Blogger’s note: What follows is some 1,200 words on writing and reading. Nothing to do with politics at all, nor snark, alas.
So get off here if you’re not of a mind for some of what we would have called in the dead-tree era of magazines a “back-of-the-book” piece. If, on the other hand, y’all like this kind of thing, I’ll post more great sentences/passages with some exegesis…let me know in comments if this is a feature or a bug for Balloon Juice going forward.
Finally — this is part of a temporary redirection of my efforts more generally. I’ve got a month to get out the door a book proposal that’s been languishing for laughably too long. So I’m going to be doing my damndest to avoid all provocation from the usual suspects — I’m looking at you, Ms. MM, Mr. Brooks, Douthat, et too many al. Instead I’ll be spending the next several weeks reading and writing in and around the eighteenth century, and as I find choice tidbits there, (and, as there is nothing new under the sun, I will) I shall be sure to share them with you.
_________________
Too many years ago to count, when I was just starting to think like a writer (instead of thinking of myself as a “writer”), I started to keep a notebook of other people’s sentences.
I remember the first one I listed, because it still seems to me to be as great an opening line as any in the English language. That would be the one Edward Gibbon used to launch The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:*
In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.
O! That Augustan grandeur. The balance of its clauses. Gibbon’s music, too. Speak the line as you read it: it rings.
And, of course, the sense of it, all the enormous structural potential energy bound up in the first words of a story of decline. Gibbon leads us into his story at the point of the action, Rome in unquestioned glory. Bam! Like that, one sentence in, you know where we go from here.
That’s writing.
I lost that notebook, decades, homes, loved ones ago. I’ve written a fair amount since, and I think I’ve gotten better at it over the years — or rather, that I learned to read myself more carefully, and bury more of the dross before it makes me wince in public. (Blogging works against that training, as it happens; speed is not my friend.) And most of all, the crab pincers of everyday existence have hacked my reading time — and much of my writing life — to shreds.
But in the last month or so, from somewhere (I think I know where, actually, and I’ll write about that in one of these posts soon enough) I’ve regained something of the habit of reading like a writer. That is, once again, every day I carve out time to read something really good — and not necessarily words associated with anything I’m working on or teaching. And I’m watching as I go, picking up what the author is doing, what makes the engine go of whatever it is I’ve got in front of me.
When I do I look at lots of things. Structure most of all, for reasons that I think are obvious. (Basically: the task of the writer is to make his or her readers feel compelled to go on as they come to he end of each paragraph/section/chapter — up until they reach an ending arrives that is both satisfying and persuasively entailed by what has passed before. You get there through well-worked out structure.)
Then there’s language, down to the level of word choice, and things like qualities of description, use of metaphor and on and on — all the stuff that, properly stolen from others, can make me a better writer.
But while I’m doing all of that — think of it as the scales and chords I need to practice to maintain my chops as a writer — it’s always the exemplary sentences that leap out at me, that stop those worthy runs through all the sharps and flats. Sentences are what writers make. We use them to do all kinds of other things, but at bottom, our job is to assemble words into those essential, elemental units of meaning. And when they’re beautiful, when they signify, the really good ones teach me so much.
As, for example, this one, the first I pulled out of the mix in this recent return to good writerly habits:
She was bending and speaking English to a middle-aged lady seated at play beside her: but the next instant she returned to her play and showed the full height of a graceful figure, with a face which might possibly be looked at without admiration, but could hardly be passed with indifference.”
That’s from the first page or two of George Eliot’s “Jewish novel” — Daniel Deronda.**
So what first caught my eye/ear there? That would be the way Eliot managed to construct a physical space out of words — and then impose both design and motion upon it. Gwendolen Harleth (to whom we’ve not yet been properly introduced), is “bending”…and then, in an instant returns both to her roulette game and to erect posture, “the full height of a graceful figure.” That’s a delineation of three-dimensional space written by someone who’s looked at a lot of painting. It presents a tableau (Gwendolen bending and speaking to a sitting player beside her…
…and then it animates that set piece in a way that completes the visual description through motion: Gwendolen returns to the game, and through that gesture reveals her carriage, her figure and her complicated beauty. In writing classes we talk all the time about that old (true) cliché, the need to show rather than tell. This is what it looks like, accomplished by one of the greats.
Next, I noticed all the character-work this little string of words manages to do. We know on meeting Gwendolen that she’s a gamester (as Jane Austen might have put it) — not just a watcher of the game, but someone enmeshed in the social web of the play, talking to her anonymous tribal kin within the temporary and artificial village about the tables. Then we get that last piece of not-quite description: a face that we are compelled to imagine, knowing only that it could be lovely — and that it is marked by some quality that arrests attention, and perhaps desire.
