Lolita's First Lines

Chris's invitation to beginnings coincides with my obsession with this one. My husband introduced me to this first paragraph and I have to admit that when I first read it my eyes glazed over the surface like a marble on linoleum. As I have inched my way through the book and look back on those first paragraphs it seems to have set exactly the right sensuous tone and cadence for the ecstatic psychosis of this narrator's twisted tale. On the cover of my frayed 1989 Vintage paperback Vanity Fair blurts that it is the "only convincing love story of our century"; Time says something about it being "wildly funny." What I see is one of the most painfully sad stories of an incontinent man and a broken child finding themselves lost and attached to one another. It's my first reading of Nabokov's Lolita and I'm on page 215. Here's the opening:

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.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

There she is, spun taut between childhood and the perversion he has bound her to.

-Mara Naselli

Bullshit, Elegant, Kafkaesque, Details

First a nod to Chris because the Garden State soundtrack has become the music that works its way to the top of the queue several times a day. It's in rotation with Green Day's American Idiot, an album I hadn't listened to too much until the Rolling Stone cover story.

But this is about what we're reading.

I'm in the process of seeking the next total-immersion book. It's been about a month, but the last title to hold that spot was Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and while I've read more harrowing memoirs (Alice Sebold), Flynn's isn't going to soon be knocked from those compelling and painful and necessary.

Bit more Flynn: In 1999 a friend passed along what was at that moment, that month, that week, her favorite book of poems: Flynn's Some Ether. Good stuff. Then a few years later tried to get into Blind Huber. I don't recall much from that one, though. The cover, a blurred beehive. But Another Bullshit Night was teased out last summer in a New Yorker article, which unfortunately is not available in any online archives. I've searched. I have friends. A few. I want to convince them to buy the book by sending them a copy of that article. I can't.

Since then I've gone halfway into Haruki Murakami's latest, Kafka on the Shore, but can't seem to push on and finish it. I petered out of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as well, one hundred pages from the end. This says something about me and not about Murakami.

Because I've been copyediting some essays lately on quantum mechanics and physicalism and string theory and felt kinda duhhhh when I try to comprehend the subject, I picked up Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. My good intentions last Sunday were cut short by a bout with the stomach flu. Fever, fluid-loss, and a few dreams in which I was a motorcycle--okay, a chopper--and unable to pull the covers over me because I was a motorcycle, forced me to give up the days’ devotion to Elegant; instead I spent nonsleeping hours with the Metallica: Some Kind of Monster DVD.

I want to watch the first season of Deadwood. This ties into what I'm reading. I want to see Deadwood because Mark Singer's profile of Deadwood creator David Milch (also writer on Hill Street Blues and co-creator of NYPD Blue) in the Feb. 14 & 21 New Yorker is wonderful. "The Misfit: How David Milch got from 'NYPD Blue' to 'Deadwood' by way of an Epistle of St. Paul." Did I say it was wonderful? It is.
One other book. . .

Fun in the David Sedaris way: Jennifer Traig's Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood. Traig has OCD, but a specific form of it known as scrupulosity, which compels her to perform her OCD rituals according not to an arbitrary habit (closing the door five times, taking ten swallows of water) but to religiosity. From the dust jacket: "On a given day, Jennifer might be putting all her possessions in the washing machine to cleanse them of the pork fumes emanating from the kitchen. Or clipping the lawn according to Old Testament regulations. Or covering her hair with Kleenex while she maintained her constant state of prayer." Funny, sad, funny, and good.

- Eric Lagergren

angie's favorite first lines

Why does it have to be fiction?

Poetry:
Ginsburg's Howl
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,"

Whitman's Leaves of Grass
"I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

Sharon Olds's Satan Says
(the whole first poem kicks ass)

Memoir:
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
"I hadn't so much forgot as I couldn't bring myself to remember."

OK, fiction:

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing . . . That is the life of men. / Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."

Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
"I was not sorry when my brother died."

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?
"'What would the good and proper people of this world do if there were no rogues in it-no social delinquents?"

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
"New Year's Resolutions"

That Affair Next Door by Anna Katherine Green
"I am not an inquisitive woman . . . "

Who Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro
"Royal Beating. That was Flo's promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating."

-angie kritenbrink

What Bauman's Reading

Not much; I'm packing to go to Quebec. But in the mean time (the mean time is a mean time and we know it) I've been thinking about novels with a great first page (or two). I had to think about this recently for a workshop I was leading. I made up an absolutely incomplete, arbitrary, but sort-of-across-the-spectrum list of some novels that I think have a great first page (or two). Can we add to this list? Yes, we can. So that's your job today: add to this list.

Here's the rules (because I'm in charge) for determining great first page (or two):

1. Fiction, in English
2. Has to have a great first page (or two)
3. Probably should include a rather fantastic opening sentence (although there are ways around that)
4. (MOST IMPORTANT! and this will shrink the list... ) The rest of the book can't suck either. In other words, no show-offs flashing around a fancy first page (or two) and then completely unable to sustain.

