Prose Trips Ever Lightly, Punful Trenchant Pen

Tim Poston is baaaaaad.

He lives behind a wrought-iron gate in a Venice neighborhood that is plagued by some of the city’s worst drug trafficking and other crime.

But that isn’t what makes him bad. What makes Tim Poston bad is what he writes.

Poston has developed a minor obsession with an annual contest that encourages people to devise the worst possible examples of awful literature, and to compress them into one sentence.

The theoretical goal is to see who can come the closest to the turgid prose of Victorian author Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton. It was Bulwer-Lytton, not Snoopy, who opened his 1830 novel, “Paul Clifford,” with: “It was a dark and stormy night . . . “

This year the founder and presiding judge of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, San Jose State University English professor Scott Rice, received more than 10,000 examples of bad-to-dreadful writing from throughout the nation.

Tim Poston contributed more than 3,000 of them.

“Three thousand, three hundred fifty-six,” said Poston, an English-born UCLA mathematics instructor who frequently escapes the cerebral strain of holding massive equations in his brain by pausing to write a few more Bulwer-Lytton entries.

Like this:

There was a certain ugly comfort in the row of great bottles where her ex-rivals floated yellowed by Formalin, the earliest quite monochrome by now, but her mind kept yearning back to bread and milk in the Royal nursery and the golden arms of her personal nanny, poisoned by her sisters so long ago.

Or this:

The man who came into my office looked forlorn and yet potentially explosive, like unattended baggage.

Or this:

Tyrannosaurus Rex was dangerous and Brontosaurus was enormous, but Mr. Teeth was a vicious, malevolent, unpleasant, creepy, terrible, dreadful, dire, horrible, villainous, monstrous, unclean, abominable, noisome, fiendish, baneful Rogethesaurus.

His efforts won nothing more than an honorable mention in the Vile Puns category in the 1987 judging and a place in the most ambivalent niche of Scott Rice’s heart.

Poston, a thoughtful, whimsical man with a long, curly, two-pronged beard that is graying on its left side, injects many of his entries with queer images or, more often, festering puns. Like:

“Our triumph was foretold by your own prophecies,” gloated the mutant wildebeest lord as his minions herded the ragged remnants of humanity into their final reservation in Olduvai Gorge, “the old order changes, giving place to gnu.”

Or:

Sir George McBeth’s fury at the childhood doggy nickname caused by his birthmark made him the most blasphemous man I ever knew; even women among the ladies, his own wife was the only woman who ever out-damned Spot.

Such are the unfortunate consequences that occur when a man who does deadly precise work for a living needs respite.

Picture Poston working at his computer in his small, white-walled, second-story duplex, his mind churning furiously on quadratic polynomials as he struggles to devise a mathematical model of an ecological system.

He needs a break. He hits a couple of keys to change programs, and suddenly he’s free of the rules of mathematics, free to maneuver in the boundless world of literature. Free to devote his high IQ to whatever fragments fly before him. Like:

That year in Portland, Maine, I made more memories than I really needed.

Poston’s hobby began modestly after he read an anthology of the worst of Bulwer-Lytton contestants. Melding his addiction to science fiction and affection for minor 19th-Century novels (“I’ve no objection to a book that starts with a chapter or so describing the characters without anything happening, the kind you can’t sell now”) he wrote one at a time, then a few, then more.

He thought a hundred would be a lot. He was wrong. He made it too easy. He programmed his computer and printer to spit out each entry on pieces of heavy, postcard-sized paper to conform with the contest rules.

At times his entries can be a political statement on literature. Poston hated “Clan of the Cave Bear,” Jean Auel’s successful 1980 novel about Cro-Magnon life. He thought Auel, a housewife-turned-writer, “had no cultural sense except this time and this place” and confronted her characters with too many modern-day problems.

So he paid her back:

Queque sat at the mouth of her cave, sti r ring the five-day-old mammoth’s-foot stew with a bone ladle and glumly thinking about the bottom line.

The deadline for 1988 Bulwer-Lytton entries isn’t until April 15, but Poston’s already cranked out 729 more horrible samples.

How Professor Rice will react is uncertain.

“Last year I was ready to give him a special award,” Rice said. “And then have somebody shoot him.”