That is: Eliot here invites the reader to enter into the space of her novel. We must, constrained by only the merest touch of the author’s authority, construct Gwendolyn’s image. Eliot does not restrict what we may imagine. All she tells us is that as we read, the woman in our head must hold both our attention and an ambivalence of judgment. We know from the start that she is flawed, and likely a danger — to herself, probably, as well as others. She may earn sympathy as well as curiosity; but we will have to read on to find out.
One damn sentence!
Maybe I’m overdoing it here. Certainly, I’ve read the novel before (though, as noted, very long ago), and I know something of what to expect from and for Miss Harleth. But as I opened up the book again just a few days ago, I tell you, this line stopped me in my tracks. The use of just the suggestion of visual representation to orient us to scene, character and plot is the work of a virtuosos. Add to that the marvelously tricky way Eliot co-opts the reader into participating in the moment, and you have a writer’s master class in just fifty-two words.
It’s at moments like these that I truly love my craft, not to mention the company it lets me keep — even if all I can do, as here, is hold that master’s coat.
(Oh, and I suppose if you’ve labored this far, you’ve earned an open thread. Have at it.)
*Properly, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” But I’ve always known it in the other way, so there it is.
**I picked up Daniel Deronda, after a lapse of decades since last I read it stimulated by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blogging on perhaps my favorite novel of all time, Eliot’s Middlemarch. TNC is doing much the same thing I am here, only in greater depth, and engaged with more of the book and Eliot’s technique.
Images: Annibale Caracci, Two Children Teasing a Cat, c. 1590
Caravaggio, The Card Sharps, 1594
JGabriel
Tom Levenson @ Top:
Vote: Feature, Like.
.
JGabriel
Tom Levenson @ Top:
Vote: Feature, Like.
.
JGabriel
Huh, don’t know why FYWP duped my comment, but since that gives me two votes, I’ll just leave it be.
.
Mark B.
I’ve always been partial to the first sentence of J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”
scav
@JGabriel: Vote Early, Vote Often. I Third and Fourth the motion.
rlrr
Oh my — another case of IOKIYAR
Gin & Tonic
Please continue with this, thanks.
MariedeGournay
“Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Still the best opening sentence IMO. And voted up too.
dedc79
It is a great line, but did you enjoy the whole book? I read it not long after Middlemarch (which I loved) but found the Deronda portion of the novel (as opposed to the Gwendolyn portion) to be a bit of a slog. It might be that for a Jew who was evolving into an atheist, there wasn’t much to appreciate in the story of a man evolving into a kind of messianic Jew.
Laura
Yes, please, more and more.
currants
You put me in mind of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art.
andrewsomething
@MariedeGournay:
So much love for that line!
The Bobs
Isn’t Gibbon’s statement about Rome Eurocentric crap? In the second century CE India and China were both more advanced than the Roman empire.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
same shit, different navels?
that is a vote to continue, by the way. the only pretentious ones are those that think there is something more important that should be discussed, here, there, and everywhere.
currants
Also, too: First line that makes me want to throw things that will cause great, loud, crashing and shattering sounds: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
No doubt my dislike of Victorian lit is a hangover from my childhood, where education was seen as wasted on girls (after all, homemaker+wife+mother=woman’s life), and where parents routinely (still) leave everything to the oldest son, and leave the responsibility for making sure that happens to the oldest daughter. Executrix, I believe. A word that has some delicious punning possibilities…but I digress.
Wide Sargasso Sea, on the other hand, is a pleasure not to be missed.
RSA
Marvelous. Keep going.
Your habit reminds me that Roald Dahl (not a great stylist, but a solid writer) kept a notebook of his own sentences, ideas that would eventually be turned into stories. I do the same thing, but it’s a great idea to take note of examples of craft and art in others’ writing.
SIA
No time to read your whole post till later, but (rather appropriately), I quite enjoyed this particular sentence:
I vote regular feature and already have some fine examples in mind. Well done again! Gotta go- crab pincers on my arse….
SIA
@currants: Pride and Prejudice, yes? Miss Austen – my favorite!
Joey Maloney
@MariedeGournay: I have to go with ‘In five years the penis will become obsolete’.
Voted up, also too.
Joey Maloney
Oh, of course, moderated by the pen1s.
woodyNYC
I’m reading Decline and Fall (It’s been taking a while, I can’t say I’ve suspended other reading) and I was really taken with a line Gibbon used to sum up the results of the first Nicean Council:
“Within these limits, the almost invisible and tremulous ball of orthodoxy was allowed securely to vibrate.”
