"Last night I dreamed I went to Manderlay again."

Once upon a time there lived some new answers ...

"A screaming comes across the sky".

I think we've done this before, w/mark s putting up the whole first line of mason&dixon...

My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack — all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years — and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal scenes that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletin-board subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton; schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own "lost boy" way; and Eli, who spends his solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks with drawings — the artist's multiple renderings for a larger work? — portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the "new millennium" psychotherapist; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you'll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizing the decaying downtown area (as "an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways"), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob, the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated "perfect" brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of "sexual language" in eleven types of social insects — all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he's fled the vicinity, he's right here under our noses, he's using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing) all my ninety- eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker's ashes.

i really should read that book sometime.

'I'm going to kill that performance poet.'

It's ManderlEy, no?

When we did this last time I said what I am going to say again now:

I don't think 'a screaming comes across the sky' is a great first line at all: I think people think it is cos they think GR, as a whole, is a great book. (Me, I think it's a Great book, but also an awful one.)

pf: i disagree. 1st sentence is what got me into GR; in fact whole first para is brilliant iirc (something like 'it had happened before, but not like this'?).

ok it's: 'A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.'

"An ill wind blew that morning. People scurried about their daily business, keeping their heads down, avoiding eye contact. The summer was long gone, the cold bleakness of winter had its grip on everyone. None of this mattered to Dexter. Where ever he was, and whatever he was, it didn’t matter." hahaha

haha the pinefox has MELLOWED

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" may seem obvious but it pushes my childhood nostalgia buttons. And "A screaming" etc. for similar reasons, in this case teenage nostalgia. I did like the start of The Bell Jar when I read it recently, the thread's somewhere in the archives.

I was going to try and sound all intelligent by quoting some hugely important and clever-sounding tract, but then remembered that:

a) I haven't read any

and

b) The only first line I can ever remember (apart from the one at the start of this thread, and I've never even read that) is the one mentioned in the post just before this one (clear?).

So it'll have to be:

"It was the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs."

Nice...

1. I'll agree for sure with the Hobbit

2. AND The Bell Jar - that's enough of a winner for me: as good as any of Joyce's, possibly.

3. I still don't think GR's opener is great, at all - I think it's Far Too Easy.

4. How have I mellowed? I don't criticize Pynchon on that other thread, and I do here; in fact I am harsher on his first line here than I am there (but as ever I have not changed my mind in the slightest).

5. OK: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard'. (That *is* a first line, isn't it?)

I agree that it is the para as a whole to GR which is excellent.

It sounds like the "Road to Mandalay" more than anything written than way...funny. When i was 18 i used to love the very tacky beginning of "L'Amant" by Marguerite Duras: "Very soon it was too late in my life. By the time I was 18, it was too late"