Last week’s martini post was superseded by Good Friday. The good news this Friday is that you are free to engage in additional field research at the local bar.
Those who are serious about their research and martini history need to check out Martini, Straight Up, by Lowell Edmunds.
Bernard DeVoto called it the “supreme American gift to world culture,” and H. L. Mencken said that it was “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.” FDR served a Martini to Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943 and asked him how he liked it. “Well, all right,” the Russian said, “but it is cold on the stomach.” Stalin’s successor was served a stronger Martini than the rather bland sort that FDR mixed. Khrushchev called it “the U.S.A.’s most lethal weapon.”
You see, it has serious political implications. I also noticed this unassailable observation:
[The Martini's] return in the 1990s is the return of the image. Only a few diehards still drink the old straight-up gin Martini. . . .
I guess that makes me a diehard.
(Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons)
March 28th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure |
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Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), novelist, playwright, and statesman, has among his credits The Last Days of Pompeii and Rienzi. But his most famous line is the opening to Paul Clifford:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
In homage to this overwrought verbiage, the English Department at San Jose State University initiated the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” With numerous categories and 25 years of history, the Bulwer-Lytton contest has generated a vast compendium of awful prose. The 2007 winner:
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.
Other winners and honorable mentions abound, and you will find your search for intentionally bad writing amply rewarded. You may be impressed by irony . . .
With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.
. . . or revel in the linguistic descent through multiple layers of nonsense.
Professor Radzinsky wove his fingers together in a tweed-like fabric, pinched his lips together like a blowfish, and began his lecture on simile and metaphor, which are, like, similar to one another, except that similes are almost always preceded by the word ‘like’ while metaphors are more like words that make you think of something else beside what you are describing.
March 28th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Language |
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