July 31, 2007

"Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently...."

"... as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ’permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee."

Writes Jim Gleeson, a Madison man. And congratulations to him, because, with that sentence, he's won the 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
“It’s like you take two thoughts that are not anything like each other and you cram them together by any means necessary,” Gleeson said. He claimed he took time off from his current project, a self-help book for slackers titled “Self-Improvement Through Total Inactivity,” to pen his winning entry.

5 comments:

Smilin' Jack said...

Hey, that's not so bad. I kinda liked it...reminds me of David Foster Wallace.

MadisonMan said...

That is so much worse than it would have been if it started Gerald began to pee -- but was...

Art!

Ann Althouse said...

It's really funny with "to pee" at the end though.

Parker Smith said...

I think it's funny to consider the archaeologist finding Gerald centuries later - a la Pompeii...

They live for that kind of thing, you know.

Chip Ahoy said...

This is hilarious. "Gerald began to pea" broken by a ridiculously long disjointed clause far weightier than the statement. My favorite winner from some years ago was "The one thought that repeatedly ran through Andre's mind as he crawled through the desert was, "crawl, Andre, crawl."