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 The Fifth Column & Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway  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:

First Line Friday! Police Line-up

We’ve covered some amazing first lines and some others that tend to… fall flat. This raises some questions: Is a first line truly any different than any other line? Does a first line have  to knock you on your butt? Are the first lines of “great” books actually better than those of lesser books?

Let’s put that last question to the test. Our first lines today come to you courtesy of my phone’s camera, and the $0.50 romance bin at my local used bookstore. But here’s the catch. There are also two so-called “classics” mixed in for good measure. Without the crutch of your favorite search engine, can you pick the two classics out of the line-up? Just curious…

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

The Travel Narrative: Amateur Hour

Continuing our theme from yesterday I thought I’d add that my obsession with the travel narrative isn’t solely limited to great works of literature. As I’ve mentioned here, I’m a bit of a blog voyeur. And today I’m sharing a few of my past internet haunts to give you an idea what I’m talking about.

I’ve stumbled on many an expat blog, some great, some dull.  The worst kind are without a doubt the married couples- burned out consultants with money burning a hole in their pockets- who vow to take a year or two off to “recharge,” but who actually just give off an air of wanting to make their friends and families jealous. Boooor-ing. 

For some reason, the ones that really seem to hold my interest are the blogs of artists living abroad. Sadly, the lifespan of blogs both good and bad, are sometimes shorter than we’d like them to be. (I write that sentence… on a blog. Irony? Or foreshadowing?!!) Most of these have petered out, or have found new homes on Tumblr, but if you’re anything like I am you might just enjoy browsing the archives.

• Jed Sundwall was a friend of some friends. On his blog I had Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brazil and Argentina all at my fingertips. He’s still churning out great material on Tumblr, but you can visit his archives here for a look at his days abroad. It’s no exaggeration to say that everything I know about the Phrygian cap, I learned from Jed. 

• When I was planning my own trip to Buenos Aires, I happened upon Jimmy Danko, a mohawked expat artist who has since returned home to L.A. But watching him whip up some art or repurposingold Subte passes never gets old. Oh, he's still on Tumblr, too. 

• Camille Acey’s Adventuresin Wheelville will show you what it’s like to be black, female and foreign in Slovenia. Though my own wife is Slovene, she’s never introduced me to the glories of Slovene rap. 

• Camille’s blog roll led me to Madame K’s My So Called Life in France. From what I can tell she lives in Metz, which is sort of like the armpit of France, but she creates cool stuff and eats really well. 

• Others examples can be found at Vagablogging.net. They feature case studies on the vagabonding lifestyle and share other helpful tips for those who want to head out into the unknown on their own. Check them all out.

The Travel Narrative

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Blue Highways  by William Least Heat Moon, a book that was recommended to me 10 years ago in Cuszco, Peru and which has been nagging to be read on and off ever since. Next to it on my nightstand sits Into Thin Air   by Jon Krakauer, a first-hand account of the Everest disaster of 1996. Meanwhile, on my way to and from work I have been enthralled by Melville’s Moby Dick,  a book that nearly circumnavigates the globe before its finish. 

My favorite book so far this year might just well be Kerouac’s On the Road,  and my favorite author of all time, as any regular readers have probably deduced by now, is Ernest Hemingway- chronicler of European wars, African safaris and Cuban boatmen. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it’s becoming crystal clear now, that I am a hopeless sucker for the travel narrative:

“The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just like us!” or “They’re not like us at all” The traveler’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.”

–Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel.

Anyone else?