FEET FIRST: “DR. FISH” FOOT BATHS
Got eczema? Psoriasis? The fish are ready to see you . . . the garra rufa or “doctor fish” footbath has become popular at many Asian spas. Soak your feet in shallow water while dozens of tiny doctor fish nibble away at the dead skin. According to one spa’s Web site, the doctor fish cleaning “is not painful, because fishes have no teeth.”
THE “CALL ME ISHMAEL” AWARD
Great Opening Lines from Novels
Sometimes the first sentence is all you need to keep reading.
LITERATURE’S OPENING GAMBITS
The first line of a book can tell you a lot about the rest of story. For example, when you read the opening line of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” you know that you’re in for a comedy of manners that will include discussions of marriage.
Other times, the first line of a book tells you almost nothing, but is so intriguing and seductive that you want to keep reading to find out more. For example, Toni Morrison’s opening line for Beloved—“124 was spiteful” leaves you wondering . . . Who or what is 124? Why was 124 spiteful? What has been done to 124? You’re hooked.
Getting hooked is the universal truth about great first lines. When you read one, you know you’re in the hands of a great writer.
READER, SHE MARRIES HIM
The opening line mentioned above from Pride and Prejudice says many things with just one sentence: Austen declared her subject to be courtship and marriage, established an ironic tone, and set the scene for a “chase” between men and women. We may already know that Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy—but this line makes us eager to know how that ending came to be.
TRAIN OF THOUGHT
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” How did Leo Tolstoy know there would be so many memoirs written in the 21st century? This first line of his great work Anna Karenina is meant to ground the Karenin family in its own particular torment, but its psychological truth is so powerful that it is quoted by people who have never even read the novel.
FIGHTING WORDS
First doesn’t always mean brief:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . .
Thus begins Charles Dickens’s 1859 A Tale of Two Cities, about the French Revolution. Even without its famous twin closing line (“It is a far, far better thing to do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”), this line sets the tone perfectly for a story of all these things battling within two lookalike but very different men: Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton.
LUST FOR LIFE
There’s no doubt about what is driving the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s book: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” Sounds like a steamy romance, says the reader—and then he discovers that the fire of Humbert Humbert’s loins is all of 12 years old. Cue the “ew” factor, but by this time, you’re less focused on Lolita’s youth and more fascinated by Humbert’s reckless, life-shattering compulsion.
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Sometimes an opening line gains status as a saying stripped of its original context. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L. P. Hartley in his 1953 novel The Go-Between (adapted into a 1971 movie by playwright Harold Pinter). Does anyone read Hartley any more, except for a students of Modern British Literature? But Hartley’s opening line captures an essential human truth, especially for the English. Disillusioned by World War I, exhausted by World War II, and tired from still-imposed rationing, to them the past was vanished.
TEEN ANGST
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Holden Caulfield, the 20th century’s most famous teenager, began his story:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
You’re hooked and want to know what Mr. Caulfield will tell you.
TURNING UP THE HEAT
“It was a pleasure to burn,” begins Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic Fahrenheit 451. His protagonist, Fireman Guy Montag, is talking about burning books. However, Bradbury wasn’t talking about the kind of book burning the Nazis did, or about censorship. He said famously that his book was about what happens when people come to rely more on television for their information and forget about facts. In that case, Bradbury implied, you might as well burn all the books because they take up space and getting rid of them becomes a productive task . . . like mowing the lawn or filing papers.
MORE OR LESS
When Kurt Vonnegut opened his groundbreaking Slaughterhouse-Five with the sentence “All this is true, more or less,” he wasn’t yet speaking in the voice of the novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, but in his own. One of the things that make this sci-fi modernist novel so important is that it’s also the story of the author trying to come to terms with his participation as a young soldier in the firebombing of Dresden during World War II and his incarceration in a German prisoner-of-war camp. What was true? What was false? Even the narrator wasn’t sure.
SOUTHERN GOTHIC
“In the town, there were two mutes, and they were always together,” begins The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel. Although the book has three distinct parts, this sentence gives us the place, its oddness, and its sense of community. The two deaf men, Spiros and John, are true outcasts: one is an immigrant and mentally unstable; the other is a possible Jew, and a possible homosexual. McCullers was an early bard of the underdog, and this memorable first line emphasizes her quiet compassion.
PURPLE PROSE
Alice Walker’s 1982 The Color Purple was a literary landmark for several reasons: its attention to individual fates of African Americans, its sensitivity to different kinds of sexuality, and in large part because of its masterful use of dialect. The opening line is “You better not never tell nobody but God.” The double negative, the urgency, and the reference to a divinity all indicate a novel concerned with authenticity rather than style.
