The First Few Sentences of My Our Noir Novel

I remember it like it was yesterday because it was.  I sat at the computer writing or maybe just typing.  Sometimes I listened to music I liked or laughed at something I read.  Mostly I forwarded through songs that didn't move me and stared cross at idiots.  Spent so many hours eyes wide and mouth agape I developed some conditions. 

Dry conditions.

I tried to fix them with moisture but the root stupidity haunted me.  I tried to write but could only type.  Aware of the vultures circling above I vowed to continue writing or typing or whatever it was I was up to.  Just as despair prepared to pin me on that dry mat I heard the dainty knuckles of a dame rapping on the door. 

I listened for a sharp tap of a ring the second time around and there it was.  Married lady showing up here at this hour could only mean one thing ...

[You continue below the fold.]

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[Ahistoricality]

.... I'd forgotten to go to lunch with my wife and her friends from the Late Post-Roman Early pre-Renaissance reading group. This was a problem, because they had something I needed: a footnote. One damn source, but it was the keystone, the linchpin, the dark secret which would hold the whole story together.

[Adam Roberts]

I’d lost my bottle of oil.

[Adam Roberts]

(...or, too esoteric? Hmm)

[Jake]

On a dark and stormy night. . .

[JPool]

She opened the door and stood framed in the doorway. Her legs went on as long as a full paragraph of Gayatri Spivak's sentences. But in her case the subaltern was saying plenty, and I liked what I heard. I probably liked it a little too much, so I pulled my faced straight and sat up behind my desk.

"Excuse me Mr. Kaufman, am I disturbing you? Are you typing something?" she asked, formal, but purring all the same. "I thought you might have forgotten about me."

[SEK]

Y'all all win. I was stumped as to where to head next, didn't consider Aristophanes, and certainly didn't consider DARK SECRETS or LONG SPIVAK LEGS the next step. Expect to see your name in print on my acknowledgments page.

[hijk]

i don't know why but i'm reminded of the master and margarita

[aaron]

She was in trouble, I could tell. Something had been problematized, and I don’t mean just epistemic violence.

I poured her a Tropicopolitan--that’s a cosmopolitan made in Haydn White’s bathtub--and told her to tell me all about it..

“Hybridity,” she said. “It’s all about border-crossing, about deterritorialization”

I took a drink. It all made sense. Homi Bhabha’s boys had been out of the news for a long time, ever since the war, but then old dogs don’t learn new tricks, do they? So that was their game: smuggling French hybrids with forged titles across the border. There was nothing new about that historicism.

[aaron]

At some point, the phrase "she could really fill out a body paragraph" should make an appearance, as well as some kind of "dangling modifier" joke.

[a. fortis]

Jeez Louise! Homi Bhabha references and everything--that's not noir, that's academic horror...