Quote of the day: And Kicking off George Bush's sorta sad week

(Updated below)

Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.

- That's the first sentence of the preface to Jean Edward Smith’s biography of George W. Bush. After this, one supposes, Smith really settles down to rendering a judgment on Bush's presidency. (Hat-tip to Thomas Mallon's review in The New Yorker.)

Smith's line is also being added to my collection of great opening sentences (non-fiction division).

Poor Dubya hasn't been having a very good week, has he? Smith's bio came out on Monday the 4th. Then, on Wednesday, the day Bush turned 70 – a day when more reflective people than Dubya (which is to say, almost anyone) might want to pause and consider how they've spent their time on this old world – the Chilcot Report dropped, providing a withering assessment of the British role in the Iraq War (pdf).

The Chilcot Report mainly takes the actions of the Blair government to task, leaving to the US the task of producing a similar official accounting of the mendacity, incompetence, and barefaced illegality by the Bush Administration before, during, and after the war. (Not gonna happen, I'm afraid.)

I should note that the Report has a pretty pedestrian first sentence: "We were appointed to consider the UK’s policy on Iraq from 2001 to 2009, and to identify lessons for the future." Less of a Jane Austen, as these things go, more of a Richard Nixon. So it wasn't placed in competition with other worthy opening lines. But you don't have to read far into the executive summary to get to the zingers – and they seem all the more harsh to my American ear by their understatedness.

(Update:  And here's the last sentence of Smith's biography. Serves me right for waiting until the book comes to my local library:

Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

“As Gregor Samsa awoke in the recovery room from uneasy dreams . . . "*

So this is happening:

All big ideas start somewhere. With that in mind, undergraduate engineers at the University of Pennsylvania are starting with cockroaches.

They’re experimenting with different ways to control the insect’s legs after they’ve been amputated. Think voice commands and brain waves.

It’s the type of technology shaping the next generation of human prostheses, and the assignment gives students the chance to channel their inner Dr. Frankenstein.

*It's the opening of my forthcoming existentialist/dystopian/sci-fi novel, tenatively titled The Transformer.  Contact my agent to negotiate film rights.

Great opening sentences: Hard-boiled edition

A friend recently got me started reading the novels of Roger Zelazny, who's been in the business since the Sixties. He started me out with the full collection of Amber novels, and he followed it up with A Night In The Lonesome October. I liked the Amber chronicles, although my favorite was the first of the ten (!) books, partly because of its noir – even Marlowe-esque – action and tone (which were quickly lost once it became a still-enjoyable, but no longer the same, dimension-shifting story of sword and magic). Lonesome October, on the other hand, will probably become my annual Halloween read. It's that good.

Zelazny also wrote the dreadful Damnation Alley early in his career (it was made into the barely-recognizable yet somehow even more dreadful movie of the same name starring Jan Michael Vincent and George Peppard).

But I tell you all that to tell you this: I'm currently reading Zelazny's The Dead Man's Brother, an ultrapulp mystery thriller written in 1971 but for whatever reason not published until 2009 (the fact that Zelazny died in 1995 could be a factor: Harper Lee, pick up the white courtesy phone; Harper Lee, the white courtesy phone, please).

And it begins with this sentence:

I decided to let him lie there, since he was not likely to bother anyone, and I went to the kitchen to make coffee.

As long-time readers know, I curate a small collection of classic first sentences, and this just made the list. So I figure that, however guilty, this will be a pleasure.

In fact, I think I'll put it in a display next to this little treasure.

Sunday morning toons: #Benghazi is the new Belgium

Belgium is the rudest word in the Universe, yet by a strange coincidence, also the name of a country on Earth. The word is completely banned in all parts of the Galaxy, except in one part, where they don't know what it means, and in serious screenplays.

Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe

and Everything (US edition)

The GOP really only needs two things: (1) Any sort of policy platform containing anything other than tax cuts that they might actually be for, and (2) any remotely-viable presidential candidate for 2016. Really, that's all.

