Comments on: Favorite First Sentences

By: Bites: Mapping Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, clamping down on the free wi-fi, Akron/Family «

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:48:03 +0000

[...] It seems appropriate to start this off with HTMLGIANT picking “Favorite First Sentences“ [...]

By: Rev

Rev — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:59:09 +0000

“Jack Torrence thought : Officious little prick.”
The Shinning – Stephen King

By: Rev

Rev — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:59:00 +0000

“Jack Torrence thought : Officious little prick.”
The Shinning – Stephen King

By: tom k

tom k — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:29:45 +0000

‘A man called Berg, that changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….’

- Berg, Ann Quin

By: tom k

tom k — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:29:00 +0000

‘A man called Berg, that changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father….’

- Berg, Ann Quin

By: Tristram vs. the critics « Tell Me What To Read

Tristram vs. the critics « Tell Me What To Read — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:52:17 +0000

[...] vs. the critics Jump to Comments If you find the style irritating, Matt Cozart, commenter, who’s apparently reading this simultaneously, although I wouldn’t be surprised if [...]

By: sabealm

sabealm — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:30:01 +0000

‘One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.’ – Marguerite Duras.

‘Call me Ishmael.’

By: sabealm

sabealm — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 22:30:00 +0000

‘One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.’ – Marguerite Duras.

‘Call me Ishmael.’

By: John Madera

John Madera — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:07:05 +0000

Such a great book. I was in a study group looking at this book recently with Burton Pike the translator of the most recent translation, the one put out by Dalkey Archive. I’d read the Mitchell translation already and it was fun to revisit it again.

By: John Madera

John Madera — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:59:27 +0000

This one from Samuel Delany’s DHALGREN is a masterful tribute to Joyce’s own amazing opening loop in FINNEGAN’S WAKE. (You know, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.) Here’s Delany’s: “to wound the autumnal city.” The end of the novel has the beginning of the sentence: “Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond Holland and into the hills, I have come to” Note the stutter when you put the parts together. Simply masterful. You have to read this book!

From Jenny Boully’s impassioned and understatedly erudite prose poem [one love affair]*:
“She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his former lover during one of the very first days of spring, a spring which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way that Chaucer’s spring would never do.” Pick this book up at Tarpaulin Sky and anything else from Boully, for that matter.

From William Gass’s “Order of Insects,” a story Gass, in an issue of the Paris Review, called “the best thing [he] ever wrote.” I’d have to agree:
“We certainly had no complaints about the house after all we had been through in the other place, but we hadn’t lived there very long before I began to notice every morning the bodies of a large black bug spotted about the downstairs carpet; haphazardly, as earth worms must die on the street after a rain; looking when I first saw them like rolls of dark wool or pieces of mud from the children’s shoes, or sometimes, if the drapes were pulled, so like ink stains or deep burns they terrified me, for I had been intimidated by that thick rug very early and the first week had walked over it wishing my bare feet would swallow my shoes.”

From Brian Evenson’s “Wander”:
“And after many days of wandering – days of bitter cold, days in which we wore out what remained of our shoes and then lost toes and then wrapped our feet in rags, days in which we were hard-pressed to decide what wounded and floundering flesh was safe to consume and what must be passed over, days when we passed warily by other tribes of men such as ourselves, days when we were forced to decide whether to haul one another forward or abandon one another along what remained of the roadside – we came at last to a place not utterly undone by devastation.”

From Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel.” I was reminded of this great story by a wonderful article by Grant Munroe at The Rumpus (http://therumpus.net/2009/08/searching-the-library-of-babel/#respond):
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.”