POSTMODERN POSTER BOY
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.” No, it’s not a line from Dr. Seuss; it’s the opening of Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, published in 1916. Readers know immediately that this is a book unlike any other, and that’s the point: you either keep reading or you don’t. Joyce has no need to pander or seduce—he’s truly the artist, all grown up.
BELLY OF THE BEAST
“Call me Ishmael,” wrote Herman Melville in 1851 as the beginning to Moby Dick, his epic story of man versus whale. But why has this simple declaration remained so famous and so compelling? By telling us immediately that he is adopting the name of a Biblical orphan, the narrator indicates he’s an outsider and may not view events in the same way as the other characters.
IT PRINTS THE WORST OF LINES
Given that opening lines are so often memorable, it was inevitable that someone would start lampooning them. The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest can be found online at www.bulwer-lytton.com, “Where WWW means ‘Wretched Writers Welcome.’”
Why Bulwer-Lytton? You may not recognize the name, but you’ll certainly recognize the opening line, from Edgar Bulwer-Lytton’s (justly) forgotten 1830 novel Paul Clifford:
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.
Such extravagant prose, so many digressions, and so little information apart from the fact that a) it’s raining and b) we’re in London. No wonder San Jose State University professor Scott Rice chose Bulwer-Lytton as the figurehead for his bad-writing contest, held annually since 1982.
A GOLDEN PLUNGER TO ANYONE WHO DOESN’T GIVE A BORING ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
“I’m not going to thank anybody; I’m just going to say I damn well deserve it.”
—Humphrey Bogart, 1952, after winning for
The African Queen
“I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me! You really like me!”
—Sally Field, 1985, after winning for
Places in the Heart
“I just want to thank everybody I’ve ever met in my entire life.”
—Kim Basinger, 1998, after winning for
L.A. Confidential
THE TROJAN HORSE AWARD
Allspice
Contrary to what its name suggests, allspice is not a mixture
of different spices. Its unique flavor comes from dried fruit,
and it gets an award for being the sneakiest of spices.
TAKE A WHIFF
Allspice’s spicy aroma hints of nutmeg, pepper, ginger, juniper, cloves, and cinnamon—all spices. As a result, people assume that it’s a spice blend when it really comes from a berry. Cooks use it as both a sweet and savory seasoning, but allspice is worthy of distinction for its strong flavor and its rich history.
A SPICY STORY
Spanish explorers in the West Indies discovered the evergreen tree Pimenta dioica in the early 16th century. The tree’s white flowers develop berries that are picked and dried in the sun to give us allspice. It takes four to five years for a Pimenta tree to bear fruit, and the berries have to be picked at just the right time, before they ripen, because the fruit’s flavor exists mostly in the rind of the unripe berries. When the berries do ripen, they lose a lot of their aromatic properties. The tree grows wild only in the Western hemisphere and is produced (for commercial use) primarily in Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.
South Americans have used allspice for centuries as a meat curative and as a flavoring for chocolate. The spice came to Europe in the early 17th century, and soon it was called “English spice” because the English were its largest distributor (having colonized Jamaica in 1655). In 1693, Europeans started calling it allspice—a name chosen to convey the multiple spices it seemed to contain—and the popular misnomer stuck.
Over the years, different cultures have adapted allspice to particular uses. It remains most popular in the Caribbean, where it flavors jerk dishes, but it’s also used to flavor sausage in Germany, stews in the Middle East, and cakes in England. In Scandinavian countries, it’s used to marinate herring.
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
Some also swear by allspice’s medicinal properties. It has a mild anesthetic quality, sometimes relieves arthritis pain, and has been used as an aphrodisiac. People also add it to hot tea to eliminate gas pains and other digestive problems.
For more than 400 years, French monks of the Order of Chartreuse have made their namesake elixir, and allspice has been cited as a secret ingredient. Legend says that a French diplomat named François Annibal d’Estrées gave them the recipe in 1605. It includes 130 plants, herbs, roots, and leaves in a brandy base. Rumored to deliver long life, the elixir definitely delivers a strong punch—it’s 142 proof, or 71 percent alcohol by volume. It quickly became popular among locals. A less-potent version, green chartreuse—a mere 55 proof—was made available to those who wanted it for its medicinal effect. It’s still available today, as is yellow chartreuse, a slightly stronger version (80 proof). The monks continue to sell the liqueur to finance their monastery.
