His fingertips grew hungry, prowling the surface of the keys like tiny lungfish slurping at the lettered pegs for sustenance to feed their drive to weave a tale of an impavid constabulary, boldly, courageously, indefatigably attempting to glean the meaning of a calamity that warped a late-model conveyance the way a wet suction cup siphons droplets of gentle dew into grotesque figures of terror.
If only it had actually happened on a dark and stormy night…
Still, when Joel Phillips sat down to write his award-winning opening salvo for the worst novel possible, he did it with the kind of deep love and admiration that atrocious writing requires. You see, purposely writing something really, really bad demands the writer actually be really, really good. It’s one of the wonderful nuances that come with creativity, and it’s the kind of thing the creatively gifted understand in their bones. With or without crushing hyperbole.
So just what’s going on here, you ask? Well, the easiest summation of it all is that Joel Phillips, West Trenton resident, music theory professor at Westminster Choir College, and all-around fan of satire and parody, won the 2015 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. That’s the annual competition that challenges writers to craft the worst, most purple-prose opening sentence to a theoretical worst novel ever.
The contest is a nod to 19th century English writer Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose very name reflects his penchant for wordy prose. Bulwer-Lytton is the man who gave us the immortal “It was a dark and stormy night,” which by itself might not be so bad, but those are only the first seven words in a long, tortured opening sentence to his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford.”
To be fair, you’re familiar with a lot of things Bulwer-Lytton gave the popular consciousness. He coined the phrases “the great unwashed,” “pursuit of the almighty dollar,” and “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and gave us such classic horror tropes as paintings with eye holes cut out, behind which a no-goodnik watched his manor guests’ every move.
Rightly or not, Bulwer-Lytton is mostly thought of as the architect of tormented, purple prose, and the San Jose University English Department, which has run the contest since 1982, has immortalized him as the patron saint of overwrought writing.
The entries into the annual contest bearing Bulwer-Lytton’s name are, fittingly, astoundingly bad and often hilariously so. Phillips’ winning entry — one of several he sent — reads as follows:
“Seeing how the victim’s body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer “Dirk” Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase ‘sandwiched’ to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.”
The irony? It was the first entry he’d penned.
So exactly how does one craft something so bad that it’s worth bragging about? Well, according to Phillips, it begins with sincerity. Think, he said, of “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose dead-on send-ups of Michael Jackson made him an instant — and, importantly, lasting — name. Or Mike Meyers’ pitch-perfect lampoon of the James Bond, 1960s spy flick pathos in the Austin Powers movies?
To some, these parodies might seem hostile, or at least mocking. “American humor is based in a spirit of meanness and superiority,” Phillips said. “Someone’s always being belittled.”
But that’s not what’s happening with the likes of Weird Al or Mike Meyers. “You can tell that Weird Al really loves Michael Jackson,” Phillips said. The essence of parody, then, is distilled into appropriation.
“Appropriation is about loving something so much that you want to make it a part of you,” he said. “It’s like you want to own a piece of it.”
For Phillips, who won a cool 250 beans ($250) for his entry, wanting to own a piece of the classic, hardboiled detective genre drove him to skewer its oft-thickly metaphored prose in a way only a true fan could do. Phillips is, after all, a major fan of writers like Mickey Spillaine, whose classic Mike Hammer books are splendid substitutes for thesauruses and who almost single-handedly defined the literary language we so easily identify with classic gumshoe fiction.
“I read all of that stuff and I adore it,” Phillips said. The language is alive and urgent, the descriptions vivid and signature to the genre. What, then, is there not to adore?
Adoring it all is what gets him to piggyback on an annual literary conference in Ireland that focuses on detective fiction. After last year’s conference, Phillips realized just how saturated he and his fellow hardboiled fans were in the language and syntax and genre conventions, and decided to write some entries for Bulwer-Lytton.
Phillips actually learned of the contest from a newspaper piece back in 2003, when Marianne Simms, a fellow Alabaman from Wetumka, won the contest with this romance novel gem:
“They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white … Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.”
