This struggle is sweeter than a life without dignity.

Mahmoud Khalil in a letter to his son, published in The Guardian

I was destined to become the eternal museum viewer.

A bad week of reading for me (sick, then preoccupied with dogsitting a very active pup) but a very good week of submissions. Thanks, submitters.

"Irrespective of their age, they were able to get a lot of ants," he told Reuters.

“Four people, including two Belgian teens, plead guilty to trafficking giant ants in Kenya”, Reuters via ABC News

As a belated Indie Bookstore Day gesture, book links in this newsletter are to my neighborhood store.

THE GARDEN IS AN OASIS FROM THE MALICE OF OUR TIME.

A note left on the fence of a neighborhood community garden

It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody.

“A.I.: The New Aesthetics of Fascism”, Gareth Watkins for New Socialist

Submitted by Moon.

Haggis pakora has been described as a "highly improbable Indo-Caledonian alliance making use of the Scots' most potent culinary weapons: sheep pluck (heart, liver and lungs) and deep-fat frying."

Wikipedia entry for haggis pakora

Submitted by Chris.

I haven’t been sure how much to disclose in this newsletter, but: the not-so-great but maybe-manageable news I got in mid-March spiraled into essentially a torching of my relationship with my PhD advisor in the last couple of weeks. It’s been sad, because I do respect my advisor as a scholar and thought she was someone I could trust. (The specifics are internecine and tedious and probably airing them here will cause problems; it involves questionable decisions about grant spending and her leaving for a new job, and it affects multiple students.) This heel turn situation is, basically, a required rite of passage of doing a PhD. I cannot recommend it! It’s very destabilizing.

Maybe the more important part: while I kind of just have to write a pretty bad dissertation by the end of the year and I think I can do it, I also will be figuring out my next move because aside from academia being entirely on fire right now, this whole process has made me wary of trying to succeed in a field that so blatantly rewards sociopathy. Advice, strategizing, passing along gigs, and tip jar donations very welcomed in this shitty moment. (And, of course, always sentences.)

The Rohingya are people, not lessons.

You will, I hope, forgive me my instruments.

“What Will You Do?”, Kaveh Akbar for The Nation

The sofa bed was designed for someone different from me—not just smaller but also, it seemed to me, with a different personality.

Respectfully, theory does not come easy to me as a grimy materialist nestled in my pit of archives and filth.

Me, being kind of a brat in a dissertation draft

With half-hearted apologies to my dissertation committee, I am fundamentally just a dumb goblin for whom “critical spatial theory” sometimes sounds like a riddle from a sorcerer who won’t let me cross the river so I am mostly annoyed by the insistence that I demonstrate how I’m contributing to it.

Over the course of the last week I got some fairly high-stress news that isn’t exactly terrible, but does introduce some new chaos into my work life and finances. The news is partially related to the ravages of New American Authoritarianism (need to think of a better term here as this suggests a dictatorship of moderately upscale restaurants guaranteed to have truffle fries), though the situation I find myself in could have just as easily occurred in another timeline. I do wish that some of it hadn’t unfolded on my birthday, though.

All of this may affect the quantity of sentences collected week to week in the coming months. As always submissions are appreciated. Poetry and perfect sentences will not singlehandedly destroy the fascists, but it has to hold some utility if fascists are so insistent on crushing creative expression.

I wouldn’t piss on him if his heart was on fire.

Big Balls may dream of a bigger Cybertruck today, but soon enough his dreams will turn to statins, and to summer nights cool and quiet enough to sleep with the windows open.

“The US of AI”, talk by Matthew Kirschenbaum at Princeton
University

Submitted by Richard.

Using the wrong words has the magical ability to make objects disappear; the boots, bullets, and batons all become invisible if you say the wrong words, in jest or in fury.

Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, Mohammed El-Kurd

A few runner-up perfect sentences from this:

Power, in this analysis, is an immutable, indelible structure set in stone rather than an imposing yet tenuous entity resting on sand.

Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent.

“Speed Up The Breakdown”, Quinn Slobodian for The New York Review of Books

The future Zuckerberg went on to pitch was a delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade.

