First Line Friday! 2012 election edition Vol. II

Last week we looked at the first lines of Mitt Romney’s books. Today we examine the first lines of President Obama’s. First, from  Dreams From My Father:

A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.

And then this one, from The Audacity of Hope:

On most days I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway train carries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through and underground tunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states.

Okay, so what do we think about these bad boys? I think it’s apparent that the president writes with a little more flare than Governor Romney- then again, we would probably expect that from the man whose mug adorns the iconic HOPE poster. But while the first example above carries a pretty great hook (what was the news?!), the second one is a relatively pedestrian opening to a book we already know is going to be political. I would definitely read on after the first  first line above- and I’d be pretty ambivalent about reading on after the second one. (Unless I were the owner of an iconic HOPE poster, that is.)

It's all been done before... even the experimental stuff

Having spent some time in art museums lately, the subject of originality has been on my mind.

In literature, as in the visual arts, one can probably make a good case that no matter what an author sets out to do, it’s all been done before. Plots, themes, devices, styles, character types- they all get recycled and repackaged- all the time. Now, this doesn’t mean that a work of literature can’t still reach us on some level if it happens to repurpose the age-old hero’s journey, or retell an old Greek myth, or follow every trope in a given genre. After all, we still listen to music and go see movies even though there are no new chord progressions and no new ideas in Hollywood.

But what if a writer wants to be an innovator and a visionary and a literary trailblazer? What is that author to do? Well, a few authors I’ve read this year spring to mind as examples.

I was bowled over, for instance, after plowing through 75 straight pages of powerpoint slides in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad  and realizing at the end of it that she had managed to form a pretty cohesive narrative that both moved the plot forward and revealed the innermost thoughts of one of the characters. Then in May of this year Egan serialized a short story on Twitter and it was… just okay. More than anything it struck me as a “gimmicky” publicity ploy.

Dana Spiotta’s novel Stone Arabia  is another book I read this year that aspires to innovate and break new ground. She employs a “collage” style that incorporates interviews, transcripts of YouTube videos, emails and other things into her regular narrative. I’ll admit that it worked for me, and it’s not something you see every day. But for all the praise these techniques inspire as 'experimental next steps in storytelling,' the problem with efforts like these is that- you guessed it, it’s all been done before.

Jump back 80 years and John Dos Passos was basically doing the same thing in the early ‘30s. His U.S.A  trilogy is peppered with newspaper clippings, song lyrics and biographies, intermingled with passages of his own stream of consciousness writings.

Jump back another 80 years and you’ve got Herman Melville spicing up his first-person narrative in Moby Dick  with historical treatises, zoology primers and all sorts of Shakespearean literary devices: soliloquies, asides and even stage directions.

I imagine that if you jump back another 80 years or more, you’ll find someone else doing something “new and innovative” in their day, as well. 

"Wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured..."

-Image source

One more Chicago-inspired post. 

On Saturday we made the hike out along the Lakefront Trail to the Adler Planetarium (and the best views of the Chicago skyline, by the way.) The weather was turning, there was plenty of spray coming off the seawall, and lots of whitecaps out on the Lake. Having finished Moby Dick  so recently, the scene brought to mind the following passage, where Ishmael tells a group of Peruvian sailors about that special breed of sailor known as a ‘Lakeman.’ (The paragraph breaks are mine- I just put them in where Melville should have:)

“Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla, this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. 

"For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,-Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,- possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes.   

"They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies in the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have yet heard the fleet thundering of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capital of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. 

"Thus gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.”

The Oak Park Pilgrimage that wasn't

Well, the good folks at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park threw me a curveball by taking the day off on Labor Day- so despite my promise from lastweek, I have no report from the Hemingway birthplace and museum to give you. But that small hiccup, in an otherwise fantastic trip to Chicago, just gives me one more reason to return to the Windy City. What a great town.

Now, by way of consolation, here are a few libraries I snapped at the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. The pictures are crappy because  a) they’re taken with my phone, and  b) these intricately hand-crafted “rooms” are not much bigger than a shoebox diorama. But they are amazing. (The fibers you see in the rug below are single threads.)

English library of the Queen Anne period, 1702-1714:

English rotunda and library of the Regerncy period, 1810-20:

French library of the Modern period, 1930s:

And here's one I pulled off the interwebs for scale:

If you're ever at the Art Institute, go see the Seurat and American Gothic and all the other highlights, but by all means, make sure you hit the Thorne Miniatures on the Lower Level. They'll blow your mind.

First Line Friday! 2012 election edition

When I’m not bloviating about books and literature, I’m a pretty hopeless political junky. And with the two major party conventions taking place this week and next, I figured I’d combine those two hobbies for First Line Friday. Today we examine the opening of Mitt Romney’s two books, Turnaround  and No Apology.  Next week we’ll examine the two books penned by President Obama.

In Turnaround,  Romney’s hidden his first line behind a “preface to the paperback edition,” an “introduction and acknowledgements” section, and a prologue. But chapter one kicks off like this:

“In the fall of 1998 I got a call asking whether I would consider taking the helm of the troubled Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Olympic Games. I dismissed the notion out of hand.”

In No Apology,  he begins like this:

“I hate to weed. I’ve hated it ever since my father put me to work weeding the garden at our home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.”

Well, William Faulkner they are not. But since people picking up the books will already be familiar with their premises, those two openings do set an effective hook by making the reader wonder “how are we going to get there from here?” If he didn’t want to take on the Olympics, why did he end up doing it? And what the heck does weeding a garden have to do with American exceptionalism? I haven’t read either book, so I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I would read on.

You?

