First Line Friday

I've been a little bit of a downer recently with the first lines I've highlighted.  I haven't love them all.  And I am going to continue the trend today.

"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."

Hmmmmm, pretty shady punctuation, isn't it?  For my taste, it's far too meandering, too random, too loosy goosy.  The novel is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  And, having said all of this, I think I can predict what the rebuttal will consist of.

So go ahead, disagree with me, if you will.

Haiku-ption Contest #8

My haiku is below. Give us yours in the comments.

Jackie Onassis:

Graceful former first lady,

Planking pioneer

Symbolism in Literature: Not so fast, my friend...

INTERVIEWER:   Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?

HEMINGWAY:   I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

INTERVIEWER:   Continuing with just one question on this line: One of the advisory staff editors wonders about a parallel he feels he’s found in The Sun Also Rises  between the dramatis personae of the bull ring and the characters of the novel itself. He points out that the first sentence of the book tells us Robert Cohn is a boxer; later, during the desencajonada,  the bull is described as using his horns like a boxer, hooking and jabbing. And just as the bull is attracted and pacified by the presence of a steer, Robert Cohn defers to Jake who is emasculated precisely as is a steer. He sees Mike as the picador, baiting Cohn repeatedly. The editor’s thesis goes on, but he wondered if it was your conscious intention to inform the novel with the tragic structure of the bullfight ritual.

HEMINGWAY:   It sounds as though the advisory staff editor was a little bit screwy. Who ever said Jake was “emasculated precisely as is a steer”? Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man  but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated.

-From the Paris Review Interview published in 1958

Literature and The Art of Manliness

If you liked our post from Fathers Day, you'll probably also enjoy these similar posts from one of my favorite sites, ArtofManliness.com.

Lessons in Manliness From Atticus Finch

Lessons in Manliness From The Old Man & The Sea

Lessons in Manliness From Beowulf

More Author Look-Alikes

Ay-oh, Oh-ay! Look at those deep-set eyes and pouty lips. The only difference between Virginia Woolf and Judith Light is a hairdryer and a little makeup. (And probably a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.)

Here's Tobias Wolff with unquestioned mustache domination, but Richard Dreyfuss has the edge on scalp coverage and protruding chest hair. Otherwise not a shabby match.

Facial hair, heavy eyelids, and prominent eyebrows... Alfred Molina matches Marcel Proust feature for feature.

Two words came into my head when I saw this picture of D.H. Lawrence: Daniel Faraday. A concerned and bearded Jeremy Davies is right about spot on.

Last but not least, T.C. Boyle and Terrence Stamp. Kneel before Zod!!

Be a Better Dad, Read a Novel...

Fathers Day’s got me thinking. There just aren’t many great fathers in the world of literature. Scan your bookshelves and tell me how many decent, loving fathers you come across. You’ll find that the dearth of dads is pretty striking. It seems we get better stories when our fathers are dead, cruel, or out of the picture altogether. Even when they’re there, they tend to be hapless milquetoasts (I’m looking at you, Tom Joad Sr.) There’s a lot more tension that way. And it lets the main character figure things out on their own.


But of those select few who can be held up as examples, I think you’d have to put To Kill A Mockingbird’s  Atticus Finch right at the top of the list. A quick perusal of that book can give some great pointers to those of us trying to figure out fatherhood. Channel Mr. Finch, and you’re well on your way.


For example, teach your kids to read. Teach them to respect their elders. Teach them all about life. But most of all, teach them by example. Don’t be afraid to take a principled stand. Sure, today’s casting directors will put Latinos, Asians, and wheelchair-bound Aborigines in just about every show they watch on tv, but nothing says ‘racism isn’t cool’ like defending a falsely-accused black man when the whole town is forming a lynch mob.


Treat your kids with fairness. Show them what integrity means. At the same time, respect their need to understand the rationale behind all your silly rules. 