Phillips actually tried his hand of some romance, the royal flush of hyperbolic fiction, but he couldn’t do it. “I don’t read that stuff at all,” he said. And therein lies the issue. To know how to send something up, you need to know it in your very core.
But you also need to know how to plumb creativity itself. At Westminster, Phillips has taught a course on parody and satire, and sees his job as something akin to literature.
“I see my job as not to just teach making music,” he said, “but to get my students to articulate poetry.” He’s referring mostly to students singing lyrics, but the point of creative cross-pollination is important here.
“A poet would feel the same way about writing the words that you feel singing the notes,” he tells his students. “It’s being really in tune with the expression of idea.”
As Phillips sees it, everyone is creative, even his father, who kinda wasn’t. Back in Birmingham, Alabama, where Phillips grew up, he listened to his mother sing and tell stories. “My mother was brilliant,” he said. In fact, she sang so well that she would occasionally be taken from class so she could go and sing at funerals.
“Dad can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” he said. “But he was very supportive.” He was also a genius in a mechanical way. The kind of guy who could repair or build anything, like a perfect birdhouse.
And then paint it with blindingly reflective silver paint.
So between his father’s measured mechanical brilliance and his mother’s breezy creativity, Phillips grew up wanting to do two things — be a musician and teach. He got his bachelor’s and doctorate in music from the University of Alabama and his master’s in music from the Eastman School of Music. When he applied to teach, he said, he was limited by the amount of jobs for teaching music at a university. “You have to be willing to go where there’s an opening,” he said.
His opening brought him to Westminster in 1985, where he is a professor of music theory and composition. He teaches at Rider University with his wife, Elizabeth Scheiber, a professor of Italian and French who also is the associate director of the Julius and Dorothy Koppelman Holocaust and Genocide Research Center, “and an all-around swell person,” he said.
Schreiber is also finishing a book on the combination creativity of author Italo Calvino, and, Phillips said, makes up insanely creative parody lyrics to songs while bopping around the house.
If it’s not safe to assume from the above that music runs deep through the Phillips household, their son, Tom Phillips, a graduate of Lawrence High School and the Berklee College of Music, is a pro musician. He plays electric bass with the Designated Divers, the house cover band on Carnival’s cruse ship, the Miracle. The proud parents spent their holiday break with him at sea.
As an all-around type of creative, Phillips is a keen observer of all things around him. He gets an especially large kick out of what makes New Jersey so very Jersey, particularly around Trenton, where the people pronounce the name of the city as “Tren’n.”
Having grown up in Alabama, of course, Phillips is keenly aware of different cultures and accents. In New Jersey, people make fun of the way Alabamans talk. And in Alabama, they return the favor on New Jersey.
But such powers of observation are critical to the creative brain. There is no pure creativity, of course, we’re all influenced by what we see and hear and sense. Creativity, then, is the power to notice things and absorb them, and then to make them part of you, the way a parodist like Weird Al takes in pop icons and turns them into works of social commentary.
That, of course, doesn’t mean it’s easy to just whip off something that’s so bad it’s good. Satire, after all, is not just regurgitating what someone else has done — which is a lesson the makers of terrible parody films should take to heart when creating spoofs, that simply restaging or tagging iconic movie scenes is not inherently funny.
Good satire, beyond the love, beyond the observation, has to understand what actually makes something funny. When Phillips wrote his winning Bulwer-Lytton entry, he was aware that funny requires a hefty dose of surprise and incongruity.
Yet, the very fact that Phillips’ winning entry (remember, he wrote several) was the first one off his brain suggests that overthinking can be the death knell of funny writing.
Or something.
The point is, the line between top-shelf and bottom-drawer is not the gulf you might think it is. “The really good and the really bad actually do have things in common,” he said. “Mediocre is its own category.”
But under it all, the love of what you’re spoofing is still the key. To make yourself part of something that so profoundly affects you? “Well,” Phillips said, “that’s a perfectly wonderful thing to do.”
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