Recognizing their embarrassing lack of either of these, this week they've made a virtue out of necessity by going all-in on ginning up some new controversy in the continuing nothingburger that is Benghazi!, hoping that they can thereby pre-impeach Hillary Clinton even before she officially declares her candidacy. Linguistic experts predict that, by the end of June, right-wing pundits and political figures will have generated more distinct, individual sentences containing the words "Hillary" and "Benghazi" than any other paired words in the history of the English language.

Meanwhile, Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling, and Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma can go Belgium themselves.

Today's toons were selected from among the most remarkable, certainly the most successful political cartoons ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, including McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of hoopy goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Pat Oliphant, Joel Pett, Rob Rogers, Ben Sargent, Dan Wasserman, Signe Wilkinson, Steve Sack, Matt Wuerker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Ted Rall.

p3 Legion of Merit: Bill Day.

p3 Iron Cross: Mike Keefe.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium (tie): Monte Wolverton and John Cole.

p3 World Toon Review: Petar Pismestrovic (Austria), Enrico Bertuccioli (Italy), and Ramses Morales Izquierdo (Cuba).

Congratulations to p3 regulars Jen Sorenson, winner of the Herblock Prize for excellence in political cartooning (and congrats to Clay Bennett, also a p3 fave, for being named finalist)!

Ann Telnaes shares a little May Day irony.

Mark Fiore wants you to relax and imagine a terrifying world. Actually, there's not much imagining involved.

Taiwan's Next Media Animation has a tragic story that doesn't make me feel as sad as I probably should. (Hint: 2014 Darwin Award sweeps!)

Tom Tomorrow confirms your worst fears.

Keith Knight examines the collective bargaining issue that could bring pro sports to its knees.

Tom the Dancing Bug presents: Bob figures it out. (Admit it: You do this kind of thing too.)

Red Meat's Bug-Eyed Earl is cultivating his powers of observation.

The Comic Strip Curmudgeon celebrates a totally relatable comic that encapsulates the kind of thing that happens to real people all the time!

Comic Strip of the Day begins a review of death-penalty toons from this week with the best opening sentence I've read in a good while. And I flatter myself that I'm at least a minor authority on the subject.

Where's the village smithy today, since they took the hosses away? That's the title tune to "Shoein' Hosses," a 1934 Popeye short directed by Dave Fleischer and animated by Willard Bowsky and Dave Tendlar (both uncredited). Also uncredited: Musical director Sammy Timberg (who may have written the title tune just for this film, since I can't find any other trace of it), Billy Costello (Popeye), Mae Questel (The Slender One), and William Pennell (Bluto, also singing the title tune). I'm not sure who does the voice for Wimpy's brief appearance. Bluto's theme is the 19th-century sea shanty "Blow the Man Down," and the horses' theme is, of course, "The Old Grey Mare." Odd that the tune for Popeye's beat-down immediately before the spinach appears is obviously meant to suggest "The Anvil Chorus" – but it isn't. And the chain-and-anchor-forging tune is Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever." (Nothing's cheaper than public domain!) Why did Olive fire Wimpy, who only somewhat wrecked the smithy, but hire Popeye, who (with Bluto's help) completely trashed the place and left her pinned to the wall? And is there a fitness message in the juxtaposition of Popeye singing that "the way to stay wealthy is always stay healthy" with Bluto's original appearance walking out of a bar smoking a stogie? I didn't think so, either. A later, colorized version of "Shoein' Hosses" was made, but we're bringing you the original in glorious black and white.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

The Big, And Getting Bigger Since We Welcomed Back The Departed, Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman knows a pathetic cry for help when he hears one.

Possibly-ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen takes us back to the fundamentals.

Matt Bors reveals the mistake that broke up the perfect friendship.

Jesse Springer is about to see one of his favorite targets flushed.

Test your toon captioning mojo at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

First lines as rap, Can’t you hear that*

Our love of opening sentences in literature around here at p3 is a matter of record.

But this kind of takes it to the next level: 18 famous literary first lines paired with rap lyrics, accomplished with the help of a rap lyric rhyming site. (Of course there is such a thing! Why would there not be such a thing?)

I feel it doesn't manage to hurt the literature, although I'm not sure it really helps the rap, either. See what you think.  