BGinCHI
Tom, I tried to start a wildcat “Tell us the best novel you read in 2011” in a thread the other night, but not too many takers.
I think that kind of thread is a nice addition and gets people talking about books they wouldn’t otherwise read or take a look at.
And with novels there are many ways to miss them, as opposed to TV and films which tend to get lots of exposure.
JGabriel
The Bobs:
I don’t know that they were really more advanced. Peers seems a more accurate description. Rome was the western capitol of a trading system that stretched from London to Eastern China & SE Asia, through Europe, the Middle East, Russian, Central Asia, and India.
Any power imbalances tended to be rectified over time through trade or conquest. So no trading or power center in that system was likely to be much more advanced than the others at any particular time.
.
JGabriel
Edward Gibbons via woodyNYC:
Like a Ben Wa Ball?
.
rlrr
I have Decline and Fall (unabridged and free from Gutenberg) on my Android tablet…
Benjamin Franklin
If you read letters written a hundred years ago you see simple people had, what is now a rare, gift.
The advent of Spellcheck, IM, texting etc,follows decades of neglect in our schools, and written expressionism isn’t getting better. That muscle, like others, atrophies when not in use.
rlrr
@Benjamin Franklin:
Possibly. But could it be that only the good letters have been preserved? It’s kind of like the belief that craftsmanship was so much better in the past because of the quality of old houses and furniture. It’s not so much the better craftsmanship, but the fact the crappy stuff hasn’t survived.
JGabriel
@currants:
A) That’s Jane Austen.
B) It’s pre-Victorian.
C) It’s intended to be ironic and snarky.
I actually share a minor dislike for much Victorian literature — the novel seemed to become stuck and staid in the form of the psychological melodrama and, during that period, lost much of its 18th Century playfulness. But I don’t include Austen with the Victorians.
.
Constance
Thank you. More please.
currants
@SIA: Yes–a favorite of many! And I know, I know–Elizabeth Bennett is the feminist heroine, and Austen’s working against all those awful stereotypes, but still….BLECH.
Dee Loralei
vote to continue. Thanks Tom.
amphodale
This is great. Keep going.
I would like to start reading history again. I’m interested in anything that’s well-told and not particularly ideologically inclined. But I’m not really up on it enough to keep up with TNC and co’s discussions.
Any ideas where I should start?
Benjamin Franklin
@rlrr:
You have a point, but I am referring to corrupted every day speech which translates well when texting, not so much otherwise.
martha
@JGabriel: I think that you hit on something that some people just miss–“old” writers can be snarky too. Snarkiness isn’t a new invention people!!! Good grief (she says, wryly).
And Tom, I vote 20 times YES!
gogol's wife
@currants:
@JGabriel:
As JGabriel says, Jane Austen is not a Victorian, far from it. And she is satirizing the attitude expressed in that sentence, not upholding it (she’s basically ventriloquizing the thoughts of Mrs. Bennet, who can’t express them so elegantly). And she wrote some of the most beautiful sentences ever produced in the English language. Read Mr. Knightley’s admonition to Emma after she insults Miss Bates, for example. People who think Jane Austen is a chick-lit writer, when in fact she is one of the greatest stylists and moralists ever to walk the earth, are idiots. I tell any students who are interested in learning how to write to just read, read, read, ESPECIALLY Jane Austen. Thanks for this post, Mr. Levenson. I adore Daniel Deronda, even the boring bits.
currants
@JGabriel: *grin* Thank you. I understand that (and was wrong to lump her in with Victorians). Still can’t bring myself to look forward to reading the stuff, and can get through the occasional obligation to do so only with time, effort, and the occasional clenched jaw.
Munira
@JGabriel: Feature and like – but then I’m a writer, too.
slag
Thanks for this, Tom! This post actually touches on one of the major problems I had with my own literary education. At some point in the early years, I started to desperately want to learn what made writing “good”. In jr. high and high school we read some “great” authors–Shakespeare, Melville, etc–and maybe followed the reading with a lit theory discussion of some sort. But those discussions never ever touched on what made the writing “good”. It drove me nuts. Just telling me Shakespeare is “great” doesn’t teach me anything. Just making me write a structurally correct sonnet doesn’t help me learn how to write like Shakespeare (should I choose to do so). So, WTF is the point of that shit?
