So Bad it's Great: Awful Opening Sentences

I might be bias against this dude but anything Charles Dickens writes his awful whether in beginning, middle, or end. Does he not quit when he writes? What the hell was he thinking?

[i]"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."[/i] — Oliver Twist

Que?

"The woman pushed on the baby's stomach and sucked its penis into her mouth; it was thinner than the American menthols she smoked and a bit slimy, like raw fish. She was testing to see if the baby would cry, but the little arms and legs were still, so she peeled away the plastic wrapping over its face." - Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Ok it's disgusting and awful, but I was hooked after reading a crazy opening like that. Not quite what you were going for, but I felt the need to post it.

Fucking gross. I hope this guy is not related to Haruki Murakami.

One must remember that Dickens was getting paid by the word. If that system were still in play, I could take 14 pages describing the spider I just squished in a paper towel. However you may feel about Mr. D. (and he makes me insane, too--like tell the story already), we do owe him for the fact that authors maintain rights to their work--meager though they may be. It used to be ficiton was work-for-hire--they gave you a flat fee and no matter how successful the book, that's all you got. Charles "With God as My Witness I will Never Go Hungry Again" Dickens negotiated the basics of what is still today the basic publishing contract that allows you reclaim rights to what you created.

[QUOTE=stoyan]Fucking gross. I hope this guy is not related to Haruki Murakami.[/QUOTE]
I don't know about that. But, Ryu Murakami is the guy who wrote the book that the movie Audition was based on. I don't know if you've heard of that though.

He also wrote In The Miso Soup. He's a really good writer, that opening is just a little fucked up.

Chokes opening line about telling me not to read this actually made me think 'Well, fuck you then I wont read it!"

but i did anyway

I've heard of [I]Audition[/I] but don't have the nerve to watch it. And that opening of Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami? Reminder again that I should never attempt to eat breakfast while reading the posts around here. There goes another bowl of Cheerios. We need a smilie for "barfing."

Damn, sorry to ruin your breakfast. Although cheerios can be a dinner sometimes too, or maybe a midnight snack... nevermind.

Next time I'll put up a warning - ** Luddy, if you are eating right now, don't read this post **

[QUOTE=Jeebus]I might be bias against this dude but anything Charles Dickens writes his awful whether in beginning, middle, or end. Does he not quit when he writes? What the hell was he thinking?

[i]"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."[/i] — Oliver Twist

Que?[/QUOTE]
Agreed.. my god.. who cares, I gave up at "inasmuch."

[QUOTE=PGoutis01]Next time I'll put up a warning - ** Luddy, if you are eating right now, don't read this post **[/QUOTE]

Well, that is quite kind of you...but having made it through "Guts" (which did come with its own sort of warning--not to mention a reputation that preceeds it)...well, keyboards are cheap. A good gross-out is priceless. I spent my last birthday dinner in a tacky Polynesian restaurant trading dead baby jokes with my 14 year old daughter. My family know how to par-tay.

Cheerios for supper sounds great. What wine would you suggest? No, never mind, Cheerios is more of a beer kind of meal.

[B]Ire[/B] and [B]Jeebus[/B] can you imagine what Dickens would have done with the Murakami?

[I] Inasmuch as the baby, which being an infant comprised only those parts by which one would recognize it as a human child, those parts being toes, five on the left foot and five on the right, making for a total of ten, those feet being attached to two unmuscled but dimpled appendages that might be termed legs.....
[/I]

I give up. Already exhausted. Pick it up from there if you want. I'm going to go get those Cheerios and beer.

[QUOTE=Luddy Dunn]Well, that is quite kind of you...but having made it through "Guts" (which did come with its own sort of warning--not to mention a reputation that preceeds it)...well, keyboards are cheap. A good gross-out is priceless. I spent my last birthday dinner in a tacky Polynesian restaurant trading dead baby jokes with my 14 year old daughter. My family know how to par-tay.

Cheerios for supper sounds great. What wine would you suggest? No, never mind, Cheerios is more of a beer kind of meal.

[B]Ire[/B] and [B]Jeebus[/B] can you imagine what Dickens would have done with the Murakami?

