Yesterday was Edward Said's birthday, and I was thinking about how much I admire his first book, Beginnings. I consistently take my own obsession with the opening frames of a text into the classroom.
Today I'm just cracking open Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" to review it for next week's American Lit to 1860 class. And I was instantly struck by its opening, particularly in relation to the beginning of William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Davis: "A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable."
Gibson: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Double terrible ambiance!
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