beginnings

I picked up Jonathan Lethem's "The Fortress of Solitude" a couple days ago, and started turning the pages. I was hooked at the opening paragraph, because of writing like this, with imagery so strong that I wish I knew how to adapt it and make a supershort film.

"Like a match struck in a darkened room:

Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July.

The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls' parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell."

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