My Interest In Amanda Is Purely Academic…

I've received a number of comments over the past several months centering on my interest in the writings of Amanda Marcotte. These comments, for the most part, seem to center on the idea that my interest is prima facie evidence of some sort of man-crush on the womyn. Let me assure you this is not the case. My interest in the writings of Amanda is purely academic.

Maybe academic isn't the right word. But in the spirit of the moment, I'll use it anyway…

Ever since viewing my first Ed Wood movie back during my childhood years, I've always found myself loving flamboyant badness in whatever form I've found it. I'm the sort who'd pass up Citizen Kane to watch Plan 9 From Outer Space. I'd rather read the poetry of William McGonagall than that of T. S. Elliot. On those rare occasions I read fiction, what I reach for is something along the lines of a Danielle Steel novel, rather than the typical New York Times Review of Books recommended borefest of nobly multicultural post-modern literary offerings. Both are dreadful in their own ways, mind you, but only the Steel novel will have you laughing out loud.

This taste for outlandish badness, more than anything, explains my interest in Amanda Marcotte. There is no other single site on the internet that brings me as much laughter as Pandagon. This is entirely due to Miss Amanda's efforts. I have yet to find another blogger who is such a unique, and utterly entertaining, combination of ineptitude and energy. It isn't just the fiercely earnest banality of her thoughts. Nor is it her remarkable stream-of-consciousness style. And it isn't simply the tortured syntax and grammatical atrocities that are the hallmark of her oeuvre. It isn't even based the fact that she has obviously never proof-read a word of her considerable output prior to posting. Rather, it is the mixture of all these elements, combined with a monumental lack of self-awareness, that makes her output so noteworthy…

This is writing that is so bad that an element of grandeur creeps into it.

And that, more than anything, explains my fascination with the writings of one Amanda Marcotte. I am fascinated by her output in the same way I am fascinated with the output of Edward D. Wood, Jr., William McGonagall and Danielle Steel. It also explains why I occasionally listen to the music of Elliott Carter.

Finally, I'd like to mention that I am not alone in my love of this sort of thing. If you take a moment to visit the site of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, you will find the brainchild of one Professor Scott Rice. What is the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest? Well, in the words of the Professor…

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

Professor Rice's primary intent was to create an entertaining teaching tool for aspiring writers, but the contest's popularity has lead to the publishing of five books, It Was A Dark & Stormy Night, Bride of Dark and Stormy, Son of "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night", It Was a Dark & Stormy Night: The Final Conflict and Dark & Stormy Rides Again. Each is a collection of the best sentences entered for the contest over the years. I own a copy of each, and all except the newest (It Was A Dark & Stormy Night) is quite dog-eared and worn. At this time only It Was a Dark and Stormy Night is in print, and if you don't own a copy, I suggest you order one immediately. Beyond that, the existence of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is proof positive that I am not alone in my enjoyment of that which is amazingly bad.

An Aside, Sort Of: Below, I have reproduced several of my favorite Bulwer-Lytton entries. I'd ask you to imagine Amanda Marcotte writing that first novel that we all know she has in her. Then I'd ask you this question: Would any of the sentences below be beyond her?

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.

"Heavens!" groaned fair Diana Rea (a groan uttered to the heights from her depths as she strained every muscle of her viscera (her bowel, her gut, her innermost being (that from which the great sages have mined their deepest wisdom (unlike middling ones, who only mine the mind (though Diana had quite a lucid mind in her lovely head (which sat on small, soft shoulders over which cascaded mounds of flaming red hair (if one can say mounds cascade (or that red hair flames, for that matter, though well it seemed to on Diana (who, though pretty, wasn't shallow, but contemplated life's landscape in its heights and depths, lights and darks (like Kierkegaard, whom she was reading at the time (though nausea was the opposite of her problem))))))))))), "I do wish I could get over this constipation thing, but I must admit that the time I've spent on the pot reading has worked wonders for my knowledge of the humanities."

He stood, a shell-shocked shell of a man in turquoise gabardine, reeling in the memories of the past nine hours - the hurled accusations from the dwarf Enrico, the ski lodge larder strewn with mangled pots and pans, the lurching flight through the marshes at dawn - and he marveled at the seasick sequence of events that had brought him here, a tangled figure in two-tone shoes, standing in silence on this craggy cliff at the edge of this really big desolate plain, a pair of cheap, sequined clown shoes in one hand and a battered muffin tin in the other.

The door, which was left open by the young, pert girl wearing a peasant blouse trimmed in Belgian lace with the laundry mark on the back and a bright full skirt with gaudy flowers in organized blotches, who reminded Raoul, the gardener, of that long-ago spring when he proved his manhood in a flowery - much like the flowers on the girl's dress (except that they were daisies, not roses) - field with a lady welder a few years his senior, but who was said to weld the straightest seams in the yard, even though she tended to be a bit careless with the excess flux falling on her steel-tipped shoes, blew shut.

With six-guns blazing she fought her way through the crowded saloon, never stopping to worry about where she'd left her clothes or the man in the rabbit suit she'd just left upstairs.

Amanda couldn't decide - should she give up her study of menstrual imagery in Hopi folklore (which no one else on that sedate Midwestern campus had thought to look into) and settle down to a nice quiet life with Philip on the farm, where together with the plowing and the planting the two of them could experience nature's timeless rhythms firsthand, or should she go to law school.

Comments

[lane]

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Loves it, and Amanda isn't doing it intentionally, which makes it so much more amusing.

[PeterUK]

So how come you have the PVoD, don't tell me you use it as a paper weight?

[Dennis The Peasant]

I tried to use it as a paperweight, but it ate my desk.

[PeterUK]

..and now it's twice the size,whatever you do don't let it near the cesspool.

[Flyby Reader]

"it is the mixture of all these elements, combined with a monumental lack of self-awareness, that makes her output so noteworthy…" Another Bulwer-Lytton fan agrees. Perhaps one might also say reading Marcotte is like watching a train wreck, with violence and destruction only to the Queen's English . . .

[jcw]

Amanda and Economics don't mix either. From a rant on December 1st entitled "What Middle Class". I wonder what school she went to that taught Supply and Demand 101.

"But one thing that's critical is a return to high marginal tax rates. The existence of a super-wealthy class has a lot of negative side effects for working people, but one of them is that we have to compete with them in the housing and food markets, and since price is no object for the rich, they drive up prices. Supply and demand 101, and it's especially true in terms of housing."

[Dennis The Peasant]

jcw-

I wanted to write a post about "What Middle Class" and just didn't have the time. Her grasp of economics is only exceeded by her grasp of prose.