> 1st Place winner of the "It was a Dark and Stormy Night" Literary
> Contest
>
>
>
> Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
> San Jose State University
> One Washington Square
> San Jose, CA 95192
>
>
> <http://www.sjsu.edu <http://www.sjsu.edu/> >
>
>
> Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
> 2005 Results
>
>
> As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual
> Stromberg
> carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet
> pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake
> manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of
> the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as
> described
> in chapter seven of the shop manual.
>
> Dan McKay
> Fargo, ND
>
>
> A 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains is
> the winner of the 23rd running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction
> Contest. A resident of Fargo, North Dakota, McKay is currently
> visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious
> literary achievement.
>
> His entry, extolling a subject that has engaged poets for
> millennia, may have been inspired by Roxie Hart of the musical
> "Chicago." Complaining of her husband's ineptitude in the
> boudoir,
> Roxie laments, "Amos was . . . zero. I mean, he made love to me
> like he was fixing a carburetor or something."
>
> An international literary parody contest, the competition honors
> the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward
> George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest
> is
> childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening
> sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last
> Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three
> times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the
> sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed"
> and "the almighty
> dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830)
> with
> the immortal words that the "Peanuts" Beagle Snoopy plagiarized
> for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
>
> The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting
> only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success
> by academic standards, the contest went public the following
> year
> and ever since has attracted thousands of annual entries from
> all
> over the world.
>
>
=========================================================
>
> For the complete results of this years
> contest, see:
>
> http://www2.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2005.htm
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