Sometimes, I think kids should be forced to read and discuss “bad” writing along with “good” writing just so they could start to understand the difference.
gogol's wife
@currants:
Since you complain about inheritances going to male heirs, it’s ironic that you hate Pride and Prejudice, in which the heroine is suffering precisely from the fact that her family’s estate is entailed — since there are no sons in the family, it has to go to the nearest male relative, the odious Mr. Collins, so Elizabeth has to consider marrying him. This plot situation has been ripped off recently for the series Downton Abbey, where the heroine Mary is faced with the same dilemma as Elizabeth Bennet.
nancy
I like it, please carry on. I’m looking for more sites where I can read pieces like this. It will be great if one of my favorite places starts offering the kind of writing I’ve been looking for. thanks
oscura
In the words of Oliver Twist,
“Please, sir, I want some more.”
Tom levenson
Dear all,
Thanks for the props. There are a bunch of specifics here to which I should respond, but I’m about to start hiking at th Point Reyes National Seashore, so I’m going to lose signal in 3…2…1. But I’ll try to do so when I return to something a little more responsive than a cell phone keyboard in 8 hours or so.
Cheers!
slag
@gogol’s wife: Agreed. I must have read and heard that sentence hundreds of times, and I still laugh at it. That sentence revels in the only kind of British humor worth reveling in–dry wit.
JGabriel
The first words Tom Levenson ever addressed to me on Balloon Juice were: “That’s just a perfect sentence.”
After reading this essay, I feel completely unworthy of earning such a distinction.
.
eemom
@gogol’s wife:
If you weren’t already a wife, I’d ask you to marry me.
“My playing is no more like hers than a lamp is like sunshine.”
“Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.”
“A fond mother, though the most rapacious of beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant, but she will swallow anything…”
“Sir Thomas was most cordially anxious for the perfection of Mr. Crawford’s character in that point. He wished him to be a model of constancy; and fancied that the best means of effecting it would be by not trying him too long.”
handsmile
@BGinCHI: (#21)
Sorry that I missed that particular thread (would you kindly direct me). I strongly second your remark that “with novels there are many ways to miss them, as opposed to TV and films which tend to get lots of exposure.” For much that reason, I certainly enjoy the occasional threads here in which fiction or non-fiction works are recommended.
My various responses to “best novel read in 2011” would be:
Best new novel: Open City – Teju Cole
Best novel new to me: A Postcard from the Volcano – Lucy Beckett
Best classic novel, first read: The Belly of Paris – Emile Zola
Best classic novel, reread (again): Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
jeffreyw
@oscura: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreyww/5809573358/
Don Elliott
Feature. My wife and I found ourselves with only one iPad and no books on a trip last summer, so I read Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” aloud so we could both enjoy it. We found ourselves repeating more than a few sentences because of the extraordinary imaging they contained. Now this piece is going to force me to go back and re-read the damn thing and copy those sentences into a notebook….,
Hungry Joe
This, from Anne Tyler’s “Earthly Possessions,” doesn’t qualify as a great opening sentence because, dammit, it’s TWO sentences. Still …
“The marriage wasn’t going well and I decided to leave my husband. I went to the bank to get cash for the trip.”
chopper
@Benjamin Franklin:
at least today’s writers dig irony.
slag
@jeffreyw: Ha! We named our first cat after Oliver Twist. We found him flea-ridden in a dumpster, and as soon as he devoured his first bowl of food, his oversized eyes looked up and made that very statement. Poor cat still can’t talk with his voice, but his mannerisms are utterly unambiguous.
JGabriel
Anne Tyler via Hungry Joe:
Please, please tell me the next sentence is: “I had no idea my second cousin Muffy would choose that moment to rob it.”
.
gogol's wife
@eemom:
I love all of these, especially the last one. I just re-read Mansfield Park, inspired by watching the truly horrible film version with Harold Pinter as a demonic Sir Thomas. Had to get the taste out of my mouth.
currants
@gogol’s wife: …or not ironic at all, actually. Likely I wasn’t very clear, but that was my point.
gogol's wife
@currants:
Okay, I guess I gathered that you thought the novel was an unquestioning acceptance of that state of affairs, when in fact it is a cold-eyed exposure of it as a moral abomination.
Lynn Sutherland
Another very enthusiastic yes–to understand your explanation of showing place, space, character in that single sentence was an “a ha” moment for me–more please.
burnspbesq
If good writing is supposed to grab your attention, then I suppose this headline is good writing.
Abortion Doctors Charged with Murder
gene108
Though slightly off topic, with respect to “great” sentences, the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest gives me a good chuckle.
eemom
@gogol’s wife:
omg, I agree. I was SO disgusted by that blasphemous piece of shit I wanted to kill something.
