I know your burning arrows.

“The Abject Lover”, Meleager of Gadara

The film features various mutated creatures, none of which are actually sharks on cocaine as the title suggests.

Whatever is left of whatever they distill is more concentrated in their complete and dangerous freedom.

Submitted by Rusty who notes for context that the sentence is “about apples from trees gone feral after the collapse of human civilization.”

Panettone, I have since learned, is a dichotomous food: there’s magnificence, and then there’s stultifying disappointment, with little in between.

“Food Review: Three Exceptional Panettones”, Helen Rosner for The New Yorker

Chris submitted a version of this sentence that appeared in the print edition of The New Yorker thusly:

With panettone, there's magnificence, and then there's stultifying disappointment, with little in between; these are my favorites.

When I tried to find an online corollary I could only find this version of the text. I dislike the gap between the print and online sentences and what that gap does to Historical Record, but “dichotomous food” is pretty good and who am I to deny Helen Rosner some revisions. The semicolon bit in the print version is nice, though.

It would go like this: a hole in the ground where the house stood; the outline of the barn foundation; a well that goes dry in mid-August and then it’s seventy yards to the lakeshore, which Harold Green says made your hands burn when you were a kid with a bucket; a dead apple tree and a patch of day lilies; stove parts; rusted out tin-ware vessels; rough-forged horseshoes; axe heads, harness rings, buckles, and hoops; hayrake teeth; bits of old medicine bottles and cheap willow ware; mica chips; rotten shoe leather; stone piles and a few plough lines; fence fragments eaten by red oaks; the bowl from a clay pipe with the initials ‘T.D.’

The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875, Bruce Curtis

Via Kieran Healy on Bluesky.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I know this seems like a lazy entry—this is a famous sentence, a sentence so famous it’s subject to frequent satire! It isn’t a new discovery! But this isn’t a “new perfect sentences” newsletter it’s just perfect sentences encountered in the past week, and re-encountering is entirely within the remit.

I was thinking about this sentence after interviewing Colette Shade about her new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything for an upcoming episode of RIP Corp. Colette talked about how in the book she sought to situate her own life within broader social forces and historical events. It’s been a very long time since I read The Bell Jar but it seems like its pop cultural legacy is mostly a reductive “sad girl lit” status despite the fact that right out the gate it drops in the state execution of Communists as a facet of a personal experience of broader alienation. Lots of smart people have written at length about the significance of Plath opening The Bell Jar with the Rosenberg executions so I’m not going to do that here, but the point is it’s (still) a banger.

Jan. 5, 2025, 11:21 a.m.