*Rhyme selected by RapPad from Justin Timberlake's History of Rap 3. You're welcome.

Graham Greene, Harry, and the frozen February ground

As regular p3 readers know, over the years I've been curating a modest collection of great opening sentences.

This isn't, strictly speaking, the first sentence of Graham Greene's screenplay for The Third Man, nor is it the first sentence of the novel he later wrote from the screenplay. But it is the first sentence that got the whole ball rolling. From the author's Preface to the novel:

Most novelists, I suppose, carry round in their heads or in their notebooks the first ideas for stories that have never come to be written. Sometimes one turns them over after many years and thinks regretfully that they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So years back, on the flap of an envelope, I had written an opening paragraph: 'I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.'

Some time later Greene was approached to write a screenplay to follow up on The Fallen Idol, and he returned to Harry. But the producer wanted a story about the four-power occupation of Vienna after WWII, so it wasn't long before the only thing left of Harry was his first name, his unexpected reappearance, and the frozen February ground into which he was supposed to have been lowered.

Greene shared this interesting account of his own inventional process, and why the materials for the novel were hanging around after the screenplay was produced:

To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me to be almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script. One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form. One must have the sense of more material than one needs. The Third Man, therefore, though never intended for publication, had to start as a story before those apparently interminable transformations from one treatment to another.

RIP Ray Bradbury: "There are worse crimes than burning books."

[Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died this week at age 91. The Guardian's obituary called him “peerless,” which is as good a place to begin reckoning our loss as any.

I wrote about Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451 during Banned Book Week in October 2008. A good lead-in to that post (reprinted below) is a Bradbury quote that's making the rounds today: “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” After all, in Bradbury's dystopic portrait of an anti-intellectual world, it was reading that was banned, not books per se. Book-burning wasn't so much an act of government censorship as simply the benign act of eliminating an attractive nuisance.]



I sometimes think Banned Book Week, which comes to an official end today, is like National Secretary's Day: It's a short interval into which we compress our quiet, sheepish appreciation for something indispensable that we should feel grateful for every day of the year.

We're finishing up with a classic from 1953: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. For many, this is the iconic banned book--a banned book about book-banning, or at least book-burning. But Bradbury himself insists--heatedly, at times--that his classic work isn't about government censorship/book-banning at all; it's about how the culture of television destroys the culture of reading and literature. (And that was in 1953!)

One disagrees with the likes of Ray Bradbury at one's peril, but while the author may be the last word on what he intended, he doesn't get the final say on what his book meant.

Of course, most people would certainly agree with Bradbury's point: It doesn't take jack-booted agents of the state to curb our access to ideas; sometimes it can happen simply because we're too busy being entertained to take an interest. In his late-80's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that we spent much of the 20th Century worrying that the oppression of Big Brother in 1984 might be our future, when all along we should have been worrying about sleepwalking into the narcotized emptiness of Huxley's Brave New World. After all, the governor of Alaska can't name a book or magazine she reads, but she would never think of herself as uninformed. Sometimes the agents of control wear Tina Fey glasses and wink at the camera.

In fact, here's a painful little bit of irony: Out of curiosity, I plugged the phrase "Why is Fahrenheit 451 banned?" into Ask.com. The top-ranked answer, from a site called WikiAnswers, was this:

Fahrenheit 451 was banned due to its controversial manner and questionable themes.

And that's it. That's the entire answer. Truly, those who want to keep unfettered access to ideas have at least as much to fear from faceless bureaucrats as from book-burning "firemen."

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fist, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.

He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.

Don't stop here.

As I mentioned a few days ago in the comments, I mostly picked war horses from a generation or two (or more) ago for this celebration, in part to make the point that what once was forbidden often winds up on standard reading lists. But there are books out there that need a friend today--long before Steven Spielberg gets around to optioning the movie rights. p3 friend Batocchio lists many more that have found their way onto the roster of "challenged" books.

Read a banned book.

And thank a librarian.

Saturday morning tunes: Morning, doorway, policeman, name

I'm on record as insisting that the greatest single line in American popular music is “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

But if we throw open the gates and invite British rock in as well, this song becomes an instant finalist, especially since its really great line is also its first line.

