Humbolt begs Lolita who's passed pubescence but is younger than 17,
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. Lo. Lee. Ta…
Vladamir Nabokov
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York…
Sylvia Plath
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…
Hunter S. Thompson
These examples of opening paragraphs written by authors I love.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
Earnest Hemingway
Hemingway’s opening paragraph paints a picture for the reader.
She quietly dresses, slipping into a white thong, then covering her nakedness with an oversized Oxford shirt. Outside, she gets on her Vespa scooter, moments later she's at Dog Beach where she rents an umbrella and folding beach chair from Lazy Carlos’s.
Figaro Lucowski
How does this opening paragraph from my story Lazy Carlo’s stand up against the others here?
More on Hemingway—
He was a man’s man who couldn’t get a handle on bohemianism. He didn't fit in with Stein, Elliot, and Pound.
The sea fish, Marlins, and Swordfish he spent hours trolling from his boat, Pilar, got revenge on him when he fell ill with stage IV skin cancer while living in Idaho in 1961.
In the end, bohemians have the best time, from TS Elliot to modern rockers, the Beats, jazz musicians, and artists.
James Baldwin said, commenting on life in the 60s,
Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does homosexuality.
There are abundant articles on the web about pain, heartache, pleasure, and happiness, stuff you read in Psychology Today— words, words and more words, soapy stuff, experts and more experts writing the same twaddle, none of it out of the box.
Experts make the point that we are living in a world where people take too much psychotropic dope, particularly anti-depressants and mood stabilizers— I’m on anti-depressants, why? Because my body and soul were consumed by a black spirit.
A few years ago I met a German psychiatrist in Pai, Thailand, an unorthodox hippy town in the Kao Tao mountains that looks like a Spaghetti Western set.
We drank Thai beer, Leo, with ice like Thais do. Earl (the shrink) says to me,
psychotrop drogen sind nutzlos, after a month the body becomes immune so you must continue increasing the dosage, so there's no reason to prescribe them.
I got the vibe the German shrink was on the run— Pai’s a scene where people can slip away from the de facto world, a no man’s land, or from the law even, for writing bogus scripts.
You must go to jail to know what it's like.
I'm at home in bed, not in jail. Millions of men and women in the world are doing time as I write this—
God bless the blind poets and poetesses doing time because they can’t look up at the moon for inspiration.
God bless your computer and typewriter— they are faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a flash.
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