Microblog Memes

Let's go with something more somber.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

-Lolita by Nabokov

It's not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.

And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.

I just started reading "The giant squid" by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn't find the official English translation, so here's the original and my rough translation:

Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All'inizio c'era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po' di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi... invece il centro del mondo è il mare.

We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

From Lady sings the blues, Billie Holiday's autobiography.

Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn's Book by William Kennedy

Haha someone named him Eustace!

I managed to finish that series with my son but daaaang is it weirdly religious.

"A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism"

It still gives nightmares to the people who deserve it :)

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. 

-- "Titus Groan" by Mervin Peake

It's a mood.

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

it hits differently these days, but: "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -William Gibson, Neuromancer

I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files

If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof.

– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he's done. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop"

My favorite opening lines that I didn't see yet are:

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed”

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And, Gibson's "Neuromancer"

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

This is my favorite opening line:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

• Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

I absolutely love the opening of The Martian by Andy Weir

I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked. Six days into what should be one of the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare. I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now. For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”

Well, not the first line per se, but the first chapter of Snowcrash is easily one of my favorites ever.

If I had to pick an opening like though, it would be:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Stephen King

I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen