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Monday Morning Mock Drafts: Big Intro!

Horatio Cornblower

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Guten Tag, Drones.

Taking a break from attempting to remove rodents from various pieces of water-sports (points at Balls:  not one word) equipment and watching Hellesuck destroy any hopes and dreams Litre might once have had to put together this morning’s work week distraction.

Seriously, Hellebuyck, suck more why don’t you?

Today’s topic comes from Yeah Right, who when not reading recipes is reading books.  Last night he suggested something like “best opening lines of a book” and I said, “hell yeah, another week I don’t have to do any thinking!”

So that’s what you’re drafting, opening lines from any book you think worthy of consideration.  ideally the draftee should be the first sentence, and only the first sentence, but I’m willing to consider 2-3 lines if they really bring that certain Jenny say Qua, or whatever it is the French are yapping about.

Yeah Right is taking the opening line of John Steinbeck’s ‘Cannery Row’ which I forgot but, being an erudite fellow, I happen to have a copy of, so here you are:

“Steinbeck’s epic California novels deconstruct the visionary and edenic West.”

Well, that kind of sucks.  Not sure what Yeah Right is thi…

Oh.  Oh that’s the introduction.  Never mind.  Way to grab the reader for Penguin Classics, Susan Shillinglaw.  Susan goes on like this for 20 pages.  I bet she killed it in English 101.

The actual opening line is as follows:  “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

Also there are dames, but you have to (and by all mean should) read the book to get to that part.

For my pick I will take what I think is the only possibility for #1 in this draft, even more than, say, not making Jamarcus Russell the #1 in a professional football draft, and take Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’:  “Call me Ishmael.”

There’s a sentence that grabs you by the lapels and screams at you to read hundreds of pages about man’s Promethean need to fight his gods, and also a lot of stuff about whales that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the story.

The rest of you are on the clock.

 

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Horatio Cornblower

“All this happened, more or less.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

4
SonOfSpam

“Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.”

Well, I’m sure things’ll get better for Jack.

9
Horatio Cornblower

He’ll be fine as soon as he realizes that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

4
BeefReeferLives

comment image

3
scotchnaut

“I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.”

-Infinite Jest

1
yeah right

“What’s it going to be then, eh?

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.”

3
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

comment image

3
2Pack

The woman stepped carefully from the Greyhound bus, her right hand holding firmly on to the bar as she eased herself down.

The Black Angel, Connolly

2
BeefReeferLives

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”

6
Gatoraids

A green hunting cap squeezed on top of the fleshy balloon of a head.

1
yeah right

Fully recognize this one but really disliked the book.

0
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

I didn’t hate it but didn’t find it as transcendent as so many other folks did.

0
Doktor Zymm

It was a fun read

Edit: I did read it when I was in New Orleans which might have helped

Last edited 1 year ago by Doktor Zymm
1
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

Confederacy of Dunces?

1
Horatio Cornblower

Yes.

Ignatius is an acquired taste, to be sure.

0
Gatoraids

think does a great job of capturing internet trolls before there was an internet, bit ahead of its time

0
Gatoraids

yesh

0
Gumbygirl

“When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

2
ballsofsteelandfury

This technically doesn’t qualify as it’s not the first paragraph (it’s the second) and it’s not just one line or two, it’s a whole paragraph, but this is a really fun one:

It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in. The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills, you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call-houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills, the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.

0
ballsofsteelandfury

Next pick:

Sundown painted purple across the great Pyramid while the Emperor enjoyed a steaming whiz against a dumpster in the alley below.

0
Horatio Cornblower

Bloodsucking Fiends, A Love Story

1
ballsofsteelandfury

Ding ding ding!

1
Horatio Cornblower

(I mean, it’s literally right behind me)

1
BallsofLacrosseAndMapleSyrup

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

it’s from the prologue, but meh, “rules”. This is easier to start with this
*wanking motion*
You’re not my supervisor

From Romeo and Juliet

7
Sharkbait

comment image

4
Horatio Cornblower

Look, at the time it was written Juliet was periously close to being considered an old maid.

3
SonOfSpam

“Hag.”

-M. Gaetz, purchasing his 23rd copy of a Nabokov book

8
yeah right

I read that whole damn thing just last year.

I regret nothing.

0
Gatoraids

for an anti pick there’s always the fun winners of the worst opening line competition

https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/winners

last years winner
“She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.”

7
Horatio Cornblower

Love that competition. My favorite is this one

“Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon, nephew of King Aurelius Ambrosius, who was in turn the son of a long list of people who weren’t kings and thus don’t matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass.”

4
ballsofsteelandfury

See, that would make me want to read that book!