     

Reading Check-up

So, we’re sitting two-thirds of the way through 2012. It’s time to revisit our reading resolutions. You can find mine here. And here’s what I’ve read so far this year:

1. The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro 
2. A Bell for Adano, John Hersey 
3. Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta 
4. Wasatch, Douglas Thayer 
5. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James 
6. Curtain, Agatha Christie  
7. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust  
8. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte  
9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte   
10. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan 
11. The Vegetable, F. Scott Fitzgerald  
12. The Fifth Column & Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway  
13. The Death of a Disco Dancer, David Clark   
14. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett 
15. The Dead, James Joyce 
16. Blue Nights, Joan Didion
17. Swamplandia, Karen Russell 
18. Silas Marner, George Eliot
19. Home, Toni Morrison
20. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
21. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
22. The Human Comedy, William Saroyan
23. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
24. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides   
25. The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern  
26. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
27. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

And currently vying for attention on my nightstand are:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

That’s 14 women and 15 men (with one gentleman showing up twice). But what really blows me away is that 24 of these authors were brand-spanking new to me. I feel like I’m tearing through new authors like they’re going out of style (some of them are!), and I’m still  only scratching the surface.

But back to my goals. I’m clearly reading more women, I’ve knocked off an Agatha Christie, and all I need to do in the next four months is read a foreign language book in the original. Not too shabby.

What about you? How is your reading year coming along?

What's your white whale?

The white whale from Moby Dick  is one of the great enduring symbols from the world of literature.

For Captain Ahab it represented everything menacing and evil in the world. For others on board the Pequod it illustrated Ahab’s monomaniacal obsession with revenge at the cost of all else. But the white whale has also come to conjure up images of some ultimate dread, of ill-fated unfinished business, and of hopeless, lost causes and predestined disasters.

As readers, we’ve all got a white whale. We’ve all got at least one book that taunts us mercilessly from the shelf- one that has conquered and defeated us, and that hangs ominously over us for years after our failure to read it. As I mentioned in this previous post, the book that became my personal Moby Dick, was none other than Moby Dick  itself. This seems like an appropriate place to leave one of Hollywood’s greatest motivational speeches:

Today, I am proud to say that I have finally defeated my own Moby Dick,  who also happens to be the ‘actual’  Moby Dick.  That’s right, fellow readers, pick your metaphor: I have harpooned the great white whale, exercised the demon, shaken the monkey off my back, and filled El Guapo so full of lead he’ll be using his... well, you get the picture.  

I HAVE READ MOBY DICK!

So what about you? What’s your white whale?

Or, if you’d prefer, what’s your favorite Three Amigos quote?

Vintage Mitchell

One more interesting tidbit from the Margaret Mitchell House:

Long before she was producing Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, young  Margaret Mitchell was naturally producing non-Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. Take, for example, this early, early story- written in her own girlish hand:

In case you can’t read the words through the glare of my cell-phone pictures, here is the full text below:

Two Little People

Two little people live in my backyard. One is named Tommy, and the other, Sarah. Tommy is the boldest and the bravest. Each morning he gets up and salutes Sarah, saying “Come Sarah, the sun has been up an hour you are very sleepy, my dear.” Sarah rubs her eyes. They go together and get breakfast. Sarah is lazy and lets Tommy do the work. She does not even cook her food, but eats it raw.

Every day they have a singing lesson. This is what they sing. “Quack, quack, quack,” for Tommy and Sarah are two ducks.

The End.

Not quite Pulitzer material, I admit. But you can’t help but be moved by the social commentary provided by Sarah’s unwillingness to wake-up, just as the post-bellum South was reticent to wake up to the harsh realities of reconstruction. Or the symbolism of the raw breakfast as a stand-in for man’s unfulfilled potential. Or how the skilled use of onomatopoeia reminds us all that we are all, at center, just brute animals striving for an unattainable transcendence.

How a pre-teen Mitchell accomplishes all that in just 10 or 11 sentences is downright remarkable, no?

Literary Atlanta

My little brother was in town this weekend, rounding out the list of Atlanta attractions he’s visited on previous trips. Our wanderings took us to the Oakland cemetery, where Margaret Mitchell is buried, and then to the Margaret Mitchell house downtown.

Now, the Margaret Mitchell House is a bit of a misnomer. It really should be called the Margaret Mitchell one-bedroom apartment, because that’s all the living space she took up in the grand three-story building that now bears her name. 

But hey, false advertising seems to have been a running theme in Ms. Mitchell’s life. She found herself engaged to five different men, falsified her resume to gain employment at the Atlanta Journal, and when talking about her masterpiece, Gone With the Wind,  tossed off this classic line: “In a weak moment I have written a book-” as if the muse attacked her one long weekend and she dashed the thing off on a whim. That weak moment actually lasted her a good ten years from start to finish.

Oh well, if you get caught up in Mitchell-mania, stop on in. It’s worth your time. You’ll see the apartment she referred to as “the Dump,” you’ll see the front door of the Tara movie set, and you’ll learn a thing or two you might not have known otherwise. (Fun fact, Scarlet was originally named Pansy O’Hara, and she lived not at Tara, but at Fontenoy Hall. Also, if Margaret Mitchell had her way, Rhett Butler would have been played not by Clark Gable, but… wait for it… Basil Rathbone. What a name!!)

Next up? The Ernest Hemingway museum in Oak Park, Illinois, which I’ll visit this coming weekend.

Some reasons to ruin a book

Looking for a crafty project to fill up your Saturday? Look no further. READTHE100 forwarded us this link for bookish DIY types. Take a look:

(Some of you may remember this post from last year, where I lamented the fact that my wife doesn’t often follow this blog, and therefore wouldn’t know that a hollow book safe would be a pretty rad Christmas gift for yours truly. Turns out she does check in every now and again, and painstakingly fulfilled my wish with one of these: