FINDING WATER

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FINDING WATER by Julia Cameron is a course of action to unlock/unblock and stimulate creativity. It seems to have worked for Mrs H, so I thought I'd give it a go.

Posted by parabolichobo

23rd Nov 2008, 16:47 comments (0)

I Am A Strange Loop...

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I Am A Strange Loop / Infidel / The Graveyard Book / Where The Wild Things Were

I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. Opening paragraph:

One gloomy day in early 1991, a couple months after my father died, I was standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, and my mother, looking at a sweet and touching photograph of my father taken perhaps fifteen years earlier, said to me, with a note of despair, "What meaning does that photograph have? None at all. It's just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It's useless." The bleakness of my mother's grief-drenched remark set my head spinning because I knew instinctively that I disagreed with her, but I did not quite know how to express to her the way I felt the photograph should be considered.

Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Opening paragraph:

"Who are you?" "I am Ayaan, daughter of Hirsi, the son of Magan." I am sitting with my grandmother on a grass mat under the talal tree. Behind us is our house, and the branches of the talal tree are all that shields us from the sun blazing down on the white sand. "Go on," my grandmother says, glaring at me.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Opening paragraph:

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.

Where The Wild Things Were, by William Stolzenburg. Opening paragraph:

On the northernmost tip of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in a wild and lonely little crescent of shore called Mukkaw Bay, ocean meets land in a crash of wind and wave against craggy rock, geysers of salt spray erupting into brooding skies. Mukkaw Bay is the sort of place to imagine the Romantic philosopher, hair swept crazy by the gales, pondering the epic clash of titanic forces. And so in a sense it came to be, when in the summer of 1963 a young farsighted ecologist happened upon the place with a few pressing curiosities regarding the vital struggle between predator and prey.

Posted by Caine

19th Oct 2008, 21:52 comments (2)

Blindness | Echo Burning | Cyteen

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Blindness / Echo Burning / Cyteen

Blindness, by José Saramago. Opening paragraph:

The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called. The motorists kept an impatient foot on the clutch, leaving their cars at the ready, advancing, retreating like nervous horses that can sense the whiplash about to be inflicted. The pedestrians have just finished crossing but the sign allowing the cars to go will be delayed for some seconds, some people maintain that this delay, while apparently so insignificant, has only to be multiplied by the thousands of traffic lights that exist in the city and by the successive changes of their three colours to produce one of the most serious causes of traffic jams or bottlenecks, to use the more current term.

Echo Burning, by Lee Child. Opening paragraph:

There were three watchers, two men and a boy. They were using telescopes, not field glasses. It was a question of distance. They were almost a mile from their target area, because of the terrain. There was no closer cover. It was low, undulating country, burned khaki by the sun, grass and rock and sandy soil alike. The nearest safe concealment was the broad dip they were in, a bone dry gulch scaped out a million years ago by a different climate, when there had been rain and ferns and rushing rivers.

Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh. Opening paragraph:

Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a world sown with petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten human civilizations - a planet on which at the time human beings first flew in to space, humans still hunted a surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun natural yarns by hand and cooked over wood fires.

Posted by Caine

19th Oct 2008, 21:23 comments (3)

Speaks The Nightbird...

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Speaks The Nightbird / The Queen of Bedlam / The Great Derangement

Speaks The Nightbird, by Robert McCammon. Opening paragraph:

Came the time when the two travellers knew night would catch them, and shelter must be found. It had been a joyful day for frogs and mudhens. For the human breed, however, the low gray clouds and chill rain coiled chains around the soul. By the calendar the month of May should by all rights and predictions be charitable if not merry, but this May had entered like a grim-lipped miser pinching out candles in church.

The Queen of Bedlam, by Robert McCammon. Opening paragraph:

'Twas said better to light a candle than to curse the dark, but in the town of New York in the summer of 1702 one might do both, for the candles were small and dark was large. True, there were the town-appointed constables and watchmen. Yet often between Dock Street and Broad Way these heroes of the nocturne lost their courage to a flask of John Barleycorn and the other temptations that beckoned so flagrantly on the midsummer breeze, be it the sound of merriment from the harbor taverns or the intoxicating scent of perfume from the rose-colored house of Polly Blossom.

The Great Derangement, by Matt Taibbi. Opening paragraph:

It's a Thursday afternoon in San Antonio and I'm in a rented room - creaky floorboards, peeling wallpaper, month to month, no lease, space heater only, the ultimate temporary lifestyle - and I can't find the right channel on the television. I rented this place, it seems, without making sure that it had ESPN. This realization thows the poverty of the room into relief for the first time.

Posted by Caine

19th Oct 2008, 20:51 comments (0)