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here. 

Note: This video has depictions of explicit silliness in it, and may not be suitable for all viewers.

Sunday morning toons: The dog barks, the caravan moves on . . . to New Hampshire

(Update: The Red Meat link is fixed. Thanks, Ryan.)

Today's selections have been lovingly hand-selected from the week's political cartoon pages at Slate, Time, Mario Piperni, About.com, and Daryl Cagle:

p3 Picks of the Week:   Mike Luckovich, Steve Sack, Dan Wasserman, Rick McKee, Bruce Plante, Signe Wilkinson, Tom Toles, Jeff Danziger, Bill Day, Adam Zyglis, John Cole, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Legion of Honor: Glenn McCoy. 

p3 Best of Show: Clay Bennett.

p3 Certificate of Appreciation for Reminding Us There's Anything Else Going On Besides the GOP Primaries: Jim Morin. 

p3 World Toon Review: Cam Cardow (Canada), Petar Pismestrovic (Austria), Rachel Gold (Austria), and Ingrid Rice (Canada).


Ann Telnaes looks at one possible future for the GOP.


Mark Fiore reveals the horrible weapon deployed 500 feet below an Iowa silo. Flannel visible! Flannel visible!


Tom Tomorrow celebrates a group we don't get to hear enough of: sensible thinkers.


One from the vaults: The K Chronicles dedicates this strip to that one black kid.


Tom the Dancing Bug presents the latest edition of Super-Fun-Pak Comix! Note that “Incomprehensible Suffering Funnies” comes perilously close to duplicating the joke from the cover of the National Lampoon's October 1973 “Banana” issue, but at the last minute rescues itself.


Comic Riffs observes the passing of cartoon artist Ronald Searle. (As it turns out, I own the Tom Lehrer sheet music described in the opening paragraphs. It's from a Broadway revue of his music called Tomfoolery, and the illustrations are indeed wonderful.)


Red Meat's Milkman Dan either narrowly averts a cataclysmic temporal paradox, or he doesn't.


The Comic Curmudgeon has, without a doubt, the funniest one-sentence take on an Archie strip that I've ever seen.


And speaking of Archie: Why is the ACLU paying attention to the adventure of the Riverdale gang? Funny you should ask: Wedding bells are ringing this month.

So what’s the big deal? And, as we are always asked by outraged Facebook fans when we write about pop culture, why does the ACLU care/don’t you have bigger fish to fry?

For this comic book fan, the big deal is seeing a same-sex, (interracial!) loving relationship portrayed in Riverdale. LGBT relationships in Gotham, or discussed in the politically liberal living rooms and offices of Doonesbury, sure that’s what you may expect. But Riverdale, and the wider Archie universe have long stood for the mega-wholesome ideal of the American Midwest of yesteryear — a place where writers and artists have long told us there is no room for diversity, regardless of what the truth may be.

Archie first appeared in 1941, and since then has served as the archetype for the typical, small-town American kid. In fact it wasn’t so long ago, 2003 to be exact, that Archie Comics was threatening to sue an Atlanta theater company for a piece they were set to perform depicting Archie coming out of the closet because they thought “if Archie was portrayed as being gay, that would dilute and tarnish his image.”

Best p3 wishes to the adorable couple.


There's nothing in the world that can compare with a hamburger, juicy and rare: No sign of Olive in this 1936 Popeye, “What -- No Spinach?” directed by Dave Fleischer and animated by Seymour Kneitel and Roland Crandall, but fans of J. Wellington Wimpy will get to see one of the rare stories where their hero triumphs.  I had forgotten that this short even existed -- until Wimpy began his song, and I realized I still remembered the whole thing, word for word. Not sure how I feel about that.

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here.

The p3 Big Oregon Toon Block:

Jack Ohman presents the wistful side of Newt. (Of course, Newt is so last-week, but he's fundamentally funnier than either Romney or Santorum. Yes -- even Santorum!

Matt Bors celebrates the return of man who knows his way around a coal chute.

Jesse Springer notes that everyone can breath a little easier now that UO has won its first Rose Bowl since 1917.

