p e n c h a n t

Post-holiday blues edition

Landscape painter snowed under

Small change wants money back

Macy’s manikin freezes from gawking crowd

For sale: resolution, good as new

Icicle mistaken for Washington Monument, thousands line up

Tea cart upset over display of tarts

Times Square renamed Times Rhombus

Tambourine shivers from hypothermia

Mistletoe charges overhead fee for flirts

Elephant sneezes during Nutcracker performance

Mrs. Potato Head bakes in tanning bed until “russet”

Literary news: Scrooge wants refund on failed security system

Archives: Warhol canvases city for soup cans

And the Good News Award goes to: Bell jingles all the way

Reading the first line in a book is like meeting someone for the first time, or opening a birthday gift. There’s anticipation, a moving forward into something new and unknown. The first line should read like poetry, worded carefully, perfectly. It’s important to make the right first impression. The first line should be a promise to the reader that the book is worth the read.

Here I’ve chosen the first line from a novel I picked off of a discount table, attracted by the cover, the title, and on closer look, the reviews, jacket flap copy, and the photographs of Edward Curtis, the turn-of-the-century photographer of native Americans, on whom the book focuses. This first line is a subtle tug, like a beckoning gesture. It includes two of the themes—art and memory—and introduces the structure, that of overlapping a faraway past (signified by “Leonardo”) with a recent past (“a decade ago”) with the present (notice the present-tense form). By stating the time of day of this remembrance, the author quite naturally inserts a strong motif found throughout the book; that small phrase—“one afternoon”—conveys an entire scene of light and shadow, and hence the feeling it evokes. Read the line without it and you’ll see.

Let me tell you about the sketch by Leonardo I saw one afternoon in the Queen’s Gallery in London a decade ago, and why I think it still haunts me.

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

And miles to go before I sleep. WISHING YOU ALL A PROSPEROUS 2010

Portrait of a young man in an old Jaguar, feelin’ goofy (as opposed to groovy), Dec 1979

Apologies to Robert Frost