Fun_People Archive
19 May
Bulwer-Lytton '94

Date: Thu, 19 May 94 14:43:51 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: Bulwer-Lytton '94

[I'm afraid this boils down to being a YAUISM - (Yet Another Use of the
Information Superhighway Metaphor)... -psl]

Forwarded-by: bostic@vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: Eric Allman <eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU>
Forwarded-by: "Bret A. Marquis" <bam@Bang.COM>
	
	San Jose English Professor Scott Rice announced today that an 
Austin, Texas television anchorman won this year's Bulwer-Lytton 
contest for turgid fiction with an entry that sets technophobia at 
home on the range.
	Rice, of San Jose State University, said KXAN employee Larry Brill 
won the 13th annual unliterary fest with this entry: ``As the fading 
light of a dying day filtered through the window blinds, Roger stood 
over his victim with a smoking .45, surprised at the serenity that 
filled him after pumping six slugs into the bloodless tyrant that had 
mocked him day after day, and then he shuffled out of the office with 
one last look back at the shattered computer terminal lying there like 
a silicon armadillo left to rot on the information superhighway.'' 
	Rice said that for his success in capturing the genius of Victorian 
novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's famous opening, ``It was a dark 
and stormy night,'' Brill will become the envy of Dan Rather and 
Connie Chung and receive ``a cheap word processor.'' 
	Rice said submissions for this year's contest came from every state 
in the union as well as from Canada, Great Britain, Germany, 
Australia, Switzerland and Ghana.  About a half dozen SJSU English 
professors sorted through from 8,000 to 10,000 entries to find the 
winner.
	Rice said the winning entry appealed to the group as an example of 
``a certain sort of self-conscious over-writing.'' 
	``You could see a certain kind of writer producing that and giving 
himself a sort of mental pat on the back and saying ``Damn! I'm good,'' 
Rice said.
	``And someone else saying, `Not really,' '' he added after a pause.

© 1994 Peter Langston