Test your toon-captioning kung fu at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.)

Quote of the day: For the love of first sentences

It's been some time since I've posted anything about my one of my minor passions, the love of a good first sentence. I've said before that the search for a good closing sentence may blind you to the fact that you've already written it.

Here, via Bryan Garner (not to be confused with Brian Gardner), is advice that feels somewhat familiar:

The best practical advice that can be given [on how to frame the opening sentences] is don't start. That is, don't start anywhere in particular. Begin at the end, begin in the middle, but begin. If you like you can fool yourself by pretending that the start you make isn't really the beginning and that you are going to write it all over again. Pretend that what you write is just a note, a fragment, a nothing. Only get started.

Stephen Leacock, How to Write 27 (1943).

Best first sentences: Terry Pratchett leaps over the fence and onto the track

Fine. I blame myself for being so distanced from delightful writing like this.

By way of background, I later railed (safely in absentia) against my high school and undergraduate literature teachers for never giving me a clue about the likes of Jane Austen -- although it's not like I gave even the very best of them anything that could reasonably be called a sporting chance or even a conversational opening.

Ahem.

Pressing ahead: I tip my pointy hat with a scorched brim and the iffily-spelled word "WIZZARD" embroidered around the crown to Lance Mannion et fili whose good judgment got me into the game. So far I've listened to the unabridged audiobooks of Interesting Times and The Last Hero. I prefer IT, partly because of the audiobook reader and partly because Rincewind is great fun,

But as far as opening sentences go, those stories are but neverwozzers next to Night Watch:

Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it

Now seriously: Can a tee shot like that go anywhere but high and 375 yard down range?

And, not surprisingly once you get the hang of it all, Sam Vimes seems to be one of the good ones. Great fun.

Great opening lines in literature (special "severed body parts" edition)

I find I have to stretch the concept of "greatness" a bit for this one, but it's a sentence that it's certainly tough to read without having a strong sense that here is a short story that is definitely going somewhere.

It's the opening sentence from "The Head" (the title's another pretty conspicuous signal, right there), by Manuel Komroff, reprinted in The Third Omnibus of Crime, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (1935).

On the same day that Handsome Dan shot the seargeant of detectives, the newspapers announced that some Russian scientists had made a wonderful discovery.

(The Third Omnibus is devilishly hard to track down online. I have a fairly decent copy that I found in a little bookshop in Multnomah Village about 15 years ago. Here's a summary, including a microreview of the Komroff story.)

The Omnibus of Crime (also edited by Sayers, creator of Lord Peter Wimsey), was published in 1929, at a time when the Golden Age of mystery writing was in full flower, but it found itself in much the same self-conscious position as hip-hop music before MTV finally launched "Yo! MTV Raps" around 1990: It was hugely popular commercially, but still struggling to prove that it was a legitimate artistic form. The first Omnibus establishes its subject's pedigree by tracing its literary descent from the equivalent of the Flood: the short mystery stories by Edgar Alan Poe, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," written some 80 years earlier. The first Omnibus struggles to set forth the respectable characteristics of the genre, including the all-important principle of Fair Play.

By the time of the Third Omnibus, only six years later, the biggest issue facing Sayers appeared to be differentiating the mystery story from the horror story (hence the presence of odd bits like "The Head" in that volume.)

And there things stood for some time, even though Dashiel Hammett had published The Maltese Falcon in that interval. (One likes to imagine, on the day that Falcon appeared in print on the other side of the Atlantic, Ms. Sayers writing in her diary, "Nothing of interest happened today.")

Raymond Chandler's magnificent The Simple Art of Murder (written in 1944, republished in 1950) was the Declaration of Independence for that uniquely-American creation, the hard-boiled detective. Chandler provided the rationale for separating the detective story from its older, more genteel British cousin, the mystery story, and instigated his readers to chuck overboard all those train schedules, exotic poisons and candles guttered on the side closest to the open window. The emphasis would henceforth be, instead, on the pleasures of the gun, the bourbon, the femme fatale, and -- O, this above all -- the mean streets.

Opening sentences: Conservative prose of the future

[Updated below.]


