First Line Friday: Axioms

Last week we covered first lines that set settings. This week, we pay tribute to the axiomatic opening. Here’s a well-known example that many will recognize:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Want another? How about this one- equally as famous as the first:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

These adages can be sarcastic, like Austen’s, or introduce a kind of a farcical situation, like Tolstoy’s. Or they can be whistful observations::

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.” (Zora Neals Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God )

And even wisecracking laments:

“The moment one learns English, complications set in.” (Felipe Alfau’s  Chromos)

You could almost say that The Great Gatsby   begins with an aphorism, too: “…my father gave me some advice…” (Though the adage is only teed up in the first line, and it’s the second line that delivers the punch of wisdom.) Still, it gives the reader a filter through which they are to understand the entire book.

Anyway, I think axiomatic openings are pretty effective. They push you to start asking questions immediately. Do I agree with that axiom? Is it bunk? Why does the narrator lead off with it? What kind of story is going to prove that statement out? And on and on.

Do you agree? Disagree? (As the old adage says, you cannot do both.)

Speed Reviewing

I’m more than a little behind in penning reviews of my recent literary conquests. Hopefully I can get through the backlog before I forget the books completely. Until then, however, I thought it might be fun to play around with a more forgiving form of criticism: the one line review. Here are a handful of so-called classics, summed up in a single sentence:

• Middlesex: My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets 5-alpha reductase deficiency

• Silas Marner, because anti-social cataleptic weavers make good fathers, too.

• Jane Eyre: Finally, a romance for the homely.

• Wuthering Heights: reality TV before TV ever existed.

• Crime and Punishment: it’s Lizzy Borden meets Colombo- in St. Petersburg!

• As I Lay Dying: when your mom dies you should probably cut your dad some slack- unless he’s a complete sumbitch

• The Turn of the Screw: It’s what the Sixth Sense would have been if Bruce Willis were a Victorian era governess.

• Grapes of Wrath, because even though your life might swing between bad and awful, at least you’re not suckling emaciated homeless strangers yet.

Got any others to add?

First Ads for Famous Books

Life’s been so busy since my July vacation that I’ve basically stopped checking in on most of the literary blogs I follow- so my apologies if you’ve seen this elsewhere- but I saw this post over at BrainPickings and thought it was worth sharing: The first ads for famous books.

For example, you've got Toni Morrison rocking a Roberta Flack afro:

Truman Capote looking like he’s pushing barbiturates, instead of books: (I’m pretty sure that pic was snapped in an opium den)

And Kurt Vonnegut pulling off the ‘Get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids’ face better than most men 40 years his senior.

Many more here. Enjoy.

Author Look-Alikes: Round 6

The almond-shaped eyes with the little crease underneath, the rounded eyebrows and flawless complexion… they might hail from geographical antipodes, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a little Ashley Judd in Jhumpa Lahiri:

And how about a very young Margaret Mitchell? With those cheekbones and that ultra-serious gaze, she reminds me more than a little of Olivia Wilde:

Another certified looker in her youth, Pearl Buck matured into an amiable Aunt Bee type in her later years:

Now, this kind of match is rare. Look at the hairline, the eyebrows, the ears, the nose, the heavy eyelids- heck, look at everything but that beard and tell me Herman Melville and Hugh Grant aren’t one and the same:

Finally, we have to deal with David Foster Wallace and his persistent bandana at some point. Take away the scruff, the half-smirk, the glasses and about thirty years, and DFW could be reborn as Danny Laruso, AKA the Karate Kid:

Sweep the leg? I don't think so.

Haiku-ption Contest #10

It’s about that time again, don’t you think? Throw your haiku captions in the comments:

Deep-sea diver, posed,

With Simon's roly poly

Little bat-faced girl

First Line Friday: Setting

For the next few First Line Fridays, I thought we’d try something a little different. Rather than giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a particular opening line, it might be interesting to analyze the various types  of first lines that are possible.

One of the most basic things a first line can do is establish setting, so let’s kick this off with a few openings that quite literally “set the stage” for their stories. I find that a lot of authors carry this dramatist’s compulsion, so the examples are pretty plentiful.

Though I’ve never met anyone who’s read it, Edward George Bullward-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford  gives us one of the most commonly quoted (and parodied) opening phrases ever:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

A little hackneyed? Yes. But the “setting setter” isn’t limited to 3^rd rate scribblers. We’ve covered similar lines from Orwell and Hemingway, as well:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” — from Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms

Very simple, but very effective. I love how Orwell absolutely pantses his reader with the clock “striking thirteen,” and I love how Hemingway’s phrase “of that year” makes us feel like we’re in the middle of a fireside chat and he’s about to launch into a story we’ve already asked for.

Here are some others:

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.” —from Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar

“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.” — from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” —from William Gibson’s Neuromancer

So? What say you? Do you like the “setting setter?” Or is it too hokey, too obviously reminding you that you’re being told a story?