Let your kids be kids. Let your girls be tomboys. Give them a long leash and let them explore the world around them.


But know when to give that leash a tug. (Hint, if they’re using a fishing pole to drop provocative messages into your neighbors’ back window, they’ve probably overstepped some important boundaries.)


Be humble. If you’re the deadest shot in Maycomb County you don’t have to go bragging about it. Just be ready to take care of business when mad dogs come to tear your kids to shreds. You never know when the Sheriff’s going to crap his pants under the pressure of a “one shot deal.”


I could go on and on. Is Atticus perfect? Definitely not. But where he has faults we can also learn from his mistakes. 


For instance, when the town lowlife swears revenge on you and your family, don’t just wipe his loogie of your face and say you’re too old to fight. Put the bastard out of commission, because sooner or later he’ll come after your kids, and unless they happen to don protective giant ham costumes made of chicken wire, or unless your reclusive neighbor can put a kitchen knife between his ribs, well, things probably won’t end well.


Oh, and maybe this was okay to do with old ladies during the Depression, but nowadays you probably shouldn’t lend your kids out to the neighborhood morphine addict to help wean him or her off their special sauce.


Anything I missed? Any other great fathers from land of literature? As a dad myself, I’d love to hear more…

Happy Bloomsday!

On this date in 1904, James Joyce took his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, out on a stroll through a Dublin suburb. It was their first date. Years later, Joyce would choose this date as the setting-in-time for his monumental novel Ulysses.


Fifty years after that original outing, admirers of Joyce inaugurated the very first “Bloomsday” celebration, with a pilgrimage along the same route that Leopold Bloom traced in the novel. 


For those of us who can’t be in Dublin to take part in the festivities, we’re sharing the short film below. Dublin filmmaker Noel Duffy takes you on a 23-minute tour of Bloom’s famous route. It borders on boring, and I cannot explain the appearance of “Video Killed the Radio Star” in the random and intermittent soundtrack, but then, who really needs an explanation to rock out to the Buggles? That’s right- not me, and not you.


Enjoy.

First Line Friday

Greetings all!

Today, I'd like to look at the mediocre first line of a tremendous novel. Your rebuttal is welcome, as always. Here is the first line:

"There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills."

Fair enough . . . perhaps the road is lovely. But this first line just doesn't cut it for me. It offers nothing that is unique, intriguing, or edgy. Granted, it's simple, and there is beauty in simplicity, but . . .

The novel, of course, is Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country. Now, go ahead.  Rebuttal?


*** MacEvoy weighs in ***


A lot of our email and RSS followers won't read the comments, but looking back through the introduction of my copy of C,TBC  I discovered a couple things that are interesting enough to tack on here. Consider this my rebuttal. 


Paton wrote this book while on an international tour of penal institutions. I'll quote the account of the genesis of this first line:

"He also took a side trip to Norway to visit Trondheim, and to see the locale of a Norwegian novel that interested him, Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil.  

Traversing the unfamiliar evergreen forests of the mountainous border landscape, Paton grew nostalgic for the hills of Natal... Jensen then brought Paton back to his hotel and promised to return in an hour to take him to dinner. In the course of that hour, moved, as he says, by powerful emotion, Paton wrote the lyric opening chapter beginning: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills..." At that juncture he did not know what was to follow. He had sketched no scenario for a novel.

So he was moved by a memory of his homeland, and he poured that emotion into writing. My own opinion is that his emotion can easily be felt by the reader, especially as his first paragraph continues: 

"...These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond the singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa."

But there's another reason I think it's a great opening line. The setting of South Africa, and the love of one's homeland are the major  themes of this novel. Read the passage we quoted in this post, for a taste of that. And here is Paton in his own words:

"So many things have been written about this book that I would not know how to add to them if I did not believe that I know best what kind of book it is. It is a song of love for one's far distant country, it is informed with longing for that land where they shall not hurt nor destroy in all that holy mountain, for that unattainable and ineffable land where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, for the land cannot be again, of hills and grass and bracken, the land where you were born. It is a story of the beauty and terror of human life, and it cannot be written again because it cannot be felt again. Just how good it is, I do not know and I do not care. All I know is that it changed our lives. It opened the doors of the world to us, and we went through."