Take heart though — there is a BBC version which is quite good. I watched it again last week, together with the BBC Sense and Sensibility, while wrapping presents. And I have always thought the BBC Pride & Prejudice was the absolute best film adaptation of a great book ever.
The less said about the other drekulous abominations of Austen, the better. Nobody but the BBC should be allowed to touch her.
slag
@burnspbesq: Way to bring a good thread down.
Yevgraf
@burnspbesq:
Ugh. The crushing of readily available, inexpensive and safe D&Cs inevitably leads to this kind of back-alley crap.
I don’t know what pisses me off more – the quacks who did it or the fact that it gives a platform for lying fraud piece of shit “Father” Frank Pavone to run his fucking mouth.
SIA
@gogol’s wife: I agree completely – that dialogue in Emma where Mr. Knightley chastises Emma is really, really good, and also the most powerful scene in any film production of the book.
E.M. Forester:
wonkie
I vote for more.
I noted that your post was around one thousand words. This coaught my eye because I am working on a short story and trying to keep it below ine thousand. The discipline of pruning words and sentences out of the text usually improves what is chosen to remain!
Kilkee
Prologue
September 1, 11:07 p.m.
The night sky above the Maine woods runs as black
as an underground coal vein, and the explosion of
Frank DiMatteo’s camper seemed to scorch its surface.
As the flames subsided, the glowing embers of
DiMatteo’s vaporized bones drifted up to join the
bright specks dotting the cosmos. Back in
Massachusetts, Mrs. DiMatteo, self-stimulated, writhed
in an unfamiliar bed, oblivious to his celestial
metamorphosis.
srv
Not enough drenching sarcasm.
In an earlier era of this year, I read about some university study where the pointed heads took all the great speeches and books and did some word-cloud like analysis on them, down to the paragraph and sentence level. They said they found similar patterns in “great” writing, particularly associated with words outside of the normal noun, verb and modifier…
I never found a research paper in my short-term memory search, and forgot where this magic was done. It is probably among the detritus of bookmarks you ctrl-D but where auto-titled after some enhancement advert.
I too have a notebook of great phrases and verbal innovations that other people have said. In fact, one could probably find quite a bit of filler amongst the great BJ posts/comments. DougJ, for instance, has been quite the wacked eloquent of late. Perhaps 2012 will be an era of the EmoPoet or Emohemian.
Someone find that study and write an app for it, so I can plug-in all these great snippets and have it auto-generate the next great novel with my name on it.
scav
@srv: Possibly, but I somehow suspect that grabbing carefully chosen bodyparts from championship team members, weighing, dissecting and then putting them in a blender, hitting purée and then pouring the results into a human-shaped jello mold will result in an Olympic athlete.
SIA
@currants: I know exactly what you mean! But I have found that reading literature requires that I suspend my social politics as well as occasionally my disbelief. For example, I adore Trollope and when in the mood can re-read my favorites, one after another. I still cringe though, when a wife refers to her husband as her “lord and master”!
As to Austen, I read her constantly and am always finding little hidden gems of emotional description with each new reading. I’m currently re-reading Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility a little at a time. It’s thrilling when an author from 200 years ago exactly describes some emotion or situation that I myself have experienced but been unable to articulate.
BGinCHI
@handsmile: Honestly, it was many nights ago and an open thread and I don’t remember where….but you didn’t miss too much.
That’s an interesting list. Haven’t read Cole’s book, but it’s getting excellent reviews.
The Zola is great and so is the Nabokov. It seems so odd that Lolita is VN’s most well-known book. It’s certainly not his best.
burnspbesq
My favorite first sentence of all time:
slag
@Kilkee: Impressive! Though I have no idea where that’s from.
SIA
@Mark B.: I see I’ll have to investigate that one now, LOL!
wrb
@BGinCHI:
I only saw you rejection of my nominee (for being poetry) the next day.
I haven’t read many novels this year. However, I added this at the bottom of the thread:
Alice Hoffman’s The Red Garden
and John Burdett’s wild and wonderful detective series featuring Thai Buddist arhat smack smuggler whoreson Sonchai Jitpleecheep .
ttp://www.amazon.com/Godfather-Kathmandu-Vintage-Crime-Lizard/dp/140009707X/ref=pd_sim_b_2
BGinCHI
@burnspbesq: And that’s followed by many, many more good sentences.
I try to reread a chapter of Ulysses every year. That book still floors me.
