Physician Pens Winning Entry In Faulkner Contest -- Sentence Thick With Epitomical Effluvium Of Discursive Verbosity

JACKSON, Miss. - It's a tale of warriors "girded for the assault in resplendent triumph," the object of their savage struggle a "symbol of insatiable honor, impregnable, invincible but ephemeral."

It's football, as it might have flowed from the pen of William Faulkner.

Robert Blake, a doctor who normally writes for medical journals, turned a 20-year passion for the Mississippi master's work into the winning entry in this year's Jack Daniels Faux Faulkner contest.

Stringing together multiple-syllable adjectives into a nearly 200-word sentence - and never mentioning the word football - Blake writes of a "leather oblong not-trophy."

Blake was to accept his award today and will have to read his entry for a gathering of scholars at Faulkner's home in Oxford, Miss.

That may be harder than the writing. "It's not easy to read that out loud. I'm not even sure how to pronounce a few of these words," said Blake, a self-described Faulkner fanatic.

Blake's entry is titled "Pile On," in reference to Faulkner's "Pylon." Some of the other entries were about a sunbather, "As She Lay Frying," and a search for romance in "The Bridges of Yoknapatawpha County."

Blake, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, said an idea "kind of rumbled around in my brain for a year or so," before he put it on paper.

Blake's entry "was funny all the way through - every line," said Larry Wells, an organizer of the 9-year-old contest. "He has a gift for language and an ear for Faulkner's rhythms, cadences. He knew the key words that are Faulkner buzzwords."

Blake managed to fit in the words "abnegation," "abrogation" and "viscera" but couldn't find room for the Faulkner favorite "effluvium."

"A literate M.D., that's wonderful," said writer Barry Hannah, one of four judges. "So many M.D.s don't have time to read. I like that."

Blake, 53, won a trip to the weeklong Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi which begins today.

The winning entry

"Knowing knows before hearing hears, recollection exudes from the congealed entanglement, emasculate in the indomitable odor of mansweat; remembering before knowing: hands splayed on bended knees, semicrouched in rapt immobility, forwardleaning into the ponderous nocturnal autumn air, in furious anticipation of arrested inertia, incipient savagery, luminous in the brooding dusk-dark; forwardmoving preemptorily with the sound, an inviolate sonorous command, refusing abnegation, compelling allegiance, doomed in the primordial obdurate masculinity; receiving the thrusted leather oblong not-trophy, neither chalice, but rather palpable symbol of insatiable honor, impregnable, invincible but ephemeral; viscera thrusted, arms engulfing as a lover's embrace, but futile; forwardmoving with escalating fury inexorably toward the armor-clad foe, nonapparitional, voracious, implacable, intractable, incorrigible and girded for the assault in resplendent triumph; arrested in stark, abrupt and utter abrogation of motion, profound dissolution, sudden and complete; and now cohered with the hard, immutable earth; with the penetrant whistling infiltrating through the laboriously unlimbering extrication of virile man-flesh to the abject fury of disembodied surrender; and then, with resolute, authoritative finality, the hearing: "second down."