins one of the oddest similes I’ve ever come across:

On a chip of dissolving ice, the officers of the Polaris still engaged in a struggle for control, much like two lice battling for ownership of the hide of a dead dog that was drifting over a waterfall.

And he knows what that looks like… how?