Perhaps no dream in American culture has recurred as often as the one in which a group of spiritual adepts remake the world they have inherited in the image of their own ideals.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner

I made my CS Ethics students read an excerpt from this book, alongside “The Californian Ideology” and “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”, this week. The computer history segment feels more demoralizing this semester; my educator song and dance of “all this could have been otherwise, all that is could be otherwise!” doesn’t quite land with 20-year-olds who’ve basically only known political chaos and big tech as villain for most of their lives. After all, it’s not otherwise and it fucking sucks. Still, someone had to tell them about Minitel and I guess it might as well have been me to tell them.

I missed this when I sent out last week’s newsletter but there are a bunch of new subscribers thanks to a very generous shout-out by Robin Sloan in his newsletter. Thanks, Robin! And hello, new readers!

I’m not sure if this new crop of subscribers is the reason that there were a lot of submissions this week but regardless: great work, everyone.

When I say I had not heard of “Benson Boone,” I meant I was not aware of the existence of the person in this video, who looks a bit like Paul Mescal if he was playing Freddie Mercury in a touring production of something called Bohemian Rhapsody: The Live Experience and also was taking 300mg of Wellbutrin daily.

A brief ambivalent note: I think of this newsletter as part reading blog, part elliptical diary. Amidst a not-quite bloodless coup, attending to one’s diary can feel frivolous at best, at worst a self-aggrandizing attempt to render inaction as “bearing witness.” One worries about coming across as all talk and no action, especially when seeing people who seemingly have greater access to levers of power like Congressional Democrats post through it instead of, say, doing literally anything.

This is not a #resistance project, it is a personal and curatorial one. Maybe I will look back on the time I spent on this amidst collapse as denial, persisting in little routines when I should have been stationing barricades. But it’s not exactly an either/or thing (people certainly have kept diaries while at the barricades) and despite everything I want to believe it is worthwhile to continue paying close attention to language. It is, after all, a primary concern of the fascists who I expect might rename it the US Department of Portation given their childish fervor to erase all things trans from state speech.

But that may prove to be the defining feature of life under the second Trump administration: For now, to survive and move strategically, we will have to live with the whiplash of having to take the cruelty of men who are not very bright very seriously.

baboon heart is an outlook, a point of view; we watch these movies through an ape’s eyes.

Tricia Lockwood on Bluesky

All English speakers think daily in contraband, even those who would rather not.

Apologies first to @freecraigslistsnob.bsky.social because he nominated Liz Lopatto’s sentence last week; I had already encountered and added it but did not mean to appear to engage in stolen sentence valor.

Nothing like a nice Delta-Epsilon Proof for my post-nut clarity.

An anonymous Pornhub user quoted in “We Asked the Math Tutor Who Posts His Lessons on Pornhub: Why?”, Koh Ewe for Vice

inside the piss bush, i saw half a dozen men pissing. one of them, with his dick in his hand, shouted, "i'm watering the tree of liberty!" and the other piss men cheered.

molly conger on Bluesky

The Vatican is even shot and lit in pale grays and harsh fluorescents, to honor Conclave’s cultural homeland of Hudson Books at JFK International Airport.

I know your burning arrows.

“The Abject Lover”, Meleager of Gadara

Via Mouse posting on Mastodon.

Danielle was the Sentence Submission MVP last week but I didn't see her email until after I'd sent out 104; please enjoy her submissions below.

Colors can make for incomprehension, or sense, or violence.

“The Reality of Our Seeing”, Hilton Als for The Believer

On a day I didn’t have my phone with me, I decided to follow the dogs of Venice.

The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, Zito Madu

I met Zito briefly when he did an “in conversation with” event for Joanne’s novel at Wonderville. I haven’t actually read all that much Italo Calvino, so I at best ambiently understand the extent to which the book evokes his work. A vestigial effect of having a journalist dad who regularly pushed me to pare down my elementary and middle-school works (he did not appreciate the premise of the “five-paragraph essay” homework assignment) is that I am a total sucker for writers who can be creatively unsparing in spare prose. The Minotaur at Calle Lanza is short, but not brisk. It dwells in time. It often has the quality of sinking below the surface of a lake, watching the light change underwater, before rising back into the world.

Some other bangers:

Lots of submissions this week! I appreciate this, because it was a hard week and my reading was scattershot.

Betrayal was not the word, it had too many syllables.

Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad

In Rome, the old rug that ties Western Civ together, empire began with Caesar thrice refusing the crown.

“Mobs beget mobsters”, Matt Pearce in his newsletter

Robin submitted half of this sentence as a “perfect phrase”, which unfortunately breaks the rules of the newsletter. And I think it actually is pretty perfect with the rest of it. “Ceasar thrice refusing the crown” could be a Mountain Goats song.

I have no malice toward the Sad Beige Home, but I, personally, am thrilled I do not live here.

“Bad Influence”, Mia Sato for The Verge

It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto.

I feel bad that this, the 100th Perfect Sentences, isn’t an especially perfect collection. 100 has such pomp and circumstance to it. But, this week came with some (sort of good, we’ll see) news that required me to do a lot of work all of a sudden, and The Holiday Season tends to be a time where I’m much more easily derailed. Submissions encouraged in the coming weeks.

So much of what we do demands inattention (our current emphasis on mindfulness neglects the mind’s need for incoherence, to rest, coast, spread out, incohere).

Lauren Berlant in a 2014 interview in Make Literary Magazine

What sort of times are these — where a conversation about trees comes close to crime, because it contains a silence about so many misdeeds?

“To Posterity”, Bertholt Brecht

Submitted by Wesley, who notes that he came across this translation of the poem “because it is referenced on my great grandfather's tombstone, and feels uncannily fitting for the current moment.”

Well, I did pass my qualifying exams last week. I guess that’s good?

In all seriousness, I’m very glad past me insisted on finishing that process before they called the election. If not, it’s a lot more likely I’d be planning to drop out. (Being at the state of all-but-dissertation means I am more inclined to complete the process, if partly out of a slightly childish sense of spite that I will not be broken in this final round by of all things a mediocre state university.)

Like many of you, I am angry and sad and riding waves of both anticipatory and present-tense grief (also, I miss my dog more than ever). I am exhausted from election postmortems and incoming regime pre-catastrophizing, but remain easily seduced by spiraling into both just to feel some sense of control. Spending time with friends this week has helped a bit. Take care of yourselves, and take care of people around you.

Also, commit petty vandalism when you can. On Friday I poured an iced coffee onto the hood of a car parked on my street that had a big Trump banner and it felt really great. Except for the part where I had to buy another iced coffee.

Here lie the limits of assemblage theory; granting agency to the non-human material earth while severing that material’s relations from the humans who have known, shaped it, and lived with it so intimately for generations.

“Notes on the Underground in Gaza”, Hadeel Assali for Society for Cultural Anthropology

Hadeel is involved with Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, which does extraordinary work that I hope you will support if you can.

It is difficult to encounter such a thing and not overrun the page with the fervency of my gladness.

“The Best American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay”, Talia Lavin’s newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich

Submitted by Anne.

A very limited set of sentences this week due to a sad personal update: my dog passed away unexpectedly around 4 in the morning on October 15. It was sudden, but she was at home with her family and we were able to hold her and love her to the very last moments. This is my partner’s first dog, and worrying about his family in Lebanon has left him pretty frayed already so I am more worried about him than deeply involved in my own grief. But she really was the love of my life.

It’s meant so much to have friends and neighbors and our vet’s techs reach out to us. She was so loved by so many people. Please give your animal companions extra affection today, for me. Here’s a picture of her from 2019 that is one of my favorites and captures her a few months into being our dog.

For a variety of reasons despite being in mourning I am still doing the written part of my qualifying exams this week, so I will likely not collect too many sentences for next week’s newsletter. Submissions are extra-highly encouraged, thanks in advance.

In the beginning it felt like this: the earth opened beneath us, but for a moment it seemed as though gravity forgot itself.

“A Rupture In Time”, Sarah Aziza for The Baffler

Lots of perfect sentences in this:

It is October, warped and too warm in this era of climate emergency, and nothing can be the same.

This week an IDF air strike damaged the Beirut cemetery my partner’s grandfather is buried in. It is very disorienting to hold that information alongside day-to-day tasks and work. A year ago I had tested positive for covid and had to miss a friend’s child’s birthday party; that child, who happens to be Palestinian-and Lebanese-American, continues to live in a world where people with extraordinary power would rather see children like her dead. People have been exceptionally kind in the last few weeks—friends checking in, friends bringing food, neighbors showing kindness—and I try to find some grace in that.