Borges Calls Out Kafka

INTERVIEWER:   Readers very often call your stories parables. Do you like that description?

BORGES:   No, no. They're not meant to be parables. I mean if they are parables . . . [long pause] . . . that is, if they are parables, they have happened to be parables, but my intention has never been to write parables.

INTERVIEWER:   Not like Kafka's parables, then?

BORGES:   In the case of Kafka, we know very little. We only know that he was very dissatisfied with his own work. Of course, when he told his friend Max Brod that he wanted his manuscripts to be burned, as Virgil did, I suppose he knew that his friend wouldn't do that. If a man wants to destroy his own work, he throws it into a fire, and there it goes. When he tells a close friend of his, “I want all the manuscripts to be destroyed,” he knows that the friend will never do that, and the friend knows that he knows and that he knows that the other knows that he knows and so on and so forth.

-from The Art of Fiction No. 39 at the Paris Review

Poet's Corner: "Electrocuting an Elephant" by George Bradley

Today’s poem is a little longer than we normally like to feature, but it comes to you with the grainy, century-old footage that inspired it, so I thought it would be worth sharing.

Now, because I’m posting the Youtube video, someone’s going to say that I am condoning the very filming the author calls Edison on the carpet for- but it’s only meant to bring home the bleakness of the poem’s main message.

Electrocuting an Elephant

BY GEORGE BRADLEY

Her handlers, dressed in vests and flannel pants,

   Step forward in the weak winter light  

Leading a behemoth among elephants,  

Topsy, to another exhibition site;

   Caparisoned with leather bridle,  

Six impassive tons of carnival delight  

Shambles on among spectators who sidle

   Nervously off, for the brute has killed  

At least three men, most recently an idle  

Hanger-on at shows, who, given to distilled

   Diversions, fed her a live cigar.

Since become a beast of burden, Topsy thrilled

The crowds in her palmy days, and soon will star  

   Once more, in an electrocution,  

Which incident, though it someday seem bizarre,

Is now a new idea in execution.

Topsy has been fed an unaccustomed treat,  

   A few carrots laced with cyanide,

And copper plates have been fastened to her feet,  

Wired to cables running off on either side;

   She stamps two times in irritation,

Then waits, for elephants, having a thick hide,  

Know how to be patient. The situation

   Seems dreamlike, till someone throws a switch,  

And the huge body shakes for the duration  

Of five or six unending seconds, in which

   Smoke rises and Topsy’s trunk contracts

And twelve thousand mammoth pounds finally pitch  

To earth, as the current breaks and all relax.

   It is a scene shot with shades of grey—

The smoke, the animal, the reported facts—

On a seasonably grey and gloomy day.

Would you care to see any of that again?

   See it as many times as you please,  

For an electrician, Thomas Edison,

Has had a bright idea we call the movies,

   And called on for monitory spark,

Has preserved it all in framed transparencies  

That are clear as day, for all the day is dark.

   You might be amused on second glance

To note the background—it’s an amusement park!—

A site on Coney Island where elephants

   Are being used in the construction,

And where Topsy, through a keeper’s negligence,  

Got loose, causing some property destruction,

   And so is shown to posterity,

A study in images and conduction,  

Sunday, January 4th, 1903.

And here is Edison’s “moving picture” of Topsy's final moments:

Quite sad. Shades of Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant-” or even of Dumbo’s mother, no? 

Another Month in the Can

Well, we’ve knocked off another month, and covered veritable pantloads of authors in the last 30 days (see above.) Here are the five most popular posts from that time period:

• See India! Read a Novel!
• The Travel Narrative: In pictures
• The Quote Board: Books
• It’s all been done before… even the experimental stuff
• The movie was good, but the poem was better

And, as always, some of the most interesting search terms you people used to get here (along with the links to the relevant pages) :

• Smolarski honeymoon trip
• “I heard a great laugh” Kerouac
• Paris in the 2os
• Behind the wheel of a war ambulance
• Guy Montag
• Max Headroom
• Kurt Vonnegut Infantry
• Assonance Dr. Seuss
• Journal of pediatric endocrinology page 578
• African meadow HD

Thanks for coming around; we hope you keep coming back for more!

How many books do you have left?

I ran across this sobering formula on the blog of horror writer Dan Wells:

The number of books you’ll read before you die = (Y-A) x B x 12, where:

B = the number of books you read in a month 

A = your current age 

Y = your life expectancy

Based on my age, my reading habits, and my life expectancy as a resident of Georgia, the math for me looks like this: (77.1-34.9) x 2.86 X 12 = 1,448

That’s less than 1,500 books! Maybe, maybe  if I really blow it out in my retirement- or if I live into my nineties like three of my grandparents- I can push that number north of 2,000. But still! What a paltry pile of prose I have left! If there’s ever been a better argument for why you shouldn’t fill your time reading crap, I haven’t heard it. Thoreau said it best:

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

Improve yourselves, people! Improve your shelves!  J

How many books do you have left? And will you let it affect your next book choice?