Item 1:

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog meditates on an ugly, ugly possibility: Jonah "Doughy Pantload" Goldberg, legacy conservative blogger and author of the incoherent-from-the-title-onward Liberal Fascism, just landed a $1 million advance to write a book whose opening sentence might be something very close to this:

One of the most important points of this column over the years -- other than my belly, my dog, fair Jessica, my need for a raise, the fact that I have the upper-body strength of an eight-year-old girl and the lung capacity of a Polish whoopee cushion -- is my aversion to cliched thinking.

Even worse, that $1 million advance isn't from Republican vanity publisher Regnery. It's from the same publishing house that gives the world The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Candide. (True, publishing is a business where, even on the best of days, the high-minded and the low-brow have to sit elbow-to-elbow at the lunch counter, but surely there's some limit to this sort of thing.)


Item 2:

Strictly speaking, this is about sentences, but not necessarily opening sentences. Slate recently marked the publication of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue (which I had, to my horror, for weeks been confusing with "Going Commando") by inviting its readers to submit sentences to its Write Like Sarah Palin Contest. The results can be found here.

Many of the finalists resort to the same formula that has overtaken the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, to its detriment, in recent years. They are over-long, studded with slightly odd but concrete references, leading up to a teeth-rattling non sequitur in the last phrase. And they don't sound much like Palin. unless every slightly-dotty run-on utterance sounds the same to you. Still there are some funny moments in which you can almost hear Palin's one-in-a-million voice. Worth a click.


Item 3:

Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with first sentences or conservatives. (You got a problem with that?) The American Book Review has compiled their list of 100 best last lines from novels. (Fittingly, it's in pdf format--you don't make it to the last sentence of a novel without at least a little suffering.) The choices and rankings are second-guessed in the comments at Tbogg and Yglesias, among many other places.

No such list is complete if it doesn't include this:

"Yes," he said, and shivered. "Well, send her in."

I know, it's two sentences, but they bent the rules for Joyce, so they can certainly do it for Hammett. Although, as one of Tbogg's commenters suggested, ABR's list carries the whiff of literary snobbery, which likely didn't work to Hammett's advantage.


[Update: Item 4 (via Batocchio):

Moving somewhat back toward our opening theme again, here's the ABR's 100 best first lines from novels. On the whole, this list was less surprising, less delightful, and more baffling for me than their 100 last lines list, above. I suspect many these items made the list not because they were "best first lines," but rather because they were the first lines of a book someone on the nominating committee found especially memorable. Re-reading the opening line kick-started all the feelings that the book still offered up. By that criterion, my list might well begin with this:

I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning.

Make of that what you will.]

Sanford's opening sentence Fail

I'm a fan of good opening sentences, which is why this won't be added to the p3 collection anytime soon:

In my experience, people who've read Ayn Rand's books either love them or hate them. I'm one of the few who fall somewhere in between.

Assuming the author means what he's saying, that should read:

In my experience, people who've read Ayn Rand's books either fall into one of two categories, or they don't.

Of course, given that the author is SC Governor (for now) Mark Sanford, a man with a proven inability to distinguish "Appalachian Trail" from "Argentina," perhaps that's an assumption we shouldn't make.

(Hat tip to Charles Pierce, who raises the perfectly valid question: Why is Newsweek helping Sanford revive--or at least prolong--his dwindling political fortunes by publishing one of his high school book reports?)

Great opening sentences: Bay State edition

(Update 11/11/11: "Part the Third" link is fixed.)

Here are two topics we haven't mentioned much around here for a while: Charlie Pierce and great opening sentences (for example, here, here, here, here, and here--and, of course, here and here. Oh, for pity's sake--life's too short. Just go here.)

I'm happy to report that we have an item this morning combining both. Scroll down to Part the Third, in which Pierce celebrates "the best opening line of any novel ever written about Massachusetts, Moby Dick included."

Bulwer-Lytton time

Little known fact: Originally, the popular cola was called "Nathaniel Armpriester Lethbridge-Stewart Pepper, Doctor of Humane Letters." Didn't sell worth a lick until they changed it to "Dr Pepper" (no period after the abbreviation. Look it up.) Simpler is usually better. The deft, quick stroke usually connects better than the drunken roundhouse.

