Thursday, November 19, 2009

Real ghostwriter of Sarah Palin's book: Edward Bulwer-Lytton


The evidence? Feast your eyes, my friends, on this actual sentence from the book-like thingee she's selling:
"As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on."

But I have to admit: I got punked. A Slate reader posted the following sentence, implying it was from Palin's book, and I fell for it:
"The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."

That is one terrible sentence. What's the subject? Is there a subject? Could it possibly be diagrammed? If so, would it look like the web of a spider on acid? Probably.

But it's not by Palin. It's from Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father.

Wow. Back to your day job, mister. (That horrible sentence aside, I enjoyed Obama's book--it's quite moving.)

(Palin sentence from Slate.)

1 comment:

fermicat said...

I can't bring myself to read her drivel, but Mudflats is doing it for us. Her version is highly entertaining (and based on this example, has much cleaner prose).