Monday, February 11, 2008

Bad writing can be good


Yes, indeed, bad writing can be good. And entertaining. There used to be, yes once and perhaps still, a contest. A glorious contest. It celebrated the writing of Ernest Hemingway. His brevity. And style.
It was called the Bad Hemingway competition. Books were written about it. Articles too. Some very funny. Painfully so.
But as with writing in general, the competition seems to have dried up. Like a tomato in the hot Spanish sun. So too interest in the Big Man.
Maybe Papa got a bum rap.
Then again, maybe he should have read more Bernard Malamud.
The opening sentence from Malamud's book, "The Natural," which bore only a faint resemblance to the movie:

Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was a tunnel they were passing through and was no longer surprised at the bright sight of himself holding a yellow light over his head, peering back in.
As far as I know, there have never been any Bad Malamud contests.

1 comment:

Brian Santo said...

Don't know for sure about the ongoingness of the bad Hemingway contest, but I'm pretty sure the Faux Faulkner contest is still around. I believe it's sponsored by Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of one of the airlines. I could look up which airline pretty quickly on Google, but that would suggest that I care which airline it is.

There's also a Bulwer-Lytton contest, named for the guy who opened a novel "It was a dark and stormy night." Might be sponsored by the WashPo, but that's a guess.

I know you can Google to get results of both. Excellent reading.

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