2
Gumbygirl

Is it the incest, or the ass- biting?

0
2Pack

While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny day in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies… (holy fuck what a typically British run on sentence)

Vanity Fair

4
Gumbygirl

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

4
BeefReeferLives

You know it, Guy Montag…

comment image

2
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

Farenheit 451!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM

1
yeah right

“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”

2
Sharkbait

Fight Club?

2
yeah right

Correct-a-mundo!

0
Horatio Cornblower

I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about that.

4
BeefReeferLives

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

5
Gumbygirl

1984?

2
BeefReeferLives

Yup.

1
Gatoraids

2025?

3
BeefReeferLives

Yup.

3
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

2084

1
BallsofLacrosseAndMapleSyrup

In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a bowl full of mush

“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown

3
BrettFavresColonoscopy

Asking whether there is a liberal or conservative bias to the mainstream media is a little like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus. The problem with al Qaeda is that they’re trying to kill us.

4
blaxabbath

Best introduction is still Thunderstruck by AC/DC (audio release)

3
2Pack

Stay with Me by Faces is pretty good also.

1
Gatoraids

“Other Major Sports are Inherently Inferior to Pro Football and Therefore Unworthy of Our Time.”

Last edited 1 year ago by Gatoraids
3
Don T

🏆
comment image

4
Jimbo

Catcher in the Rye.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap

4
ballsofsteelandfury

What does a magician have to do with this???

0
BallsofLacrosseAndMapleSyrup

I AM SAM. I AM SAM. SAM I AM.
THAT SAM-I-AM! THAT SAM-I-AM! I DO NOT LIKE THAT SAM-I-AM!
DO WOULD YOU LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM?

6
Gumbygirl

Goddammit! That was my next one!

2
BeefReeferLives

“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

8
ballsofsteelandfury

This one’s great

2
BeefReeferLives

Douglas was a gem… RIP.

1
DJ TAJ

From Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Book
3
Horatio Cornblower

Goddammit, “See the child.” was my next pick.

1
Gumbygirl

.

1000006201
3
Brocky

My next pick: The Martian

LOG ENTRY: SOL 6

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.

4
Horatio Cornblower

“When we pulled up to Jimmy’s Joynt on Pier 23 the doorman was beating a skinny guy in a tux with a black rubber dildo the length of a Louisville slugger and the diameter of a soup can, hitting him only in the soft parts-the thigh, the shoulder, the caboose-so each blow sounded like a butcher smacking a fat ham.”

-Christopher Moore, Razzmatazz

3
SonOfSpam

“Mother died today.”

-either Camus or Oedipus

2
Gatoraids

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”

0
scotchnaut

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

–Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

5
scotchnaut

This reminds me of a comedian-can’t remember who-that said, “In the beginning there was nothing. Then there was light. There was still nothing but now you could see it.”

3
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

I also just got back from a visit to Unseen University!

1
BeefReeferLives

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.”

5
Doktor Zymm

Hitchhikers Guide!

I need to reread those

Last edited 1 year ago by Doktor Zymm
1
ballsofsteelandfury

Next pick:

She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes – a size-eight dame in a size-six dress and every mug in the joint was rooting for the two sizes to make a break for it as they watched her wiggle in the door and shimmy onto a barstool with her back to the door.

2
Horatio Cornblower

Really thought this was going to be Noir or Razzmatazz, but

comment image

0
ballsofsteelandfury

It’s Noir

0
ballsofsteelandfury

I’m not counting prologues

0
Horatio Cornblower

Ah, shit, didn’t even notice prologue there.

But I did on the sequel!

0
Horatio Cornblower

Also Balls is correct: prologues, for purposes of this draft, do not count.

1
Horatio Cornblower

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

2
WCS

The late 20th century has witnessed a scientific goldrush of astonishing proportions.

0
WCS

Nobody, huh?

0
Gumbygirl

Cosmos?

0
Brocky

My pick:

The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail

3
Brocky

I realize now i never gave a title, can you all guess?

0
ballsofsteelandfury

Jaws?

1
Brocky

Yep

1
scotchnaut

Jaws?

0
Rikki-Tikki-Deadly

I preferred the opening line of The Deep: “In sea water more than a few feet deep, blood is green. Water filters the light from above, seeming to consume the colors of the spectrum shade by shade. Red is the first to succumb, to disappear. Green lasts longer. But then, below 100 feet, green, too, fades away, leaving blue. In the twilight depths–180, 200 feet, and beyond–blood looks black.”

1
ballsofsteelandfury

Next pick:

The voice on the phone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn’t hear too well what it said – partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down. I fumbled it around and grunted.