In the arena of the war, nothing has changed, except everything changes: the death counts, the severity of atrocities, the number of hospitals bombed, schools bombed, universities destroyed, journalists targeted, the records broken — largest cohort of child amputees in the world, fastest man-made famine in the world — the territory blasted and caught up into the flames.

“A Year of War Without End”, Lina Mounzer for The Markaz Review

This week has not been very good for sentence gathering. Partly, because I had to do a lot of sentence writing (results largely average, hopefully some approaching perfect) and partly because we were watching my partner’s home country of Lebanon get bombarded by the IDF. His parents and last remaining grandparent are currently holding up as best they can in Beirut but getting out isn’t currently an option (all flights are booked up into mid-October, and that assumes that the airport doesn’t get bombed). Escalation in Lebanon is of course only an extension of horrors that have been ongoing for nearly a year in both southern Lebanon and Gaza, but it does feel like an ominous turn.

I am grateful for the friends who have reached out and shown up in the last two weeks. Still working through the dissociation of it all and trying to show up. Sentence submissions highly appreciated as my own capacity for sentence gathering remains diminished.

PLAY INSECURITIES LIKE A PIANO.

Mr. Lochridge, an experienced submersible pilot from Scotland, said he tried to calm his boss down and asked him to hand over the PlayStation controller that was used to pilot the vessel.

“OceanGate Founder Crashed a Submersible Years Before Titan Disaster”, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs for the New York Times

Honorable mention for this follow-up furthering Lochridge’s characterization as a Man of The Sea:

Mr. Rush obliged by throwing the controller at Mr. Lochridge, hitting him in what Mr. Lochridge called the “starboard side” of his head.

We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence.

“The Shapes of Grief”, Christina Sharpe for the Yale Review

Some other bangers from this essay:

There is something about the plane, its untethering space, between times and places, that allows me to meet so readily the many gifts of the book—among them language and memory.

The dead can’t seek justice in court, but they have other ways.

“Let the Dead Sleep: On Alien Romulus and Digital Resurrection”, Matt Zoller Seitz for RogerEbert.com

Submitted by James.

Sheep ate men, in middle America just as in England.

Truncated quote of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System Vol. I in “Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective”, Jason W. Moore

Turns out this is part of a longer sentence in Wallerstein, which is fine, but not quite as punchy.

I got back home from two weeks of traveling after a redeye flight from Portland (yes, I regret this). Most of this edition was actually drafted on Friday afternoon and Saturday night at the airport. This is my first time scheduling Perfect Sentences!

The last XOXO festival was bittersweet; the only other one I attended was in 2014 and boy howdy do I feel 37 when I remember being 27. But it was good to see Erin and Peter, whose old apartment I still live in, and see their terrific almost 11 (!) year old kid who I last saw when she was 5. I cried a lot: out of anger, envy, self-pity, awe, grief, joy, and at one point over an old McDonald’s mural. I should try to write out the morass of feelings in greater detail, maybe.

These lived fast, died young, and their deaths drove the cosmic factory of the chemical elements.

Hello from a basement apartment Airbnb in Vancouver. This is my first time visiting Vancouver and most of my research meetings fell through, so please send recommendations of things to do and places to sit and read. (I have already been told, repeatedly, about Stanley Park.)

Having a very multi-modal transit experience on this trip: flew to Seattle, took a ferry to Victoria, took a bus and ferry to Vancouver, and in a couple of days getting on an Amtrak to Portland. Here’s a picture of Galiano Island I took from the to-Vancouver ferry.

I’m visiting some family in Washington State and flew out late last night, so I am very tired and this week was a lot of preparation to go out of town and general weird vibes from tropical storm weather. Thanks to the people who submitted sentences for this week, it really filled out the newsletter.

He begin with general abstractions arrived at ideally rather than with any detailed study of how actual social and political institutions work.

“The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thünen and Marx”, David Harvey

I got an annoying summer cold this week (it’s not covid at least?) and have generally been very distracted by life stuff, so I’m a little behind on PhD exams reading. This week’s sentences feel very scattershot. I’m ready for summer to end but not ready for the responsibility of fall.

Next week I’m traveling to visit family in the Pacific northwest so newsletter may go out a little late.