Here's where we start. If you need to know why I picked something, ask me, or, better, go read (or reread) it:

Hemingway "A Farewell to Arms"
Annie Proulx "The Shipping News"
Regina McBride "The Nature of Water and Air"
Stephen King "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption"
Toni Morrison "Paradise"
Sean (Shawn?) McBride (no relation to Regina) "Green Grass Grace"
Michael Ondaatje "The English Patient"
Darcey Steinke "Suicide Blonde"

I could name-drop another handful without too much trouble, but won't. Let's see what everyone else has to say.

While I pack, by the way, I'm wearing out the grooves on my Garden State soundtrack CD. If anyone doesn't think Colin Hay is the coolest thing going then you and me might have to take it outside.

-Chris

What I'm Not Reading and Why

I have all this great stuff sitting around my apartment to read. I am halfway through the Rothko bio that I have been picking up and putting down for weeks. I have a whole stack of books (and one video) about Rothko that I got from the library. I have another stack of magazines, including several political mags, Bomb, Poets and Writers, a couple of professional journals, and of course (still) an almost hopeless backlog of The Believer sitting around here just waiting for their riches to be discovered. Every time I read another one of Birnbaum's interviews I find out about five more books I need to read just to feel competent.

So why am I not reading? Because I am teaching, grading papers, planning classes, volunteering for the symphony, surfing the web, doing housework, and looking for jobs for next quarter and beyond. But this is not even a good excuse, since I am also watching hopeless amounts of lifestyle cable television and spending way too much time shopping at the mall. It seems the more "middle class" I become, the more I am becoming one of those regular old Americans we all sneer at who spend too much time thinking about how to spend their money and not enough time thinking about the things that money can't get you.

I have been trying to make up my mind what to give up for Lent (although I no longer practice any other facet of Catholicism, I stricly practice the Lent sacrifice every year as an exercise in redirection and renewal) and so maybe it should be "not reading." Backwards Lent, adding something instead of giving it up.

-Angie Kritenbrink

Hello to All That

You might have noticed we published an excerpt from John Falk's memoir Hello to All That: War, Zoloft, and Peace. I got an advance copy of that book in the mail back in November when going through a sort of near-winter depression, and it helped quite a bit to read about someone who was so depressed they travelled to a war zone to get over it.

On Mondays and Tuesdays I used to tape Christine Klein's Natural Resource Law classes at the UF law school, and I'd bring this book along with me to pass the time. It was pretty normal for me to carry review copies to her class, but this is the only one I actually recommended to her. She was a very kind-spirited person, a Boulder refugee who seemed interested in a variety of things, and I actually miss taping her classes because she had a knack for mentioning obscure places (like Estes Park, Colorado) that I had visited as a youngster. Plus, she incorporated a lot of neat pictures of national parks into her lectures.

Anyway, Hello to All That is one of the better books I've read in recent months, which is why I saw fit to post a clip from it.

-Matt Borondy

What Birnbaum's Reading

Christopher Hitchens's introduction to his Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

"The Crime that Never Was" from Charles D'Ambrosia's essay collection, Orphans

Colm Toibin's New York Times Book Review piece on Hitchens's Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

A Century of November by WD Wetherall

An Uncommon Man by Francine Prose

Articles of War by Nick Arvin

The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man's Struggle With the Monthly Tide of the Books He's Bought and the Books He's Been Meaning to Read by Nick Hornsby

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America by Scott Sandage

"The Secrets of my Success" by Jim Crace in the Guardian (5 February 2005)

"Around the Block with A.J. Liebling" by Joseph Epstein, in Commentary magazine (December 2004)

"Me and Big Media" by Ani Di Franco in The Nation (7 Jan 2005)

The Death of Demand: Finding Growth in A Saturated Global Economy by Tom Ostenton

"Beyond Good and Evil" [on Imre Kertez] by John Banville in The New York Review of Books (31 Jan 2005)

Kent Haruf's Life on the Plains, Op-Ed in The New York Times
(25 December 2004)

"What I Heard about Iraq" by Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books (3 February 2005)

-Robert Birnbaum

Hell's Half Acre and Starbucks

I've been carrying around a burnt-orange galley of Will Christopher Baer's Hell's Half Acre (one of the MacAdam Cage books that DIDN'T borrow its title from this website) for months, reading passages here and there, digesting it in a nonlinear sort of fashion. How else to treat a novel by a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa?

Anyway, there's a section in which the narrator inadvertently bumps into a communist who was drinking a Starbucks latte, causing the hot drink to spill all over the commie's clothing:

You motherfucker. What kind of communist drinks a mocha with whipped cream?

The guy moans. I can't help it, he says. I'm a victim of advertising. I walk past a Starbucks and I become a robot. Their mochas are divine.

Me, too. I've been going to Starbucks every day for like two weeks, devouring White Chocolate Mochas like Jared devours Teriyaki Chicken subs at Subway. At my usual Starbucks, there's a guy who looks like James Bond. That's his job, actually. To look like James Bond. He's a professional James Bond imitator. He goes to that Starbucks every day he's not working--for years he's been going there. I know this because I used to work at a health food store by the Starbucks, and he'd come in talking on his cellphone and buying a Balance bar, every day, not really looking at anyone but expecting to be looked at. Someone should write a book about that guy or at least use him as a character in fiction. You're welcome to use the idea, in fact. Just like you're welcome to call your book "Identity Theory."

-Matt Borondy