0
yeah right

“It was love at first site. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

1
Don T

Yes! Saved me a Blair Witch

2
scotchnaut

As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

-Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

4
Horatio Cornblower

At some point I have to remember to remind people that it’s wait ten picks or a half hour before making your next pick. We’ve gotten away from that and I blame myself.*

*(I actually blame all of you people)

2
Brocky

I blame Goodell

3
Don T

Too good.

-Max Bialistock

1
2Pack

This is currently not fair to me. I’m at work and all my books are at the casa…

2
Horatio Cornblower

“Horatio Cornblower Wastes Your Employer’s Time” is more than a tag, it’s a lifestyle. Look them up. I’ll say it’s OK, I told you that you could.

6
scotchnaut

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black the cobblestones silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ woods limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowback, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”

-Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas

4
Horatio Cornblower

“I’ve had 18 straight whiskies; I believe that’s the record.”

Dylan Thomas, right before collapsing into the alcoholic coma that would eventually kill him.*

*Or not. It’s a popular legend about Thomas’s demise, but as this pretty interesting piece shows there’s some significant debate about how much of this is actually true.

0
Doktor Zymm

And of course when I was at NYU we went to the White Horse and ordered 18 shots of whisky, though we had a group of 8ish for consumption

1
Horatio Cornblower

My gamble on Moby Dick pays off and I still get “A screaming comes across the sky” from Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’

Which was otherwise a tremendous disappointment.

1
Gatoraids

“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”

6
Horatio Cornblower

“And then Stephen King wrote 3.5 good books before going off the rails”

The Gunslinger

4
Gatoraids

Well give him a little credit for at least finishing after he was hit by van. Might need something bigger than a van to get Martin to finish Game of Thrones

3
Horatio Cornblower

Oh, did King get hit by a van? I didn’t notice him never shutting the fuck up about it over the last 2-3 books.

I’m actually rereading the Game of Thrones books, at an extremely leisurely pace. Martin is never finishing that series, and I’d be willing to bet never even publishes the 6th one.

3
Horatio Cornblower

I’d sooner face the Night King.

0
Doktor Zymm

Blew his wad on the stupid tv ending

0
Horatio Cornblower

I do have to admit, that is a great opening sentence by King.

0
Don T

This is from one of the best things I’ve read. A li’l rule bending, but totally worth it.

In the department of—but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service. Each individual attached to them nowadays thinks all society insulted in his person. Quite recently a complaint was received from a justice of the peace, in which he plainly demonstrated that all the imperial institutions were going to the dogs, and that the Czar’s sacred name was being taken in vain; and in proof he appended to the complaint a romance in which the justice of the peace is made to appear about once every ten lines, and sometimes in a drunken condition. Therefore, in order to avoid all unpleasantness, it will be better to describe the department in question only as a certain department. 

It’s brief [link]

1
ballsofsteelandfury

Next pick:

As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good: lavender, sage, and a hint of clove.

1
Sharkbait

““It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

4
ballsofsteelandfury

Tale of two cities – Dickens?

Last edited 1 year ago by ballsofsteelandfury
1
Sharkbait

Correct. That intro still hits just as hard today.

1
WCS

It was the *BLURST* of times?!?

7
Horatio Cornblower

Stupid monkey.

4
WCS

We were somwherre around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold…

7
WCS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjBYvOsN0Vs

(for ingenious cinematic and musical context)

1
ballsofsteelandfury

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?

2
Don T

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

i.e.,

“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía remembered that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez.

PS – The Netflix series is omg WOW. Second part in June, altamente recomendada

7
2Pack

The Falkland Islands misfortune has always been to be wanted more than they are loved.

The Battle for the Falklands Islands, Hastings and Jenkins

4
Don T

Proof-positive of being Argentinian 😉

1
ballsofsteelandfury

Ja ja ja ja!!

0
Doktor Zymm

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

6
ballsofsteelandfury

Ooh, that’s a good one! I’ve read this book before. If only my memory was as good as the book…

0
Doktor Zymm

Russian

0
ballsofsteelandfury

Had to look it up but now I remember!

0
ballsofsteelandfury

First pick:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

Last edited 1 year ago by ballsofsteelandfury
2
ballsofsteelandfury

We could do a side game where people guess the book…

0
Doktor Zymm

Yeah, but yours is easy

0
ballsofsteelandfury

Gotta start with an easy one. Then no one would play.

1
Doktor Zymm

True, and mine is pretty easy too

1
2Pack

too hard Brah…

1
ballsofsteelandfury

Dok, wanna reveal it?

0
Doktor Zymm

Ian Fleming

0
Sharkbait

Casino Royale?

0
ballsofsteelandfury

Ding ding ding!

0
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