Dan at Pamie.com tried this experiment out. List twenty-five opening sentences of blog entries started in the past two months (in my case, twenty-four over three months):
1. The first time I remember being profoundly misunderstood was at the age of six.
2. The time has come for me to join my revolutionary comrades.
3. Don’t worry. This isn’t one of those tedious hiatus announcements.
4. I can’t even get published in my hometown newspaper.
5. Leon Wieseltier called Checkpoint “a scummy little book.”
6. Allow me to fuck your shit up.
7. There is simply no accounting for taste.
8. I’m jumping in here really quick to report that I’m still making phone calls.
9. The latest scam to crack down on Web expression comes in the form of mandatory web ratings.
10. So your faithful reporter finished Colson Whithead’s Apex Hides the Hurt, a title he’s put off reading because of the shaky reviews.
11. I regularly take on too much and have great difficulty doing nothing.
12. This morning, I received an email that someone is impersonating me and making telephone calls in the dead of night.
13. Since I’ve been too busy cooped up in my five-star hotel room humiliating some of these valets (all of them obvious idiots, I tell you), I haven’t had enough time to follow all the discussion about ME! ME! ME!
14. Last year, the CBC mentioned that the way to get a reader’s attention was to feature a book cover that prominently features breasts.
15. These are troubling times for anybody who gives a damn about satire, because joyless pricks like Garrison Keillor seem to be the posterboys intended to assuage liberal malaise.
16. Frankie and the NR were sweethearts.
17. Every now and then, the Chronicle columnists get something right.
18. Memorial Day is such an absurd occasion for me that I really can’t dignify it with a coherent response.
19. I am a good person; I am also a bad person.
20. I’ve been having lots of discussions with people these days about cultural icons that seem to be verboeten to certain culture-vultures in the City (and in other urban areas).
21. Sometimes, I feel like the mainstream media and the new media need to get together for a few rounds of karaoke and sing “Ebony & Ivory” (or perhaps in the newspaperman’s case, “I Will Survive”) to each other, and realize that there really ain’t that much of a difference between us.
22. Bush’s recent declaration contains several troubling grammatical inconsistencies.
23. Again, the mad rush of insomnia stampedes over my being like a thunder of bison confusing me with the main trail.
24. Whilom ther was dwellynge hewed whyte
Magic Hours by Tom Bissell: This marvelous collection of essays chronicles everything from film shoots to novelists rescued from oblivion. (The essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, with its portrait of raucous factions, unexpectedly reveals how soft today's literary world has become.) But if you peer between the cracks of these smart pieces, you may very well see how cultural lives are formed from the most unexpected life choices. And as we follow Bissell's development as a writer over the years, that goes for Bissell as well. (
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway: Harkaway's latest novel greatly improves on his previous book, The Gone-Away World, which I'm already on record as praising. Angelmaker adopts genre elements without ever feeling like a genre book, and it leads me to believe that Harkaway is well on his way to a narrative grace close to China Miéville's. Yet inexplicably this very fun book, which includes an eightysomething badass named Edie Banister, a mysterious mechanical object that may destroy the world, farcical scenarios involving lawyers and the police, and some unexpectedly moving moments about fatherhood, doesn't appear to be getting much attention in American newspapers. Nothing from the snobs at The New York Times Book Review, nothing from The Washington Post. And since I can't get Harkaway on Bat Segundo, I hope this Jump Up and Down mention gets you hopping as well.
The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel: Unless you're really pressed for time, forget Jonah Lehrer. If you want to understand creativity and its relationship to neuroscience, then the bowtie-wearing Nobel laureate is your man. In addition to being a physically beautiful book (you will drool over many of the paintings), there are helpful overviews on optical illusions, science, biographical backgrounds, and many vital figures from the Vienna Secession. Kandel's enthusiasm (and his call for greater unity between the humanities and science) is contagious.
please explain:
I’ve been having lots of discussions with people these days about cultural icons that seem to be verboeten to certain culture-vultures in the City (and in other urban areas).
Yes, and I want #19!