No nutshell large enough

As the 2009 recipient of the Suzan Nightingale prize for newspaper columns published in Alaska during the previous year — universally recognized as the world’s highest literary honor — I now face the same danger of career anticlimax that turned triumph into tragic farce for Alexander after conquering Persia, Ronald Reagan after leaving Hollywood, and Richard Daystrom after inventing duotronic circuits.
From this height, a decline looks unavoidable, but I have set my sights on another goal to at least prolong the pain. And while the Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is not the Suzan Nightingale prize, it can still claim the distinction of a bar set so high that neither Walter Lippmann nor Walter Winchell reached it during their lives, and whose chances of ever doing so have only declined since their deaths.
EBLFC is like a TV show that doesn’t mind jumping the shark in the pilot episode. As a literary exercise, it blurs the line between the pointless and the superfluous, asking entrants to compose the worst possible opening sentence for a novel. That anyone reading this sentence already shares my high tolerance for unnecessarily complex sentence structures, irrelevant parentheticals and gratuitously recherché vocabulary goes, although obviously not without typing, at least without saying.
Either that or you’re German.
Yet I know restraint, having split only half the infinitives in this article so far. The name of the contest commemorates an author who knew none, an Englishman whose turgid style could stand eye-to-eye with that of Eichendorff, Kleist or Hoffman without flinching. Heck, it could take them all on at once, beat them around the ring, swipe their Menthos, and leave the entire post-Goethe pantheon gasping for a semicolon.
Amazingly, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) enjoyed tremendous success with Victorian readers, whose faultless judgment in wrought iron railings and which backward civilizations to colonize did not extend to their bookshelves.
Of course, modern readers have an answer to that in Jackie Collins. In the spirit of research, I once tried to read one of her books, since I make a modest living at writing but would rather make several thousand such modest livings, as she does. I found I lost nothing of the story by skipping every other sentence, then paragraph, then page, and finally chapter. The more mathematically inclined could see Collins’ style as the perfectly redundant literary manifestation of a Mandelbrot set.
But I digress. Of course.
The point is, Bulwer-Lytton is unreadable —and not in the cool way like “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Nobody pretends to have read his 1834 novel “The Last Days of Pompei” to score points with an intellectual chick. Witness the wisdom of the Hollywood rewrite. The classic 1935 film based on it kept nothing but the title. At least that’s what we all assume, since nobody has actually made it through the book since 1904.
During my stint as a newspaper editor, I have devoted most of my waking hours to the transmission of important information through clear, concise prose. But with the goal of winning this year’s EBLFC in mind, I did what anybody with a narrow range of outdated skills in a stressed industry would do during economic hard times.
I quit my job.
Would it make more sense to devote my energy to improving newspapers as a product, thus bolstering their status as an indispensable bulwark of democracy? Perhaps.
Do I marvel at my own ability to waste time composing such sentences? A little.
Are rhetorical questions a hackneyed and irritating literary device? Undoubtedly.
So here are my entries for this year’s contest:

The day began, like so many others, almost immediately after midnight, and continued virtually uninterrupted until the following midnight, despite Jeremy’s foredoomed attempts to construct a time machine without the calliope and live kinkajou usually associated with such devices.

I field-tested that sentence a few months ago, and was told it was too coherent for the spirit of EBLFC. So I tried again.

Theodosia’s gaze strayed to the kitchen window, through which she saw a dreary rain mottling Paul’s latest triumph, an abstract sculpture in concrete — an apt metaphor for life itself, she reflected, if only he had named it something other than “Up Yours, Manitowoc County Arts Commission.”

But I was enjoined to be more turgid. I took the criticism to heart and produced this third possibility:

It would be no wanton hyperbole to call Cecil Basingstoke-Weekes a giant among men, as it would be to call him one among musk oxen, and while to the great good fortune of the Godalming Society for Orthographic Reform’s reputation for scrupulous accuracy the latter expression never found its way past the lips of any of its members — due however much to their profound, if unsurprising, ignorance of a species rarely seen in that part of Surrey — it was the merest spite that prevented them from making use of the former.

This time the reaction tended to blank stares rather more than I intended, and I felt obligated to try one last time.

Palomina — for such was the name by which Fanny Metacarpal referred to herself in the privacy of her own thoughts — leaned against the drab doorway of her hovel, lugubriating in a mental landscape that owed much to the dreary aspect of similar hovels stretching into a Hoovervillian vista before her for its desperate Weltschmerz, strewn as it was with spiritual rubbish and emotional dirty laundry, and decided to go inside.

Was reading this column any more painful than watching Sarah Palin choose Bobby Jindall as her 2012 running mate at the exact moment a volcano erupted near Anchorage? You be the judge.