Skip to main content

Bulwer-Lytton Contestant

Read the worst sentence today, revealed to me by my coworker Stan, from Pat Conroy's new book, South of Broad. (Note: Have not read the rest of the book; it may be a literary success...)
It is on the first page of the novel and the narrator is discussing his loyalty to Charleston, South Carolina. Here is the sentence:

"I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen."

I have many questions about the aptness of comparing the love of place to "soft-tissued mollusks". My soul is probably Mesa-shaped or Rainforest-hardened. Yours is probably Butte-shaped.

Comments

Anonymous said…
WHAT?! That line crosses all boundaries of riduclousness says my chicken pot pie-shaped soul.
August 15, 2009 at 11:19 AM
Heather Bond said…
I now laugh every time I see this book. Thank you!
August 17, 2009 at 8:59 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Attention poetry mavens: any suggestions for good contemporary poets (either in general or particular collections)? Have sudden appetite but very little idea where to start. Any advice welcome!
6 comments
Read more

My Mad Girl

[A Question I am Not the First to Ask: What is it about women and madness? Are they more susceptible to delusion than men are? The subject of many books and hypotheses, we wonder if madness dogs the steps of creative women (eg. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman…) Is it a biological coincidence or a recurring phenomenon? Is it socially reinforced? Do men fear the hysterical women? Is it the uterus (Greek “hysteria”) which turns the brain?] The reclusive writer, the late Janet Frame, winner of all of New Zealand’s literary prizes, spent much time in institutions and in therapy and, as far as I can tell, her novels commonly include themes of estrangement, mental health and madness. Frame considered her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer too personal be published in her lifetime. As she’d already written an autobiography ( Angel at My Table , made into a film by Jane Campion) and been this subject of several biographies, this is telling. Towards Another Su...
4 comments
Read more

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
6 comments
Read more