I mention that because the organizers of the Bulwer-Lytton contest have announced this year's winners.

I've already explained why I think this exercise probably does a disservice to Bulwer-Lytton. I should add that I think it probably puts parody in a bad light, too. After you've read the first two or three B-L winners, there's not much surprise (and hence, very little humor) to them--not unlike the experience of watching Leno do his tired "Jay Walking" segments, I suppose.

If all you want is a passage that rambles on to an abrupt and preposterous conclusion--well, frankly, we're already paying someone $400,000 per year, plus benefits, to crank those out on a regular basis. What, really, is the difference between these two quotes, other than that one is the work of a talented amateur and the other fell out of the mouth of the highest-paid public official in the country?

She looked at her hands and saw the desiccated skin hanging in Shar-Pei wrinkles, confetti-like freckles, and those dry, dry cuticles--even her "Fatale Crimson" nail color had faded in the relentless sun to the color of old sirloin--and she vowed if she ever got out of the Sahara alive, she'd never buy polish on sale at Walgreen's again. --Christin Keck, Kent, OH

"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, 2004

That's why I continue to recommend Adam Cadre's Little Lytton contest, which celebrates brevity and at least the faint whiff of literary plausibility over formulaic obviousness. (Of course, having said that, I don't think last year's finalists are as good as the ones from earlier years.)

I mean, consider:

The pain wouldn't stop, and Vern still had three cats left.

It's two years later and I still haven't quite figured what the hell that one means (if he had fewer cats left, would that be good or bad?), but you just gotta know that a novel that starts out like that is going somewhere interesting.

On the other hand, how much farther would you keep reading--even hypothetically--if you'd picked up a novel that began like this:

Christy, lounging in the gondola which slipped smoothly through the enveloping mist had her first inkling that something was afoot as she heard pattering hooves below (for our story is not in Venice but Switzerland with its Provolone and Toblerone) and craning her not unlovely neck she narrowed her eyes at the dozen tiny reindeer, pelting madly down the goat trail.

The editor in me can't resist noting, by the way, that the line would be funnier and more intriguing by the simple substitution of the word "amiss" for "afoot." "Amiss" would raise interesting questions: What about the sound of reindeer hooves, per se, caused Christy's concern? (And we know it was the sound, because she hadn't yet looked up to see the reindeer.) What order was disrupted by the presence of reindeer where goats should be?

Leave "afoot" in the sentence, and the reader is left wondering if the author is saying anything about the reindeer at all, or if the point is simply the play off the proximity of "afoot" and "hooves."

"Amiss" is funny; "afoot" isn't. Of such deft strokes is humor created. So I say, less time spent on rhyming European foodstuffs and more attention to the fundamentals.

Not-so-great first sentences

My principle objection to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is that the finalist entries are always so formulaic and predictable (not to mention the fact that no one remembers why anyone would make fun of B-W's prose anyway):

For years, the winners of the "official" Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have usually written a long, long, self-consciously tedious sentence, with a sudden reversal in the last five words as if the writer simply popped a blood vessel at the wrong moment. They telegraph the joke like a bad prizefighter.

Once you get the gimmick--and it's pretty hard to miss--they stop being amusing, or even interesting.

So while we're on the subject of opening lines that telegraph their joke:

Sometimes you can identify an individual creative voice from nothing more than an opening phrase. A few notes: Ah yes, Beethoven. A well-balanced line: Dickens. Obviously Dickens. A compound, stream of consciousness sentence bristling with obscure-but-not-too-obscure hipster-ironic cultural references: Oh. It's Dennis Miller.*

Consider this recent sample:

Hey, folks. Tonight, we're going to talk about Nancy Pelosi, because the mere thought of the nosy neighbor from Bewitched as third in line to be the leader of the free world has stoked me into a Rain Man-like panic attack.

It's all there: The long sentence rushing to a breathless conclusion; the carefully modulated irony of the references (simply mentioning "Bewitched" would have been too trite, but mentioning the neighbor is clever and arch); the adding of a middle-brow I-paid-more-attention-in-college-than-you references ("third in line to be leader of the free world") to remind you that this is intellectual humor--the works. The familiarity can be as painful as hearing Robin Williams ad-lib "Lo, the moon hangs low like a testicle" again.