[I] Inasmuch as the baby, which being an infant comprised only those parts by which one would recognize it as a human child, those parts being toes, five on the left foot and five on the right, making for a total of ten, those feet being attached to two unmuscled but dimpled appendages that might be termed legs.....
[/I]

I give up. Already exhausted. Pick it up from there if you want. I'm going to go get those Cheerios and beer.[/QUOTE]
awesome... but I just don't want to add to the madness...

[QUOTE=Luddy Dunn]We need a smilie for "barfing."[/QUOTE]
I've been lobbying for months.

I'm not sure if this qualifies, but the opening to Ray Bradbury's [U]Fahrenheit 451[/U] was so cheese-tastic it was almost good. [I]Almost.[/I] "It was a pleasure to burn."

neat, i just read not 10 minutes ago that Fahrenheit 451 was named over the fact that paper burns at 451°F

[QUOTE=Rents]I've been lobbying for months.

I'm not sure if this qualifies, but the opening to Ray Bradbury's [U]Fahrenheit 451[/U] was so cheese-tastic it was almost good. [I]Almost.[/I] "It was a pleasure to burn."[/QUOTE]

That book sucks. I told you not to put it on The List.

[QUOTE=jane s.]That book sucks.[/QUOTE]

As does a lot of Bradbury's stuff. Which kind of breaks my heart because he was/is this freaking legend that I'd never had a chance to read--except the T-Rex scene from "Sound of Thunder" which is the single passage of text shown to us in 70's high school English classes as the ultimate in descriptive mastery. (We got lied to a lot back in the 70's.) When I finally sat down to a couple of his big hits, Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked, and the aforementioned 451--I was like, damn, this is really, um, disappointing.

Then last autumn, I was invited to see one of Bradbury's few excursions into theater: [I]To the Chicago Abyss[/I]. No word has yet been invented for how excruciatingly awful it is. If you can ever get your hands on the text, it is worth the pain because, like, [I]wow[/I]. [Insert emoticon for projectile vomiting here.]

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

[QUOTE=Spike]"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)[/QUOTE]

And thus we have reached the ground zero of bad. Thank you Spike.

[I]It was a dark night? How odd.[/I]

[QUOTE=Jeebus]I might be bias against this dude but anything Charles Dickens writes his awful whether in beginning, middle, or end. Does he not quit when he writes? What the hell was he thinking?

[i]"Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter."[/i] — Oliver Twist

Que?[/QUOTE]

he got paid by the word.

SNAP!

This is not bad as much as it is amazing--so much so that it overwhelms any storytelling intent the writer may have had. This is the sentence that supercedes any stylistic tricks the author may have further up his sleeve. What follows is impossible. What follows I've hear called with admiration "straight forward balls." I have referred to this passage in other places, but I finally found it in cut and paste form. Ladies and Gentlemen, a masterwork of sentence structure--prepare to meet almost (minus one) all of the characters in Donald Antrim's [I]The Hundred Brothers[/I] in one fucking sentence:

My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack — all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years — and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal scenes that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletin-board subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton; schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own "lost boy" way; and Eli, who spends his solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks with drawings — the artist's multiple renderings for a larger work? — portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the "new millennium" psychotherapist; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you'll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizing the decaying downtown area (as "an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways"), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob, the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated "perfect" brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of "sexual language" in eleven types of social insects — all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he's fled the vicinity, he's right here under our noses, he's using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing) all my ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker's ashes.

----

Yeah, baby! Top that.

That reminds me of a rapper accepting his award on MTV...
He forgot the almighty creator though.

all the rappers friends have like 20 "akas" also.
"This is for Shnizzle aka Mad DOGG G aka Bling King aka..." and on and on they
go.

[QUOTE=Luddy Dunn]As does a lot of Bradbury's stuff. Which kind of breaks my heart because he was/is this freaking legend that I'd never had a chance to read--except the T-Rex scene from "Sound of Thunder" which is the single passage of text shown to us in 70's high school English classes as the ultimate in descriptive mastery. (We got lied to a lot back in the 70's.) When I finally sat down to a couple of his big hits, Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked, and the aforementioned 451--I was like, damn, this is really, um, disappointing.