Allspice can also be found in another herbal liqueur: Benedictine, a cognac-based beverage with herbs and roots. It was first developed in the 16th century for Benedictine monks and is still around. On the bottle is the phrase Deo Optimo Maximo (“to God, most good, most great”). A lovely sentiment for allspice too.
PUNGENT PARTICULARS
•During the Napoleonic wars, Russian soldiers put allspice in their boots to keep their feet warm. The spice made their feet smell better too, and allspice got a reputation for being a men’s toiletry item. Today, its oil still turns up in colognes, aftershaves, and other things with “spice” in the title.
•The Mayans used allspice to embalm corpses.
THE BETTER BUSINESS AWARD
Newman’s Own
It began as a mix of oil and vinegar in Butch Cassidy’s bathtub.
It ended as a way to raise millions of dollars for
children’s camps and other charities.
SHARP DRESSER
In December 1980, Paul Newman made a batch of homemade salad dressing (a mustardy vinegarette) in a bathtub in the basement of his Westport, Connecticut, home. He called his friend, writer A. E. Hotchner, and asked him to help fill old wine bottles with the dressing, which he intended to give to his neighbors as Christmas gifts.
Newman had been making his own salad dressing for years. He was never happy with store brands (too many chemicals, sweeteners, and artificial products), and in restaurants he’d often go into the kitchen and mix up his own.
After filling up a few dozen bottles, Newman and Hotchner found themselves with half of a bathtub of dressing left over. Newman figured he could bottle the rest, sell them to a local upscale grocery store, and pocket some cash. It never happened. Newman and Hotchner got sidetracked with the holidays, and Newman spent most of the next year filming Absence of Malice.
THE VERDICT
Newman still thought his dressing was good enough to sell commercially. In 1982, he approached several food companies and bottling plants, but none were interested. So Newman and Hotchner decided to do it themselves. Newman put up $40,000 in seed money, leaving now and again to go film The Verdict, while Hotchner tried to get the company off the ground.
Deciding that they should probably taste-test their dressing before they spent a lot of time and money marketing it, Newman and Hotchner arranged a test against bestselling dressings at the kitchen of a Connecticut caterer named Martha Stewart (yes, that Martha Stewart). Of about two dozens ballots, Newman’s was judged the best on all but two—not bad for a homemade dressing. Newman left the tasting ecstatic, declaring himself “the salad king of New England.” Hotchner and Newman decided that Salad King would be the name of the business, and the next day they formed Salad King Inc.
SOMETHING STEWING
A friend put Newman in touch with Stew Leonard, owner and manager of Stew Leonard’s, the biggest supermarket in Norwalk, a town near Newman’s home of Westport. He told Newman that he liked the dressing and it was good enough to sell, but there was one problem: It would flop if he called it Salad King. And he said, in order for the dressing to sell, Newman’s face would have to be on the bottle. Newman’s response: “Not a chance in hell.”
Stew Leonard was the nation’s top seller of Ken’s Steakhouse salad dressing. He told Newman and Hotchner that if Newman put his face on the bottle, he’d get the Ken’s bottler to package 2,000 test cases and he’d sell it at his store with a huge promotion. Newman remained uninterested.
THE HUSTLER
A few days later, Newman and Hotchner were fishing on Newman’s boat, the Caca de Toro. They were at an impasse. Newman didn’t want to plaster his face on the bottle. He thought it was crass, and similar to appearing on TV talk shows to promote his movies. He just wanted to make his all-natural dressing, call it Salad King, and put it in stores without calling attention to the fact that it was created by one of the world’s biggest movie stars. Hotchner suggested they just forget the whole thing. Newman had another idea: he’d put himsel
f on the bottle, but give the proceeds to charity. Hotchner agreed.
The pair devised a Napoleonic “N” logo for the bottle, accompanying a picture of Newman wearing a laurel wreath. They also created a slogan: “Fine Foods Since February.” And the name of the dressing was officially changed from Salad King to “Newman’s Own.”
Stew Leonard held up his end of the deal. He got Ken’s to produce 2,000 cases of dressing and held a promotion at his store in May 1982. He put a sign in front that said “Welcome Paul Newman.” Hundreds packed the store. And in two weeks, Stew Leonard’s had sold 10,000 bottles of Newman’s Own dressing.
What began as a lark quickly became a real business. Newman’s Own rented an office above a bank in Westport and furnished it with the actor’s patio furniture. In late 1982, the brand expanded with the introduction of a pasta sauce. In 1983, its first full year of business, Newman’s Own recorded sales of $3.2 million, with a profit of $397,000.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards Page 34