Inspired by Josh’s Maurice Sendak post (and by Casey’s link to the “Fresh Air” interview with Sendak).

This kind of play always gets me excited. It’s easier for me to remember opening lines I like, though, because the ones I don’t like don’t stay with me. But there’s no denying that dislikes shape us too. Writing an opening sentence in a fiction is like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying excuse me…. In real encounters like this, all of human nature waits in that moment of turning to look at the person. We have secret lists of near-future possibilities waiting: panhandler? thief? long-lost friend? detective….? And we start considering the list before we actually even see the person. I like opening sentences that don’t let me feel comfortable about my list or my impulse to apply it. I like opening lines that say — something interesting is already happening. This power only comes when everything down to punctuation and single word choice is significantly managed.

Here’s a favorite opening sentence:

“I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a — wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head — tunnel) actually lived.”

(Denis Johnson, “Dirty Wedding”; I love the risks here — the work that can be wrung out of a precisely selected comma splice, for instance, and the way the parenthetic comment ends by slamming into an almost forgotten context.)

And of course simple can also be good: “In the kitchen, he poured himself another drink and looked at the bedroon suite in his front yard.”

«It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it, he suffers because he has not suffered enough, and it is by following this logic to conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold hüzün in high esteem.»—Orhan Pamuk

More on Istanbul reading Pamuk.

Tim Carmody replied:

I have three favorites, who are very different: Flaubert, Eliot, and Proust.

I asked if he meant George Eliot, and mentioned not having read Proust.

Yeah, George Eliot in Middlemarch. She has all of Flaubert’s tools, but an infinitely greater capacity for sympathy.

I thought it would be easy to have a greater capacity for sympathy than Flaubert….

Tim said:

It’s hard if you can see, see through, & disintegrate like Flaubert & Eliot can.

Then:

Proust is… Well, nothing is like Proust. Imagine a blend of Flaubert, Kierkegaard, and Wilde.

A human being compelled to identify the nuances of small moments and big ideas in a withering yet charming style.

David Milch is extending his relationship with HBO. Milch, whose latest series for the pay cable network, Luck, launches in January, has inked a new multi-year deal with HBO where he has been based for the past eight years. Under the new extension, in addition to executive producing Luck with Michael Mann, Milch will develop series and movies based on books by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner William Falkner. Milch’s Redboard Prods has inked a deal with the literary estate of the iconic American writer who penned novels, short stories, a play and screenplays as well as poetry and essays. The pact covers all of the 19 novels and 125 short stories in the estate, as well as other works, with the exception of those currently optioned by other parties.

This is pretty much my sweet spot. Here’s a quick glimpse into Milch’s new HBO series, Luck:

«Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. [...] Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world.»

More thoughts on photography & thinking, whilst reading Bernhard & Beckett in Dublin.

The alligator, a ten-foot female weighing about five hundred pounds, opened her eyes and, after several minutes, moved her head from side to side, drowsy, disoriented, not knowing where she was, not catching the scent of anything familiar other than grass and dry soil. No water close by. She raised her head and hissed in the night, in the sound of insects. The wind rose and with it came a scent she recognized as something she liked that she had smelled before sometime in her life and had eaten. After several more minutes she began to move in a sluggish sort of way as though half asleep, not entirely upright on her legs, brushing the grass with her tail. The scent she liked became stronger as she moved and kept moving until her snout touched something she had never smelled before. She sniffed and air came through it into her nostrils, bringing a strong scent of the thing she liked. Now she pushed and whatever it was in front of her bent against her weight until it gave way and the alligator walked through it and felt the ground cold now, smooth and hard. The scent she liked was here, though not enough in one place that it would become the thing itself she could fasten her jaws on and tear or take into her mouth whole. She settled on the cool ground, feeling it become warm beneath her as she went to sleep.

Elmore Leonard. Maximum Bob. 1991.

After a month the monkeys had produced five pages of the letter “S” and had broken the keyboard.

(thanks, Rich)