gandalf (imported) wrote: Sat Jun 30, 2012 11:05 am "Call me, Ishmael."

Does this hark back to the Star Trek novel "Ishmael" where Spock is transported to 1869 Seattle and meets his human ancestors?

"Call Me Ishmael." is the opening line of MOBY DICK. Here are the opening four sentences:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely --having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

On another note:

In an award winning Star Trek (City on the Edge of Forever), Spock, McCoy and Kirk travel back in time to the 1930's and started a war with Harlan Ellison. But that isn't where Spock meets his human ancestors. That (as I remember it) is the closest the TV show ever got to revealing ancestry.

Ishmael is a Star Trek Novel that hints at Spock's family name and his human great, great, great Grandmother... I never reed any spinnoff novels like that. they give me the shivers.

>>Neil Gaiman swears on a stack of many holy books of a dozen different religions (some very ancient, antediluvian religions, too) that he will never start a children's story like this opening ever again...

>>Why? you ask...

>>Because it gave the little kiddies nightmares. Some of them. Others just giggled.

>>

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

(February 15, 2009)

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/books ... -book.html

I love Harlan Ellison, Dave, thanks for reminding me of him. I want to re-read his book The Glass Teat; absolutely viceral in its skewering of (then-)modern television.

I tried to read Moby Dick last month, and I must admit I got bogged down part way through and flipped over to something else... it seems that in Melville's time, the style was to write incredibly long sentences, using commas with wild abandon, to streach the continuing thought, into a ridiculously long sentence taking up the majority of a paragraph; oh yes, some semi-colons too; can't have enough of those, eh, Herman?!

Drove me nuts .

Right now I'm reading a book of short stories by Adam Marek called Instruction Manual for Swallowing; the last story is called Meaty's Boys, and its opening sentence is:

Meaty's boys came back, their bags bulging with oozing lumps; their eyes were wide with coke, and the hair on their forearms was plastered with to their skin with blood.

Eeeechhhkk... yeah, it's a gross one, but man, this guy can WRITE.

How about first lines of poetry?

"When we come to that dark house..."

The Sleeping Beauty by Dame Edith Sitwell. My favourite poem ever, and an epic eighty or so pages long.

eunuch2001 (imported) wrote: Sat Jun 30, 2012 11:01 pm How about first lines of poetry?

"When we come to that dark house..."

The Sleeping Beauty by Dame Edith Sitwell. My favourite poem ever, and an epic eighty or so pages long.

This is getting into territory dear to my heart. Some of my favorites:

"He’s dead

the dog won’t have to

sleep on his potatoes

any more to keep them

from freezing"

Death William Carlos Williams http://banjo52.blogspot.com/2011/08/wil ... -much.html

"MY first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the working of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that purs’d and scor’d

Its edge, at one more victim gain’d thereby."

“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” Robert Browning (1812–89) http://www.bartleby.com/246/654.html

"In Xanadu did Kublai Khan

A stately Pleasure-Dome decree,"

Kubla Khan By Samuel Taylor Coleridge http://www.xamuel.com/kubla-khan-poem/

(which contains 3 lines Kipling described as the “high water achievement of the race of Adam”

“A savage place! As holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!”)

"Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;"

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad? William Butler Yeats http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl- ... ye-why.htm

Transward