I’d also recommend the first four stories in Dubliners for anyone who has never read them. Diamond cutting precise genius prose there.
gogol's wife
@eemom:
“The BBC Pride & Prejudice was the absolute best film adaptation of a great book ever.” I assume you mean the Colin Firth version? Colin Firth IS Mr. Darcy! It cracks me up that people have just realized he’s a great actor, when he was already demonstrating that he was a great actor with that performance back in, what, 1995? Of the non-BBC Austens, I like the “Persuasion” with Ciaran Hinds. I think that was a feature film.
Phylllis
I vote for more as well. My non-work writing has dribbled away to nothing; maybe this will give me a kick-start.
BGinCHI
@wrb: Loved the first two Burdett novels in that series. So good. But then he lost me.
Have you read Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl?
It has affinities with Burdett, though in a different speculative direction. It’s a really interesting novel, though slow at times. It needs an edit.
Hoffman is a really good novelist. I need to read more of her.
Bill Arnold
@Joey Maloney:
Varley? (Steel Beach)
If so, that was my first thought as well.
burnspbesq
It’s worth remembering that some great books start off with pretty pedestrian first sentences. For example:
Or how about:
wrb
@BGinCHI:
No, I’ll check it out. Thank you.
slag
Quick question…Has anyone read Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything?
We just rented the Longitude movie last night, and even though I’ve read the Sobel book twice, I don’t remember much at all about this guy. He seems like a compelling individual, but my interest is shallow enough that, if I’m going to read a whole book about him, I need the writing be good. Anyone?
someofparts
What is the difference between thinking like a writer and thinking of oneself as a writer? Naturally I’m asking to see if I can make the transition myself.
Mnemosyne
@gogol’s wife:
Hell, my original crush on Firth dates back to his five-minute cameo in a Hallmark production of “The Secret Garden.” I’ve loved him ever since.
It really seems like he gets “discovered,” fades a bit, and then resurges every 10 or 15 years. Maybe it’s because he does most of his work in England, so folks in the US forget about him?
eemom
@gogol’s wife:
@Mnemosyne:
Firth is to die for. I saw him in a nude bath scene once (can’t recall the film) and nearly perished with desire.
handsmile
2012 heralds the bicentennial of Charles Dickens, an author responsible for rather a few decent novels. (February 7 is his birthdate.)
To celebrate, I’ll begin the year by rereading Bleak House (in hopes that it will not be a bleak year).
gogol's wife
@handsmile:
I’m reading “A Christmas Carol” out loud to my husband, and it has some damn good sentences in it.
Maude
@gogol’s wife:
The scene where Marley’s ghost shows up is great.
eemom
How I wish the ghost of Marley could drag its chains into the home of every republican in public office and every asshole on Wall Street and never fucking leave.
folkbum
My favorite paragraph of all time–two sentences–is this, from Grace Paley’s “Wants”:
What I mean is, yes, Tom, please continue.
Also: Stanley Fish’s “How to Write a Sentence.” I’m about half-way through. It’s been enormously helpful to me as a writing teacher, if not as a writer.
currants
@gogol’s wife: Exactly! And having lived in a similar state of existence, I can’t read those sentences without the accompanying sense of oppression settling over my shoulders. GAH! So glad to be out of that life.
Hungry Joe
@JGabriel: Please. Anne Tyler would never have a “Muffy”; her characters are middle class, upper middle at best. I just like the way “Earthly Possessions” takes off in third gear.
Mark B.
@SIA: It’s actually not Ballard’s best book, nor his worst one, but the writing is compelling. I personally think ‘The Drought’ is my favorite along with some of his short story collections. Some of his more famous work, like ‘Crash’ is kind of self-indulgent, but interesting. His most accessible work is ‘Empire of the Sun’ which was given a pretty creditable movie adaptation by Spielberg.
Chuck Butcher
One of my favorite lines:
“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”
– regarding the disappearance of Flitcraft which may be one of the best short stories within a novel that I know of.
Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
SIA
@ Mark B, thanks, I’ll check him out. I liked the film version of Empire of the Sun and think I might read the book. I’m bad about reading the same books I love over and over and not branching out to new authors.
@Chuck Butcher, that’s a good one. I have read Hammett but prefer English mysteries generally. How are you these days?
SIA
Something strange is going on with the comment formatting…no comment numbers, just a bullet point, and no “reply” capability.
JGabriel
Hungry Joe:
Well of course not. It was joke, I just liked the idea of going from “third gear” to “over the top”.
And, yes, I like Tyler’s opening too.
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JGabriel
Looks like folkbum bum folked up the formatting.
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Mark B.
There was some weird markup in Folkbum’s comment which seems to have broken some of the formatting script. Not sure if it’s something in the comment, or just a glitch in the commenting software. Ghost in the machine.
