Grammar Class II, The Nifty Fifty

With a certain amount of pride – justifiable, I hope you’ll agree – I announce the invention of a brand new art form:  the nifty fifty.  This is a piece of prose, not poetry, not a sonnet, not even a limerick.  It doesn’t rhyme, although I suppose it could.  Its only rule is that, including its title (if any), it must contain exactly fifty words, not an article or conjunction more or less.  Here is an example:

Alice Takes a Drive

            Alice slid the black Hummer into traffic.  Lips tight, she considered George’s recent infidelities.  Goddamn men, she thought.  Goddamn blondes.  As she turned onto Wilshire, she saw ahead his familiar form, brazenly jaywalking.  Ah, she thought.  What the hell.  And she put the hammer down.  Hard.

Fifty words.  Count ‘em.

The nifty fifty evolved as an assignment for my grammar class at Bennington College, an effort to force students to use language more judiciously than they usually do.  I asked them to accomplish something – explain a process, tell a story, describe a place – in those nifty fifty words.  The piece should be affective; that is, at the end a reader should laugh, or mourn, or say, “Ah-hah!”  And the syntax should be without reproach.  In short, make every word count – all the way to fifty.

In looking at my own example, readers may feel I’ve been a bit cavalier about the requirement concerning irreproachable grammar.  “Alice Takes a Drive” contains three sentence fragments, and normally I’m death on those blades of crabgrass in the lawn of language.  However, I do allow fragments to appear in dialog, and two of these make up part of Alice’s interior dialog.  The final word, “Hard,” requires a bit more squirming.  I tell the students, sure I could have included “hard” in the previous sentence, avoiding the solecism:  “She put the hammer down, hard.”  But it feels funnier to me with the heavier beat of that single syllable hanging out there at the end.  Rules can be broken – even the rules of syntax – as long as there’s justification.  Just don’t try it too often, unless you are Elmore Leonard.

My Bennington students often produce brilliant work, and during the past few years I have received some dandy nifty fifties.  I’m including here three of my favorites from earlier years and one from this spring.  I have asserted copyright for each in the name of its author, wanting to protect his or her (or xer, for those who admire the new gender-free singular pronoun) authorship.  After all, these are excellent examples of a major new literary form.  By the way, the author’s name does not count as part of the fifty words.

She slipped into the dark like a diver in the deep, moving with a grace not unlike the predators of old. The night was hers. She moved with a purpose at once vivid and mysterious. Like a queen she gazed over her kingdom, like a rogue she patrolled it. Meow.

© Peter M. Caras, 2014

I have to note here that Peter committed a normally unforgivable sin, writing in the penultimate sentence a comma splice.  His neat parallel structure, however, made the sin forgivable; a semicolon would have repaired the problem, but I felt such a correction would have resulted in too pedantic a construction.  Objection is noted, but dismissed.  Also note that “Meow” is a fragment, but as it is a form of feline dialog, forget it.

Prayer to Saint Dymphna

            He lives inside of a red jacket, its arms holding him when he is alone.  Jackets do not ask questions.  In its pockets lie soiled remnants of a life once his own (a Metro North ticket, a rubber band).  He walks on – hood up, thumb out.

© Kathryn Henderson, 2014

Dymphna was a new saint to me.  Wikipedia explains that she was the patron of the emotionally ill and mentally disturbed.  Thus in precisely fifty words, Kathryn has created a gorgeous snapshot of a lost soul, examples of whom we can find all too frequently in the world around us.  Bless them all, St. Dymphna.

One student created what seems a nifty fifty prose poem of sorts, which is both clever and deeply moving.  Read it carefully:

             Grand Mal

Before Daily Doses and Episodes,

When my hair was still blond, Disordered,

I, in a Steady State,

watched soccer games –

siblings scrimmaging

on summer days.

I balanced on the backup balls,

sideline children Spell-bound.

Then one day, I lost my footing

and Fit effortlessly in the green grass.

© Mitchell Rue Carson, 2014

Mitchell wrote this piece from his own experience with seizure disorder, emphasizing the relevant puns with capital letters. Prose starts to meld into poetry here, but it’s still a nifty fifty, a mere and exact fifty words, boring straight into the heart, leaving us all touched, and wiser.

And finally, here is my all-time favorite, one of the grossest nifty fifties ever:

Looking into Glenda’s Brown Eye

            Glenda and Phil liked to look at each other, the closer, the better.  As a colonoscopist, Phil had access to every hidden, juicy part of Glenda.  He’d get her just right, and they’d sit together for an hour or two, Phil just enjoying the view.

© Sasha Stjame, 2014

Sasha didn’t even take my course; she heard about nifty fifties from her roommate (who did take the course) and submitted this noble effort.  So far, she is the only person to use the word “colonoscopist” in a nifty fifty.

So there you go: five fine examples of this new form.  Now here’s your assignment:  go write a really good nifty fifty of your own – really good, now – and submit it here, as a comment to the blog.  The most excellent ones will get approved and posted; you too will become a pioneer in this newest literary discovery.  And when the Academy gathers next year to award the trophy for the best nifty fifty (called a Stuart, because it’s so little), yours will be among the eligible entries!

 

May, 2014 ©