Then last autumn, I was invited to see one of Bradbury's few excursions into theater: [I]To the Chicago Abyss[/I]. No word has yet been invented for how excruciatingly awful it is. If you can ever get your hands on the text, it is worth the pain because, like, [I]wow[/I]. [Insert emoticon for projectile vomiting here.][/QUOTE]
That’s a relief. I’ve had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 for five years, I’ve tried reading it over twenty times, but I just can’t get past the melodramatic tone. It starts off like a really bad romance novel.
[QUOTE]
The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood regarding Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive that he felt he had said something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix disc on his chest, he spoke again.[/QUOTE]

I can’t stop laughing at the last bit. Must be the salamander.

[QUOTE=PGoutis01]That reminds me of a rapper accepting his award on MTV...
He forgot the almighty creator though.[/QUOTE]

At what point would the "shut the fuck up and get off the stage" music start?

I believe the Almighty is actually who "the old fucker" is supposed to be. I mean in the novel. The story is so post-modern that as with all really deliberate post-modern work, you just sit there thinking, okay, this is parody, right? Of course at the end one of the brothers is killed by all his other brothers. Guess which one? That's right, the narrating brother--because that's the only way to end a story such as this. And by that time, you don't care. All of it takes place during this dinner party in the red room the brothers milling about talking to each other, while outside the staggeringly huge mansion, the peasants are rising in revolution and headed for the house with torches and pitchforks. From that first sentence on, I was reading, purely dumbstruck, thinking, Mr. Antrim? Dude, what were you smoking when you wrote this?

[QUOTE=Dr.Jekyll&Mr.Hyde]That’s a relief. I’ve had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 for five years, I’ve tried reading it over twenty times, but I just can’t get past the melodramatic tone. It starts off like a really bad romance novel.

I can’t stop laughing at the last bit. Must be the salamander.[/QUOTE]

Oh, man, I'd forgotten about the salamander. Thanks for reminding me of that line. Now all I'm seeing is that dancing gecko from the car insurance ads.

[QUOTE=Luddy Dunn]At what point would the "shut the fuck up and get off the stage" music start?

I believe the Almighty is actually who "the old fucker" is supposed to be. I mean in the novel. The story is so post-modern that as with all really deliberate post-modern work, you just sit there thinking, okay, this is parody, right? Of course at the end one of the brothers is killed by all his other brothers. Guess which one? That's right, the narrating brother--because that's the only way to end a story such as this. And by that time, you don't care. All of it takes place during this dinner party in the red room the brothers milling about talking to each other, while outside the staggeringly huge mansion, the peasants are rising in revolution and headed for the house with torches and pitchforks. From that first sentence on, I was reading, purely dumbstruck, thinking, Mr. Antrim? Dude, what were you smoking when you wrote this?[/QUOTE]
But Wait! It was all just one of those murder mystery dinner parties. He wasn't supposed to really die. Somebody just got pissed off at him because he would never shut up.

He broke into his steak with - "The steak comes from the farm that is run by the farmer, in Animal Farm though the animals ran the farm, because the farmer was an ass, so at the farm he eats the grass, other animals eat the grass, on the farm there are chickens, sheep, cows, horses, pigs, lots and lots of bugs, there's a tractor, and the family, the dad, the mom, they had four kids - two daughters and two boys, how perfect is that - the families names were Jack Benson - he was the Dad obviously, Sandy Benson - the mother, and the kids were Jack Jr., Jimmy, Jessica, and Jamie - they called her Jamie because they weren't she if she was going to be a girl or a boy.
BLAM!
That's when one of his brothers was like "Shut the Fuck up!" and shot him...

Ok, I just woke up and I haven't had any coffee yet. Sorry about the rambling.

Well, that is a far better ending than the one in the book...which, I recall being that his brothers decide to kill him because someone has to die. the murder is actually handled in the manner of ritualized sacrifice--involving witch doctor masks and the like. The book is one of those super insider lit-crit theory irony jokes that only works the same way as the Emperor's New Clothes as in um, writer guy? you realize you have no story here? If it is a test, I'm not sure which of us, reader or writer, failed.

But man, that first sentence. Why? Because he could. It's fun to read simply because the whole of the novel (very short) is so fucking insane.

[QUOTE=Luddy Dunn]My brothers ....... all my ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker's ashes.

----

Yeah, baby! Top that.[/QUOTE]

Sweet fucking comma, hyphen, semi-colon and colon overload batman! This guy should be shot with a cannon that fires his own books dipped in glue and wrapped in barb wire.