Reading Between The Lines: Much more than an author

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One of Scotland’s best remembered poets... for the wrong reasons.

Enjoying terrible works for the sake of ironic value isn't just limited to watching bad movies and listening to the occasional brokeNCYDE track. Stephanie Meyer's trapper-keeper level writing certainly wasn't the first to be enjoyed by snarky smart-alecks for the sake of ironic value. The virtue of success came to these authors and works simply because of how gut-wrenchingly (either from pain or sheer ridiculousness) awful they all were.

William McGonagall
Scotland is home to a great number of wordsmiths, and William McGonagall came into existence almost as an antithesis to this fact. Easily one of the worst poets to pick up a pen and get to writing, his works easily put that of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Nancy Millstone Jennings to shame.

It's one thing to write bad poetry on innocuous and stereotypical poetry topics, but McGonagall took things a step further, with his poem on the Tay Bridge disaster, an incident involving the collapse of a train bridge, bringing a wretched remembrance upon the 75 lives lost on the day. And of course, he followed it up with a new poem praising the rebuilt bridge — a true master of taste.

Even to the poetically ignorant who have some semblance of what structure in writing is, McGonagall's works are cringingly awful yet incredibly fun to read.

You can find his body of works online, immaculately contained within this tongue-in-cheek preservation society at mcgonagall-online.org.uk.

Amanda McKittrick Ros
Some writers tend to rely on obscurity and overarching metaphor to drive home a point, or at least disguise their poor storytelling… and then there's Amanda McKittrick Ros. I'd make joke about the incomprehensibility of her work being on par with Finnegan's Wake, but getting ripped apart by a mob of angry James Joyce scholars isn't the way I'd want to go.

But really, McKittrick Ros' writings are stereotypically post- Austen romantic dramas about women who can't choose which Dick they want to settle with, with the distinction of writing a lot while having said very little. No joke, sentences literally go on for the lengths of paragraphs in an effort to squeeze in as much purple as possible into that prose.

Sure, bad self-published novels have been a thing since Gutenberg converted that grape-crushing press, but McKittrick Ros' body of work has seen a degree of preservation thanks to being enjoyed by snarky authors, such as the likes of Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis and even Aldous Huxley.

Although her works are nearly out of print, her debut novel, Irene Iddlesleigh, can be found on the online public domain book archive, Project Gutenberg. Bless 'em.

English As She Is Spoke
Ever use Bad Translator? It's a web application that runs your ordinary English sentence through a network of language translator. Essentially, it shows you the result of running “Where is the Bathroom” between 35 different language translators before translating back to English (you end up getting “The Work”).

Now imagine it's 1883, and a man named Pedro Carolino released a Portugese-English dictionary created with the use of a Portugese-French dictionary that was then adapted to English from French; the appeal of hilarious incomprehensibility is quite similar in English As She Is Spoke. Describing a “Coochman” as a type of servant and a “Bomb Ketch” as a “Military Object,” the head-scratching nature of the unintentional comedy made the book quite popular with contemporary satirists, including our dear Mark Twain again, who described it as “perfect.”

Our friends at Project Gutenberg sweep in once again to save the day, with the various e-book versions of this “dictionary,” free to download.

Reading Between The Lines explores books that you may have missed out on that are worth your while. If you have a book to suggest, email Eshaan at e_gupta@fanshaweonline.ca.