Writing so bad it's good

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald on August 26, 2008.

Picture a younger me walking down the hall of the English department at San Jose State University back in the late 1970s. Imagine me stopping to look at the office door of one of my English professors, Dr. Scott Rice, who had taped up a cartoon of Snoopy on top of his doghouse typing: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Little did I know as I read the cartoon that Dr. Rice would soon hatch the idea for the now world-famous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which invites entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The contest takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-70), who penned the famous “dark and stormy” line.

Because Rice was one of my favorite professors in college, I’m always pleased by how many people have heard of the contest. I entered once, but I'm not expert enough to write an award-winning bad sentence. Chances of winning are slim anyway, since entries can be as high as 10,000 for the annual contest.

This year’s winner, recently announced by Rice, did write a pretty darned good bad sentence. Written by Garrison Spik, a 41-year-old communications director and writer from Washington, D.C., the winning sentence reads:
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“Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped ‘Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’”

Wow that’s bad. I mean good.

So why would Rice encourage us to consciously write really awful sentences? Besides being fun, writing poorly in a masterful way requires knowledge of good writing. So the contest teaches us how to write well even as we try to write poorly.

I’ve been thinking about Rice lately and realized I haven’t spoken to him in decades. So I found his email address and sent him a message that began: “No doubt you’ll need to brush off the dusty memories of the late 1970s to recall me, but I was a graduate student of yours way back when.”

A few days later, I got a reply: “I remember you well. You were the guy whose dad made him write essays and then corrected them.”

And so began a conversation in which I learned that these days Rice teaches just two classes a semester and enjoys playing golf. The contest, of course, is a significant part of his life. “I don't run the contest,” he said, “it runs me. I will keep doing it as long as enough people are interested.”

Rice said he gets sentences submitted every day. “The contest takes more work than many will be willing to do,” he said. “I am working on it almost on a daily basis.”

Rice also said that in the 26 years since he came up with the idea, he hasn’t tried to improve the contest, which is judged by former winners who often disagree over which sentences should be winners. “I am a charter member of the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it club,” he said. “I ignore all suggestions for how I might make the contest bigger or flashier.”

When Rice was my professor, he’d been teaching at San Jose State for just over 10 years. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and went to school in Spokane, spending his summers on his great-grandparents’ dairy farm in Clarkston, Washington. After high school, he spent a year working at a lumber mill in Idaho.

Rice became interested in teaching English during his freshman year of college at Lewis-Clark Normal School in Idaho. “I had a Humanities course from a charismatic teacher named Wayne Sims,” he said. “Listening to his enthralling lectures and working my way through the old Warnock and Anderson ‘The World in Literature,’ I realized that I wanted to become an English professor.”

Rice also credits a second teacher, John Sisk, with inspiring him at Gonzaga University in Spokane. “Sitting in awe listening to his lectures, it seemed to me he had read everything,” he said. “After I had spent some time in graduate school, I realized that he had.”

Rice earned his doctorate from the University of Arizona, and fortunately for me, he found his way to San Jose State right out of graduate school in 1968. In the same way that Rice enjoyed the talks of his professors, I was captivated by his lectures. I took several courses from him. I’ll never forget his Rhetoric class. I still have the textbook handy in my office. I learned about persuasive arguments, diction, style, and sentence composition. Much of what I learned in that class taught me how to write.

My other memories of Rice include his sense of humor, his beard, and his style of teaching, a style I borrow and honor even to this day in my own English classes at Las Positas College.

For more about the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, visit www.bulwer-lytton.com.

Retired scientist recalls life as boy in Brooklyn

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald on August 5, 2008 and in the Valley Times a few days later.

Albert Rothman still has a faint indentation on his right index knuckle from when a picket fence tore open his thumb during a skirmish when he was four years old. He’d called a neighbor boy fat and took a beating for it.

“I’d developed a taste for danger,” said Rothman, 84, of Livermore.

Born in 1924 during the Coolidge administration, Rothman grew up in Brooklyn, New York. His parents moved many times, so the young Albert often felt isolated as he moved from one public school to the next.

At one point, though, his parents settled down long enough to own a store. “The place had rats,” said Rothman, who remembers watching a large rat behind the counter in a corner while a customer was in the store. “My folks calmly helped the customer, then as soon as the door closed, they chased away the rat.”

When it came time to sell the store, relatives pretended to be customers when prospective buyers visited. “They wanted it to look like business was booming,” he said.

Rothman, who retired in 1986 from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, earned his doctorate in chemistry and chemical engineering from the U.C. Berkeley in 1954. He has lived in the Bay Area since 1948.

But it’s his childhood that prompted him to write his memoir: “A Brooklyn Odyssey—Travails and Joys of a Boy’s Early Life.” The book portrays a young Jewish boy during the Great Depression on his journey toward adulthood.

One passage describes two gifts Rothman received from his Aunt Sina, gifts that became the catalyst for his career in science. “She gave me a microscope and a chemistry set,” he said. “I spent hours inspecting tiny things, especially wiggly protozoans from nearby ponds.”

Rothman’s aunts and uncles had wonderful personalities that populate his memoir. His British-born uncle Moe, for example, was a successful businessman and the only Republican in the family. “We all adored Roosevelt,” Rothman said, “but not Uncle Moe. He wasn’t shy about his hatred for our president.”

Moe had a great sense of humor: “He was completely bald, and I remember him calling out to my Aunt Sina to come quick and get him a toothpick,” Rothman said. “She asked ‘what’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ and he said ‘I need to comb my hair.’”

Another uncle, Sam, had entered the United States illegally from Russia as a stowaway. “He never applied for citizenship,” Rothman said, “although he did pay into Social Security.”

When Sam reached 65, he got a Social Security check for $600. He returned it because he didn’t believe a non-citizen deserved the money. “They sent that check back to him twice,” Rothman said, “and twice he returned it.” After the third time, Sam gave up and distributed the money to his children. “Sam had admirable integrity,” he said.

Other episodes in the memoir include tasting Coca Cola for the first time at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, attending a workshop with baseball legend Lou Gehrig, and being invited to a Benny Goodman concert where Rothman encountered a young Peggy Lee.

Today, Rothman still embraces life with a youthful sense of wonder. He loves nature and frequently hikes alone. A safety patrol volunteer with the East Bay Regional Park District, Rothman has hiked in Northern California, Washington State, Utah, Canada, and other locations. In fact, in1987 he made a solo ten-week journey in his truck-camper and hiked every day in every national park from Nebraska to the west coast.

A survivor of both non-Hodgkin lymphoma and a heart attack, Rothman stays fit through his hiking and a healthy diet. He enjoys classical music and, by his own admission, tries to read too many books.

His memoir is the latest work in a long line of writings. He has published and won prizes for his poetry, short stories, and essays in a number of venues, including the Ina Coolbrith Circle Poetry Contest, The Poets' Edge Magazine, Northwoods Journal, Dan River Anthology, Bristol Banner Books Awards, and the Las Positas College Anthology.

Rothman is contemplating writing a travel memoir about his hiking trips. But in the meantime, Wingspan Press has published “A Brooklyn Odyssey.” Readers are encouraged to pick up a copy by visiting www.wingspanpress.com.

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