I think the simple opening line is the perfect way to launch that kind of book.

Review: Silas Marner, by George Eliot

It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed anything, so let’s talk about Silas Marner,  shall we?

This book was my first experience with George Eliot, but Marner  is certainly not her best known, or most highly acclaimed work. Still, I thought it would be a good way to edge myself closer to Middlemarch  one day. Turns out it was a nice little read.

There’s a great use of dialect and colorful characters, and you can tell that Eliot had a blast recreating the quaint village life that serves as a backdrop for the story. In fact, the one criticism I’ll offer is that she got a little too  carried away- relaying entire scenes that have nothing to do with what’s really going on. At certain points it occurred to me that a more appropriate title might have been “The Villagers of Raveloe… and Silas Marner,”  but hey, who am I to complain? A story about a reclusive weaver? Catalepsy used as a plot device? Sold. Enough said.

Silas, the strange central character, is not at all likeable at first glance. But here’s what Eliot does so well:  right off the bat, she gives us his backstory- a sad tale of betrayal and lost love that explains why he’s become the miserable misanthrope and village bogeyman that we meet in the first few pages of the book. You can’t help but cheer for the guy as things progress.

And progress they do. One reason I love to go back to the classics is that, for any of their other faults, they tend to be very well plotted. Things that occur in the opening chapters will come full-circle and be paid off in the end. In the case of Silas Marner,  these twists and turns alternate between gut-wrenching losses and exhilarating stokes of luck. Ultimately, though, we’re given a happy ending, and Silas is utterly transformed by his character journey.

On top of all that, Eliot presents the reader with themes that are as relevant today as they were in her day. It’s a book about redemption, and community, and religion, and family. And if she wanders off on some tangents of “village color,” well, I think I can forgive that. Check it out.

Kurt Vonnegut: Infantry Battalion Scout

INTERVIEWER:   You were an infantry battalion scout in the war?


VONNEGUT:   Yes, but I took my basic training on the 240-millimeter howitzer.


INTERVIEWER:   A rather large weapon.


VONNEGUT:   The largest mobile fieldpiece in the army at that time. This weapon came in six pieces, each piece dragged wallowingly by a Caterpillar tractor. Whenever we were told to fire it, we had to build it first. We practically had to invent it. We lowered one piece on top of another, using cranes and jacks. The shell itself was about nine and a half inches in diameter and weighed three hundred pounds. We constructed a miniature railway which would allow us to deliver the shell from the ground to the breech, which was about eight feet above grade. The breechblock was like the door on the vault of a savings and loan association in Peru, Indiana, say.


INTERVIEWER:   It must have been a thrill to fire such a weapon.


VONNEGUT:   Not really. We would put the shell in there, and then we would throw in bags of very slow and patient explosives. They were damp dog biscuits, I think. We would close the breech, and then trip a hammer which hit a fulminate of mercury percussion cap, which spit fire at the damp dog biscuits. The main idea, I think, was to generate steam. After a while, we could hear these cooking sounds. It was a lot like cooking a turkey. In utter safety, I think, we could have opened the breechblock from time to time, and basted the shell. Eventually, though, the howitzer always got restless. And finally it would heave back on its recoil mechanism, and it would have to expectorate the shell. The shell would come floating out like the Goodyear blimp. If we had had a stepladder, we could have painted “F*** Hitler” on the shell as it left the gun. Helicopters could have taken after it and shot it down.


INTERVIEWER:   The ultimate terror weapon.


VONNEGUT:   Of the Franco-Prussian War.

-From Vonnegut's hilarious interview with the Paris Review