I spent most of this week at the National Archives doing research for my master’s thesis, so a lot of my reading has been kind of dry government documents which do not lend themselves to perfect sentences. Nevertheless, the week (and even the archives) had some good ones.

Feel like I’m still going overboard with the commentary and annotation here. I’ll keep working on it.

Even if the crisis were to become worse, Communist propaganda would be confronted in the Argentine by a profound indifference to the future.

Report “Allegedly Prepared by Swiss Minister” on Argentina, Record Group 234 (Reconstruction Finance Corporation), Field Preclusive Operations Files 1942-47, Box 2

This series of boxes doesn’t have a file list, just the description “alphabetical by country.” Forgetting just how many “A” nations there are, I pulled the first five boxes in hopes I might get records for one of the countries I’m researching (Brazil and, in the parlance of the 1940s, “Belgian Congo”).

Instead, I got Afghanistan through Australia and decided to peruse the records anyway to get a sense of how they were organized (haphazardly), which is how I stumbled into reading a memo about Argentina. Grammatically I’m not sure this sentence works but it’s very funny. Karl Marx failed to consider the extraordinary chill vibes of the people of Argentina, etc.

In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.

“The Testing Tree”, Stanley Kunitz

First encountered decades ago as the epigraph to Angels in America; returned to Friday morning in search of the right way to explain a feeling.

A hook and gear gaze in wonder as particles fly through the air.

LaserWriter II, Tamara Shopshin

Really went back and forth on whether this sentence deserved top billing instead:

As soon as he had a lap, there was an accordion in it.

They’re doing slightly different things, but they’re both doing those things very well.

While this greatly contributed to Oakland’s cultural milieu, it also bridged a crucial gap in the squatters-punks-artists-yuppies conveyor belt of gentrification.

The Riders Come Out At Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland, Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham

A meticulously reported history of the Oakland Police Department and its decades of working towards/backsliding from reform does not lend itself to literary flourish. There are a few reasons for this. One is that (imagine this sentence read in an old-timey newspaper-man voice for full impact) perfect sentences are fucking showboats and the serious journalist has no time for such frippery. A more generous one is that deeply reported journalism often works, as Melissa recently wrote about, at the level of the paragraph rather than the level of the sentence.

Most of the sentences in Riders are not perfect in the sense of breathtaking prose: they are workhorse sentences, diligently bearing facts and figures and footnotes with a sober clarity of purpose. They set tone and maintain rhythm without calling attention to themselves. Every now and then there’s a zinger like this one, though.

Only a smattering of the images he selected had anything particularly to do with soap.

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

There are more evocative sentences in this novel, certainly more poignant ones. But god, the diction of this! The topography it traverses! I’m only about halfway through Exit West and I’m not sure I’m totally sold on the premise but it’s good at capturing the heightened weirdness of intimacies and living a life amidst crisis.