James Young

Competition | 12 July 2008

<strong>No. 2555: Last words</strong><br /> You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net.

issue 12 July 2008

No. 2555: Last words
You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net.

In Competition 2552 you were invited to follow Bernard Levin (who liked eggs boiled for the duration of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and spice up a cookery column with similar cultural references.

Unfortunately Bernard did not tell us who was conducting while he was boiling; a Toscanini egg, for example, would be a much softer thing than a Klemperer one. W.J. Webster observes that Levin, of course, was being light-hearted, not pretentious; indeed, the Figaro/eggs recipe is also ascribed to Beecham, that most down-to-earth of musicians. But the idea of the comp was to use the reference as a base camp from which to scale the peaks of pseudery, the pyramids of piffle that loom when a skilled craft morphs into a Fine Art.

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