And I write this as someone who thought that Dennis Miller was the smartest, funniest thing to come along in quite awhile--back in 1988.

Alas, Miller is one of the unburied casualties of 9/11, the horror of which led him to give up satire for smug playground jeering.

*Acknowledgement to the late lamented Spy Magazine, from whose regular "Review of Reviewers" the general shape of this paragraph is stolen. If they'd wanted to be around to defend their intellectual property rights, they shoulda not gone under.

Great first sentences: Special blogosphere edition

Tbogg nominates this doubtful gem, although like the Bulwer-Lytton sentence that started it all, the example Tbogg cites is really two-part: A shorter tee-up, and a longer, more complicated follow-up.

Jonah Goldberg has lost his faith, not in God, but in what freedom can bring to a free Iraq and ultimately a more free Middle East. Nothing else is going to eventually lance the festering boil which is radical Islam.

Yes, I know it's hard. I know more people will die. And I know it's easy for me to say because I'm not one of them. But I also know how easy it is to lose faith when you set out upon a noble cause.

I hope for Jonah's sake he finds comfort while he meditates in the belly of the whale. And I hope one day he is regurgitated on the shores of a more free, more Democratic Iraq.

Bulwer-Lytton pulls it off in a single compound-complex sentence; Tbogg's nominee needs three paragraphs. And, of course, you may think B-W's first phrase was silly (I don't, but there we are), but at least it got to the point without making the reader take multiple runs at it.

Of course, while I might quibble with Tbogg about the merits of his nominee, his title was first-rate. Haven't heard "Technicolor yawn" for years.

Great opening sentences in journalism (continued)

Continuing on this topic, I confess with some sheepishness that I neglected to mention what would surely be the crown jewel of anyone's collection of journalistic first-liners:

It wasn't that agricultural student but it was another a whole lot like him who decided to take up journalism, possibly on the ground that when farming went to hell he could fall bake on newspaper work. He didn't realize, of course, that that would be very much like falling back full-length on a kit on carpenter's tools. Haskins didn't seem cut out for journalism, being too embarrassed to talk to anybody and unable to use a typewriter, but the editor of the college paper assigned him to the cow barns, the sheep house, the horse pavilion, and the animal husbandry department generally. This was a genuinely big "beat," for it took up five times as much ground and got ten times as great a legislative appropriation as the College of Liberal Arts. The agricultural student knew animals, but nevertheless his stories were dull and colorlessly written. He took all afternoon on each one of them, on account of having to hunt for each letter on the typewriter. Once in a while he had to ask somebody to help him hunt. "C" and "L", in particular, were hard letters for him to find. His editor finally got pretty much annoyed at the farmer-journalist because his pieces were so uninteresting. "See here, Haskins," he snapped at him one day, "why is it we never have anything hot from you on the horse pavilion? Here we have two hundred head of horses on this campus--more than any other university in the Western Conference except Purdue--and yet you never get any real low down on them. Now shoot over to the horse barns and dig up something lively." Haskins shambled out and came back in about an hour; he said something. "Well, start it off snappily," said the editor. "Something people will read." Haskins set to work and in a couple of hours brought a sheet of typewritten paper to the desk; it was a two-hundred word story about some disease that had broken out among the horses. Its opening sentence was simple but arresting. It read: "Who has noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the animal husbandry building?"

James Thurber
"University Days" (1933)

Great opening sentences (journalism sub-catetory)

Regular p3 readers know I love a good first sentence like a dog loves a bone. In fact, I will, for the first time, reveal here two of Nothstine's Rules for Writing:

1. Write a good first sentence, even if it isn't the first sentence you write, and half your job may well be taken care of.


2. If you're having trouble writing the finish for a piece, re-read the last paragraph you've got; chances are you've already written a good finish.

Charlie Pierce reminds me that I don't always appreciate the juicy opener when it's produced by a journalist. And the examples he selects are damned hard to argue with. Go see.