The first and last lines of books are often memorable termini upon which the story's beats land. But what of second lines? Perhaps they're filler, piece-work, bridging steps taken on the journey between first and last. Or perhaps they are in fact more than mere glueing elements. As part of an informal experiment on second lines (itself a concerted displacement activity in order to avoid work that urgently needs doing), here's an attempt to construct a narrative glued together from second lines. The sources were arbitrarily picked: the thirty or so books in a particular house that were not on the bookshelves. Typos and interventions with brackets and paragraphs are our own.
We're forced to conclude that the answer to the unstated question is: Yes, it is difficult (for us anyway) to make coherent stories out of random content. And it's rather long.
What happens when the future has imploded into the past? This means that almost half the total population of 130 million, including adults and children, businessmen and the bed-ridden elderly, carry mobile phones. The prospect is not immediately appealing. (Of course, when I make that statement I don't mean to be taken literally - heaven forbid!)
I crossed a rattling drawbridge. My, what a nice town! ('What will he find out there?' asks one ape.)
Richard D'Oyly Carte had built a special theater at the Savoy just for their works. He chose one of the most privileged and most difficult rooms of the New Gallery: the Mirror Hall. (Right around then the young collegiate woman who had been working as a summer intern put in her last day and returned to New England and I realized that for her, years began and ended at odd times and were barely recognizable as years - I had sat across the newsroom talking on the phone to a city commissioner while she cleared out her desk, and as she came across a paper hat from the Fourth of July the time that had passed was visible, like the shadow that follows a searchlight. Sometimes we are conscious of this movement; more often we are not.)
We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. Small talk revealed that we both had an interest in writing about offices. In 120 days from now the building of the INTEGRAL will be finished.
It operates two divisions - the Consumer Division which distributes content and services to multiple digital access devices from its own convergence technology platforms; and the Business Division which provides voice, data and mobile solutions to businesses. The proposed master-plan established four long, 10-story slab-shaped buildings occupying most of the perimeter of the plot, and leaving a large public space in the center which included community and parking facilities for the four buildings. 'Whenever you fell like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all of the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.' (He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.)
This book attempts to provide a fresh topography of the airport by considering its place in history; the creative destruction it wreaks on the landscape in which it is located; its views on abstract space; its assumption of political roles; its awkward sense of the aesthetic; and the perceptions of finality it inevitably generates. The rant goes something like this (actually this is the first time I have so formulated it): Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel from the canon of the future but the nurse romance. The first book to do this was John Snow's Survey of London, published in 1598. (It is rewarding to identify these first, and seek to discover them in the different methods and approaches which apparently differ in the external appearances, but satisfy the requirements of analysis.)
In his excellent The Atlantic Campaign Dan van der Vat expresses a violent dislike for texts 'bespattered by numbers', but these notes are often of considerable value to anyone wishing to pursue specific points. To me, or to him? But I would say that design, the basis for both arts, or rather the very soul which conceives and nourishes within itself all the aspects of the intellect, existed in absolute perfection at the origin of all things when God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting. To these ends, entries vary between the cursory and the encyclopedic: major artists and artists whose careers or talents have recently been reassessed, or who seem to the authors to merit reassessment, are given the fuller treatment. (I know plenty who are Milanese by adoption - no wonder: almost all the writers in Milan are not native; the numbers of adopted Roman authors continues to grow; Florentines by adoption there still are, though less than before; but as for Turin, one feels that one has to be born there, or to have come down there from the valleys of Piedmont following the natural movement of the rivers that flow into the Po. The very idea would be preposterous in France.)
But we don't need to learn something completely new; we need to learn to be smarter, more skeptical, and more skilled about what we already know. (There is a wealth of information and help available to you, but do you know where to go for this help or how to get the help you need?)