JGabriel
SIA:
The page columns are screwed up too. All the info from the right column has migrated to the left column, leaving the right column blank and desolate.
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Hillary Rettig
WOW. So much to respond to:
1) Love George Eliot for so many reasons. Agree with whoever said that Daniel Deronda sags in the Daniel parts; perks up with Gwendolyn. (No one does vanity better than GE.) The BBC film of Daniel Deronda is great and so is its production of Middlemarch.
2) Favorite first line, from Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings: “Roum is a city built on seven hills.” Way to communicate the passage of aeons in eight words – many of them small!
3) Lawrence Olivier >>> Colin Firth. But it hardly matters since Mr. Rochester >>>>>>>>>> Darcy. The best Mr. Rochester is Toby Stephens.
4) Persuant to the conversation about women’s fiction and feminism, here’s my essay on romance literature as fundamentally progressive and revolutionary :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hillary-rettig/the-eroticization-of-equa_b_201059.html
divF
Since I didn’t see any science fiction, here is one of the best opening paragraphs I know from the genre.
Another paragraph from the same work, a few pages later – precise and vivid.
Chuck Butcher
SIA,
Broke assed, scrambling to keep gas, electric, and water turned on. Having <0 luck selling assets.
SIA
@JGabriel, I’m on my iPad and don’t have the margin issue. But Reply arrow is not visible. As someone who once made an entire thread go italic I have some empathy whenever someone else does it.
David
Lovely. You said that you’re going to continue this discussion of reading and writing. Will you perhaps discuss how to connect this to writing in more technical fields? One of the things I struggle with in my day job – as I sit here at my desk stalling on writing a grant proposal – is how to take what I see in great literature and bring some of the spirit of it to the apparently dry writing I do – not very well – day in and day out. At the grossest level, I know that writing a grant proposal is still telling a story, but the craft seems so very different. And science writing for a lay audience seems at least in some sense to split the difference.
SIA
@ Chuck Butcher, man, I’m sorry to hear that. Your trade is really tough right now. My cousin in VA is going through the same thing. Hard to do it one day at a time – this too shall pass though. For what it’s worth, sending you good thoughts.
Hillary Rettig
Also GREAT to see Anne Tyler in this thread. She’s wonderful!
Chuck Butcher
Now I’ getting pissed. link to the http thing with the wwwDOT fallingbeamDOTorg/beamDOThtm for the little gem I referenced. It is about a whole lot more than some detective story.
Thanks SIA
Janus Daniels
“One summer afternoon Ms. Oedipa Mass came home from a Tupperware party, whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue, to find that she, Oedipa, had been named the executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost several million dollars in his spare time, but who still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting them all out more than merely honorary.”
~ from memory ; )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49
divF
Also, count me as a vote in favor.
SIA
@Chuck Butcher, wow, I went to the Falling Beam site and got completely sucked in to that story! Haven’t read The Maltese Falcon but I’m going to add it to the reading list. Gotta find out what happened to that guy!
Elliecat
This is timely. Just yesterday I had resolved to take a break from reading politics blogs in favor of those discussing writing and literature. So my vote is yes, more of this please!
To chime in on the favorite first lines, for more than 20 years my favorite first line of a novel has been:
I just love that simplicity and promise.
Grandma Maggie
One of my all-time favorite opening lines (Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White):
Where’s Papa going with that ax?
and then there’s the opening of chapter 15:
The crickets sang in the grass. They sang the song of summer’s ending, a sad, monotonous song. “Summer is over and gone,” they sang, “Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying.”
Charlotte’s web is full of stunningly beautiful sentences. I think it is the best thing ever written for kids. Reading it aloud to kids is really wonderful–the simple, beautiful language gets me every time.
E.B. White wrote some lovely stuff for adults in his life–his essays and his letters are wonderful (some of them extremely funny).
RSA
@someofparts:
I was curious about that, too. Maybe it’s the old observation that it’s a lot easier to call oneself a writer than to actually write. :-) But I imagine Tom has something more complicated in mind.
gogol's wife
To Hillary Rettig (sorry, no reply button), who said Laurence Olivier was a greater Darcy than Colin Firth: My husband agrees with you. He thinks Firth must have studied Olivier’s performance very carefully. But that film is so over-the-top with the 1860s dresses and with the two leads rather too old for their parts, that I can’t really enjoy it the way I do the Firth-Ehle version, with its perfect costumes and dancing.
