Open and Shut Case

Sometimes, I wonder why The Times is sold to the public at all. The assembled opinionists of Malta are so fond of conducting their personal exchanges through the medium of their columns that reading them feels invasive and voyeuristic. This was further compounded on Sunday by the disturbing spectacle of Lino Spiteri's dumbfounding impersonation of a dog in what I believe to be some kind of veiled verbal assault on somebody. I say that I believe as it is very far from clear to me what Spiteri is wittering on about in his introductory paragraph:

"Dog Does Not bite dog.
This one certainly shall not as much as much as growl and bare one single tooth-gap at old friends who also sniff around the terrain of this newspaper and its sister daily. If I wuff wuff gently just once at two of them I do it not to pick a fight, more as a compliment: I did notice that they were around with compelling intent and make a rare exception to my not engaging other contributors."

As I have tried to argue before on this blog, The Times gives every impression of gathering material for publication by redirecting the content of their in-tray straight into the pages of the newspaper. If you are willing to write rubbish prolix enough to permit graduation out of the letter section, then the world's your oyster. Well, The Times is your oyster anyway. Deficiencies in style and writing abilities are, in what might perhaps be considered by some as appreciable democracy, no obstacle to having even the most deranged garbage stuck in.
Lino Spiteri is obviously, in spite of appearances, no amateur in the writing trade. But even he has no respect for basic style rules that even first-year University students are meant to be versed in. What follows is a slightly amended three-point tip "borrowed" from a web style guide on opening paragraphs, which Spiteri might find useful:

• Give an introduction to the topic the article deals with; a general sentence or two will usually suffice.
• Offer background information about the topic that will help familiarise your readers and generate interest.
• Put forward the article's thesis statement, which is usually reserved for the last sentence of the opening paragraph.

But Spiteri imagines that we already inhabit the intimate space of his own thoughts. It is hardly for lack of space that he cannot concede even a single word to clarity of expression. Like many Times columnists before him, Spiteri assumes that the reader will be so fascinated by the debates among writers that no explanation is required. If Spiteri's design was literary, he may out of his depth.
Personally, I favour the first line of Anthony's Burgess's Earthly Powers:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

The book is especially rewarding in a scene in which a pretentious and untalented Maltese writer comes to dinner at the narrator's house, an insult against the country that Burgess probably intended as retaliation against the local philistine censors that tormented him.
However, for some of The Times columnists I wonder if other first lines might not be more apt. I am thinking in particular of the opening Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, a work demanding intellectual and academic analytical rigour of the sort normally reserved for the pages of The Times:

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Or even more succinctly, for the paranoid and insane, who are certainly not underrepresented, is the stark first line from Ken Kesey's psychiatric ward novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:

"They're out there."

Anyhow, the point is that I fear that pending literary inspiration, contributors Times might be best advised against venturing into practices requiring wit, metaphor, pathos or even competence in the area under review. Of course, one could protest that this would make the newspaper too boring for words.
Now that would be funny.