Last week on Next Line, Please, David Lehman gave us an enticing first line based on a two-clause summary of Tolstoy's classic, War and Peace. NLP contributors went many ways with the prompt, some playing off of the shortened plot summaries, and others, the fruit of false parallelism.
Angela Ball’s “Synapses,” (the word for “a junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter,” as Mr. Lehman reminds us) is rife with clever stuff. The breaking news about Karl Marx comes at no better time, as his birthday last week went uncelebrated but not unnoticed:
Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.
Polar ice cap diminishes and socialite seeks follicular transplant.
Novice renounces world and exerciser learns Zumba.
Karl Marx writes love poetry and lava engulfs subdivision.
Prankster covers toilet bowl with plastic wrap and Eta Aquariids
meteor shower arrives.
Shady company sells fake ants and Battle of Chaeronea is first
recorded use of “penetration of the center.”
Feigned retreat devolves to real one in Battle of Maling and
rhinoceros named to the City Council in São Paulo, Brazil.
Office stapler jams and Russian noun “Razbliuto” describes
“the feeling a man has for someone he once loved.”
Hannibal employs double envelope in Cannae and Japanese noun
“Yugen” refers to “a feeling about the universe too deep and
mysterious for words.”
In “The Power of Words,” Patricia Smith joins those of us who regret that some people just don't "get" the beauty of great books.
Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.
How much simpler it would have been
to explain to an unwilling student—
one complaining of unfamiliar names
impossible to associate with something familiar
or bemoaning detailed descriptions of scenes
surrounding impending battles—
that Tolstoy had written an epic love story
albeit a hefty one.
And nothing can beat this final stanza of Millicent Caliban’s “War Heroes”:
Lovers’ problems don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world, yet when the hurlyburly’s done,
in our stories, it is the lovers we remember and not who won.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, and keep your eyes peeled for a new prompt!
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