Chuck Butcher
SIA,
That’s it for Flitcraft. That is the whole Flitcraft moment, he never shows again. It is the story of ordinary meeting extraordinary followed by ordinary and Spade’s insight into how that came together and why it played out as it did. It does, as a moment in time, hang over the entire story because it defines Spade as considerably more than a two fisted dick (det) and brings to the fore the collision of the mundane with the extraordinary and how even the extraordinary is based on or functions out of the mundane and that is also the novel.
Falcon is the movie that is really close to the novel, though it missed the Flitcraft story, the rest are similar in title alone. There was a “Dain Curse” movie from ?80s that was fairly close to that novel. The Thin Man was ridiculous.
People discount Hammett, sadly, as a detective story writer only.
Joe
I would be happy to read more posts like this one.
SIA
@Chuck Butcher, I think your comments on Spade’s depth (if I understand you correctly) highlight the attraction of a few fictional detectives and other protagonists (including Mr. Darcy). For example, Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey is fascinating for his intellectual depth, his artistic sensibilities, and the undertow of melancholy in his character. The character makes the story compelling, much more than the story line.
As an aside, Hammett used a bit of Dickensian humor in naming the disappearing man “Flitcraft”. :)
debbie
Yes, please, more posts like this one!
I love when a sentence or a passage stops me in my proverbial tracks. William Trevor has lots of those kinds of seemingly simple sentences that change the book’s atmosphere with seemingly little effort.
Or there’s this, from Isherwood’s “A Single Man”:
A few times in my life, I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise, and I can feel rather than think. Things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I’ve lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be.
Sarchasm
Vote yes, please continue!
CynDee
Read Edith Wharton for incomparably elegant, golden prose dense on every page.
Chuck Butcher
SIA,
Hammett’s novels are quite varied in themes, settings, and tone. I won’t say “Falcon” is the best, that I’d leave to anyone reading all of them to decide for their self. The first two novels use the short character “The Continental Op” as protagonist. That character isn’t quite consistent between the two and the shorts and from there the protagonists and “themes” vary wildly. You can’t box Hammett with any one of his books. While they’re detective stories, well Red Harvest is virtually Western, Falcon gritty city, Dain Curse modern gothic…
Hillary Rettig
@Gogol’swife –
I love the over the topness of it all. And I’ll bet you agree that Edna Mae Oliver as the aunt and whoever played Mr. Collins can’t be topped.
stickler
The best opening line of any history book has to be, hands down, Gordon Craig’s _Germany 1866-1945_.
Here it is, as I remember it:
“Is it wrong to begin with Bismarck?”
Just reading that sentence, you already know where the author stands relative to social history, scholarship, and wordcraft.
gogol's wife
@Hillary Rettig: Yes, Edna May Oliver and Melville Cooper cannot be topped. I agree.
Kilkee
@slag: Unfair. It’s the first page of my unpublished legal thrillah.
mclaren
@Benjamin Franklin:
LOL. Need to sharpen up on your punctuation there, skippy. Your sentence should read:
If you read letters written a hundred years ago. you see simple people had what is now a rare gift.
But that sentence itself would improve immensely if you rewrote it: If you read letters written a hundred years ago, you see simple people enjoyed a gift now rare.
Incidentally, most of these allegedly “great” first sentences suffer a multitude of problems. Gibbons arguably abused and misused the word “comprehended.” The English language simply does not use the word that way. Likewise, the excess of “to be” constructions in Eliot’s sentence together with the run-on nature of that sentences renders it distinctly hard to read. Confusing, in fact.
Many critics fetishize over and obsess with individual sentences. Bad idea. Many contemporary writers (Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, John Updike) excel at running off striking sentences in the midst of poorly-balanced awkward badly-plotted books and stories chock-a-block with turgid scenes, dull characters, and trivial settings.
stinger
Tom levenson @42: Hiking and good writing — two thumbs up!
JGabriel
mclaren:
Heh. Kind of hard to troll a thread after it’s petered out several hours previously.
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Ronzoni Rigatoni
@Kilkee: Geebus, KillKee, This was one of the funniest things I’ve read here in a long time. I asked a pal, also a writer, but after the 1st 2, he’s been rejected everywhere. The Germans bought out St. Martins Press. Alas!) Send me the buke when it is finished. Hot damn!
slag
@Kilkee: It’s pretty kickass! Though this image: “and the explosion of Frank DiMatteo’s camper seemed to scorch its surface” is a challenging one to conjure when we’re talking about black sky. The words I’m having problems with are “scorch” and “surface” because I think of “scorch” as black and “surface” as top. Hard to envision the surface of a scorched coal dark sky. Instead, I might think the explosion “blushed its bottom”. But that image is a little cheeky. :)