Mash-up

As you may know, I am in the habit of regularly pulling a book down off my shelf and posting the first sentence to Facebook and Twitter. My friend Mark, who is brilliant but may have too much time on his hands, writes: "Don't ask why...there's no answer...but for some time I've been vaguely captivated by your many offered opening lines (nearly four dozen now), floating in a vacuum as they have been...and wondered what could become of them, separated from their origins and spinning loose in space. The obvious answer is they must try to tell their own stories, as best as they can. The result is attached. Whether you consider the items ten (very) short stories, the opening graphs for ten bizarre tales, or one exceedingly bizarre stream-of-consciousness draft as presented by an insane immortal rambling through time and space....well, that's up to you."

1 Prime - In which the foot of the abbey is reached, and William demonstrates his great acumen. After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keep a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.

2 Even in high summer, Tintagel was a haunted place. The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of ROMANCE OF THE ROSE was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.

3a A king should write his own story, especially a Briton. We're a race of musical liars, and who you are may depend on who's singing your song. I warn you that what you're starting to read is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. There were six of us to dinner that night at Mike Schofield's house in London: Mike and his wife and daughter, my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt. In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.

3b The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. On page 22 of Liddell Hart's History of World War I you will read that an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 artillery pieces), planned for the 24th of July, 1916, had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains, Captain Liddell Hart comments, caused this delay, an insignificant one, to be sure.

4 A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. Issac McCaskin, 'Uncle Ike,' past 70 and nearer 80 than he ever corroborated anymore, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ... He thought at first that it was a trick of the light, a reflection perhaps, or a large rock below the surface of the water. That was when I saw the pendulum.

5 There’s likely some polished way of starting a story like this, a clever bit of gaming that’ll sucker people in surer than the best banco feeler in town. The scent of smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. This the trip I took that day, the day they brought Walter in. Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no buses or trains heading in that direction, though six days a week a truck from Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies in the next-door town of Paradise Chapel: occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Radclif. I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty much disgusted with life. The point about white burgundies is that I hate them myself.

6 The fog was thick at the center of the bridge where the man stood leaning against the rail. Although the streets of New York were scarcely a hundred yards away, he might have been in a little world of his own. For the only light in the midst of that cloud of black night fog came from an arc light on the bridge. In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hogtied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. Though I haven't ever been on the screen, I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday - or so I was told.

7 It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my head ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." The first time my father met Johnson Gibbs they fought like tomcats.

8 Explosion! Concussion! The vault doors burst open. And deep inside, the money is ready for pillage, rapine, loot. Who's that? Who's inside the vault? Oh God! The man with no face. Looking. Looming. Silent. Horrible. Run ... Run ... I tore down the Continental Shelf off the Bouge Band while the pogo made periscope hops trying to track me. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. August 1, 1961. Dear Shilda, By now you've heard it, and I want you to call me collect as soon as possible. In late August, 1966, the city jail in Batavia, New York, held four regular prisoners, that is, four prisoners who were being kept on something more than an overnight basis.

9 In shirt sleeves, the way I generally worked, I sat sketching a bar of soap taped to the upper corner of my drawing board. In the Abalone (Arizona) Morning Herald for August third there appeared on page five an advertisement eight columns wide and twenty-one inches long. I haul things.

10 Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern.

Robert Reed

Robert Reed and I shared a love of comic books. A couple of years ago, I received this e-mail from Robert. It speaks to his talent and his humor. I wanted to share it:

One more comic book thing before I let you go. A while back there was a Justice League Unlimited episode that involved the Legion of Super-heroes and the Fatal Five. The next day I composed this little song on the way to work. I can't write music, but I hear it as something like the White Stripes might sing. Not many people have any idea who the song's about, but I'm pretty darn sure you will!

In the thirty-second century
The marvels of technology
Cannot prevent catastrophe
And things can start to go
Oh, so bad!
That's why we depend on Matter-Eater Lad!

There's a warlord from the 8th dimension
Just escaped from his detention
Fiendish plots are his intention
He's an evil genius,
He's a cad!
So please, save us, Matter-Eater Lad!

Laser blasts from Robot visors
Are to him, mere appetizers.
Fire, earthquakes, monsters, doom and gloom!
There's no peril he cannot consume!

From break of day, throughout the night,
He's there to fight the good fight,
Out of crime, he'll take a bite!
The best friend that our world
Has ever had!
Bon Appétit, Matter-Eater Lad!