April 29, 201214 yr The Guardian gifts us with yet more goals to aspire to (read: reasons to feel inadequate)... http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sfioWFXk6cILR-DQO91AOkg/view.m?id=15&gid=culture/gallery/2012/apr/29/ten-best-first-lines-fiction&cat=culture
April 29, 201214 yr Active Members Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers (1980) “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” Ok, I can not imagine how I could possibly have missed reading this 30 years ago, but, if read it I did, I have so thoroughly forgotten it it that it will probably seem like new the second go around. Thanks, AS, now I have something interesting to put on my Summer reading list. Wonder if it's available on Amazon?
April 30, 201214 yr Author You noticed! ...Isn't everything available on Amazon nowadays? Except, possibly, catamites. Unless they are tagged under some euphemism. Must figure out how to add them to my Recommendations algorithm. To the point, just about any first line by Burgess is a tour de force... "What's it going to be then, eh?" There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. Ok, 2 lines. Or the start of Napoleon Symphony where he miraculously transliterates the opening bars of Beethoven's third -- From bivouac to bivouac to bivouac to bivouac and all the way with torches held aloft... or something like that, and so on. (http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/30/home/burgess-novel.html) Hmm...how hallucinatory would it be to make this summer's project a plow-through of all things Burgess? "...I was cured, all right!"
April 30, 201214 yr Author P.S. Sorry, correction. Meant to say the Napoleon Symphony quotation riffs the opening of the symphony's scherzo movement, not the first movement.
April 30, 201214 yr I can't tell you how many essays written by Asian students I have read recently, that begin "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that...[fill in any generalization you want]." Apparently the English-language cram schools in Seoul/Shanghai/Osaka, etc., teach that this is a surefire opening to any topic.
April 30, 201214 yr Active Members To the point, just about any first line by Burgess is a tour de force..."What's it going to be then, eh?" There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. A tour de force no doubt but I'd hate to have to diagram it in front of a large crowd.
April 30, 201214 yr Active Members I'm working on a bit of fiction myself. "Let's just stay in tonight and enjoy ourselves.", whispered the gerontophilic twink, slipping a blue pill under my tongue and kissing me hard so I couldn't spit it out. Haven't got to the second line yet.
April 30, 201214 yr Author A tour de force no doubt but I'd hate to have to diagram it in front of a large crowd. Beautiful mind! (Your'n. ) Exquisite nugget at heart of the question is how to diagram the relationship between privileged modifier "winter" and those secondary others "flip dark chill." Ah, Anthony! Second in some ways only to the divine Nabokov. ...the tongue taking a trip of three steps to tap at the teeth...
April 30, 201214 yr Author "Let's just stay in tonight and enjoy ourselves.", whispered the gerontophilic twink, slipping a blue pill under my tongue and kissing me hard so I couldn't spit it out. My after-hours-poolhall Irish boy on the DL from his mates. You must know him!
April 30, 201214 yr Active Members My after-hours-poolhall Irish boy on the DL from his mates.You must know him! How very kind of you!
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