Awfully great

Today the results were announced from one of my favorite annual contests, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where there is no such thing as too bad, too cliche, too much. The contest rewards the author who can pen the most awful first sentence of a fictional novel, and is named for the great Victorian novelist who wrote the immortal first line "It was a dark and stormy night."

This year's winner came from Jim Guigli of Carmichael, California. He wrote:

"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean."

Awesome. Check out their website for past winners, words from the World's Worst Poet (not J.J. Redick, apparently), and the marvelous game "Dickens or Bulwer?" To misquote Spinal Tap, there's such a fine line between literature and crap.

On tragedy

(What I wrote last year about 7/7.)

It has been a year since the London bombings, and what I think of when I think of that day, are these lines of T.S. Eliot's:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

The strangeness of that day did not begin when I tried to get on the Tube that morning at King's Cross; not when I saw the crowds streaming out of the station or when I walked to Russell Square and saw the gates of the station closed; not when I boarded at Holborn and the train stopped just before my exit, not when we were told there was a massive power surge and the whole system was shutting down, not when I got to my desk and turned on the computer and read along as an electric failure became the end of 52 lives.

The strangeness of that day came in the afternoon, after the facts became clearer, and the words that just 5 years ago would have rang so obscure - suicide bomber, Al Qaeda, terrorist - were digested. The strangeness was getting home with no cars, no buses, no trains, and seeing the people, the hundreds of millions of Londoners who had made it into the city that morning and now had no choice but to walk out. There was little fear in this crowd, and all frustration at the situation was diffused by how out of the ordinary it all was. There was a benevolence to it all, a sense of camaraderie, of luck and gratitude that we had chosen that certain route, forgotten our keys, decided to walk rather than wait in the bus queue, done whatever we did to make it. Later the fear would creep back in, but that afternoon, we were the survivors, so many millions of us, and all peripatetic, all casting slowly homewards. I had not thought death had undone so many.

It was the closest I'd ever been to tragedy, quite literally - the entrance to King's Cross tube station, the location of the greatest carnage, is less than 100 yards from the flat we had then lived in less than a week. Tavistock Square, where the bus (as enduring a London icon as Big Ben and the weather) blew up, was less than a ten-minute walk from our home. We saw the signs begging for information on missing loved ones, smelled the dying flowers at the makeshift memorial garden at Kings Cross, felt the shrapnel marks that remained on the giant blue doors of the British Medical Association in Tavistock Square for months afterwards. Hell, for the people of Kenly, NC, Kaitlin and I were their sole link to the sad event.

And yet, for all the closeness, we were still at a remove. I did not know anyone killed or hurt, or know anyone who knew anyone. I did not see any of the bleeding victims escaping the infernal tube stations. I changed my habits - began walking to work, became aware of bookbags on trains, considered emergency exits I'd never noticed before - but continued to live and work in the city that was then my assumed home. It was scary for awhile, but we all got on with things. Death had undone us, but not outdone us.

Anniversaries of tragedies are strange days, with such conflicting washes of emotions. Today we commemorate the victims, who took no paths of glory but were simply commuters, plucked from the multitudes for martyrdom. I think of those who perpetuated the acts and pity their hate. Mostly I think of London, and how she remains unbowed; how reports say that as many people rode the Tube today as on any other day; how the Unreal City continues to pulse and thrive and survive and defy, as she has always done, as her people continue to do, undone but not outdone.