Part One - I - The first Paragraph and the First Sentence

[Mark Thibodeau]

Please forgive me, but...

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On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 9:55 PM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> PART ONE - I - First Paragraph
>
>
>
> Okay, first of all, looking at the first paragraph taken as a solid whole,
> is absolutely marvelous. So beautiful, so evocative, so lush and tactile.
> It’s an incredible opening paragraph. It tells us so much about the
> environment that we’re starting off in. “The sights, the sounds, the
> smells” to paraphrase Spinal Tap. And capping it with a reminder that we’re
> at the cusp of America’s birthing… that the departure of the British
> Loyalists still rings in the heads of the people who will populate this
> novel.
>
>
>
> Shrinking our perspective even more, that first sentence. Again, it’s just
> fantastic, ranking among my favorite first lines in all of literary
> history. Much has already been made over the parallels between the
> “Snow-Balls” and “their Arcs” being a gentle, even whimsical counterpoint
> to the deadly serious rockets “screaming” across the skies of Gravity’s
> Rainbow (another killer first line, perhaps more significant for its
> brevity). The playful stuff of snowball fights and sleds, and sweet home
> cooking and children running amok… it’s a far cry from the grim evacuations
> of the London Blitz, when the world, itself, was “given over to” the
> “carefree assaults” of fantastically over-powered madmen.
>
>
>
> But there’s one small section I’d like to focus on that has niggled at my
> brain since first reading. The fragment: “among rhythmic slaps of Batter
> and Spoon”. I don’t know about you folks, but personally, whenever I come
> across the line “rhythmic slaps” in fiction, it’s usually as part of a
> scene that is sexual in nature (“the rhythmic slaps of their bellies”,
> etc). Spoon and Batter (both capitalized) are also both easy to see as
> phallic (the Spoon, as opposed to the more probably whisk) and vulva-like
> (the batter, presumably in a bowl or receptacle, long seen as a universal
> symbol for the feminine archetype). Indeed, “Batter” itself has become a
> bit of a euphemism for sperm (“baby batter”).
>
>
> Anyhoo, just a couple thoughts to start things off.
>
> MT
>
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