Why NOT "A screaming comes across the sky"?

[jd]

I used to be a Wolf fan, I can't remember which I read...  back in the
ol' fantasy reading days... one of his trilogies, I think, the first
called Sword & Claw if I remember correctly.  He did it right.

"A screaming comes across the sky" is a very powerful opening line.
They can be powerful - but I feel that the closing line is more so.  A
first PARAGRAPH, now, that's important.  The first sentence is just
icing in my opinion.  Books with good last lines just give me this
wonderful sensation that first lines can't quite compare with.

And not to get back on Morrison but I remember reading what I
considered to be a rather self-impressed foreward to Jazz where she
talks about how she struggles with the first lines of her books, and
that one particularly.  And it just...  I dunno.  I can't remember
what it was but it was some onomatopoeia like HNRF for something which
was one of the more underwhelming first lines I've read, other than
The Corrections, whose first line made me want to burn the book
immediately.  Maybe it was because of the play-up in the foreward.

On a tangent - forewards - they kind of suck.  Does anyone agree?  It
seems that when it's the author writing a foreward they're trying to
put in the reader's mind things that they feel they didn't, or simply
didn't, accomplish in the book itself.  And when it's another person
writing it it still seems cheap, pumping up a book without letting it
stand for itself.  I am much more fond of afterwords, they seem to be
much more appropriately placed, allowing the reader to experience the
book and THEN give some elucidation.  I think that Slow Learner
doesn't suffer as badly simply because Pynchon mainly said, hey, this
is when I wrote it, this is where it was published, and by the way I
look back on these and am not super fond of them (to simplify
greatly).  Still, I think it would have been better as an afterword
anyways.

On 8/30/06, Anville Azote <anville.azote at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/29/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Unfortunately, that means bright blue these days, as
> > Gibson's since found out to his chagrin ...
> >
> > See also The Young Gods' LP/CD, T.V. Sky ...
> >
> > --- David Gentle <gentle_family at btinternet.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This one should fall in 2 seconds:
> > > "The Sky above the port was the colour of television
> > > tuned to a dead channel"
> >
>
> "The world went dark, and a low roar filled Richard's head, like the
> maddened growling of a thousand enraged beasts.  He blinked at the
> darkness, held tight to his bag.  He wondered if he had been foolish,
> putting the knife away.  Some people brushed past him in the dark.
> Richard started away from them.  There were steps in front of hi;
> Richard began to ascend, and, as he did so, the world began to
> resolve, to take shape and to re-form.
>
> "The growling was the roar of traffic, and he was coming out of an
> underpass in Trafalgar Square.  The sky was the perfect untroubled
> blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."
>
> --- Neil Gaiman, NEVERWHERE, p. 350
>