It is fundamentally weird to care so much about what other people do when it doesn't affect you at all.

History then becomes a pack of tricks we play on the dead.

"Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas", Quentin Skinner

In 2019, scientists expressed concern that the torrents of cocaine-infused urine flooding into the River Thames in London was "another problem eels don't need," while freshwater shrimp have repeatedly tested positive for the drug in recent years.

It is still Werewolf Month, now almost three months later.

"#036 - Moonstruck (1987)" Kit Buckley's newsletter the unbearable weight

What an opening sentence!! This is still probably my favorite newsletter. Some runner up sentences:

Driving through Lexington, KY, I imagine that every Jersey Mike’s sandwich restaurant is not a franchise named after a singular Michael but is instead an independent owner-operator concern, each run by a different guy named Mike from New Jersey, signposts from some great Michael-from-New-Jersey diaspora.

A while back as a procrastination activity I started working on an application to The Onion fellowship, which is due tomorrow but I will probably not submit because 1) I'm a coward and probably too old to pivot to comedy writing, and 2) abruptly relocating my life to Chicago for six months for an incredibly cool opportunity also smacks a bit of running away from my current set of problems.

That being said, the writing sample part of the application is a lot of fun—writing a good Onion headline is hard, especially in an era where Onion-esque headline writing has become a weird norm. Because I am a show-off in addition to being a coward, I am sharing my favorite drafted headlines, since a news headline is sort of sentence-adjacent.

• Geologist’s Hinge Profile Way Too Niche

• Federal Trade Commission Blocks Polycule Merger (maybe more of a Reductress joke)

I am deep in the throes of PhD exams (my program calls them "comprehensive" exams, others call them "qualifying" exams, I am using either term here because most of you are not fucking nerds) preparation, meaning that I need to read and annotate at least one book (or a few journal articles) a day basically until the end of the summer. This means that aside from the submitted sentences, a lot of this week's sentences are from the introductions or first few chapters of academic texts, because those are the parts of books you're "supposed" to read for exam preparation.

It is very disheartening to learn that a lot of PhD exam studying is learning how to efficiently skim books. It feels disrespectful to the book, and it does not alleviate my suspicion that these exams are a hazing ritual invented by bad people!

I am trying to find ways to make this process helpful for me (namely, a person who has zero expectations of landing a real academic job down the line and who wants to write books and make art mostly), with mixed results, but at least many of the texts themselves are pretty good. Advice from survivors of PhD exams welcomed.

It must borrow shame because the consensus doesn’t feel it, not yet, not today.

"The Right Side of Now", Lauren Michele Jackson for The New Yorker

Let us never forget: that the poem was entombed in a collapse of the earth.

With bio communication, it's monkey flowers all the way down.

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger

Submitted by Winston.

Winston is currently doing a GoFundMe to raise money that can help him move his family to a trans-affirming state for the sake of his oldest daughter's health and well-being. If you can spare it, please consider contributing. (I asked Winston for permission to share this; while the subscriber base of this newsletter isn't huge or as far as I know especially wealthy, it is an audience that I hope is largely sympathetic and inclined to help.)

(When I was three months on testosterone, I flew to California to end a five-year relationship, tried cocaine, and briefly stopped speaking to my family.)

"Jane Schoenbrun Finds Horror Close to Home", Holden Seidlitz for The New Yorker

What I love about this sentence is that it could be an opening sentence in a very different essay but is instead a parenthetical in a profile. It's important in profile writing to strategically acknowledge one's own subjectivity—how to make yourself known in the text without making the profile About You Entirely—because a profile is in part about comprehending the gap between how a profile subject wants to be known and whatever the profile author is bringing to the table.

Submissions are strongly encouraged for this coming week! I will be traveling Tuesday, at what looks to be a pretty dry academic conference Wednesday and Thursday, and then traveling again on Friday so my reading time is going to be a bit curtailed.

That the ivory tower is a tower, and not the source of a waterfall or a pile of spent nuclear rods at the bottom of the sea.

"Your Work is Not Academic", Kendra Albert

It has now been 13 years since Christopher Hitchens got to discover at last whether hell is real.

"The Ghosts of New Atheism Still Haunt Us", Erik Baker for Defector

Submitted by Rusty.