In the past week I’ve written some 9,000 words of my master’s thesis which is due to my committee this Friday. I have read and written a lot of not especially perfect but probably good enough to get a degree sentences in the process, and my brain is mostly soup. Many thanks to readers who submitted sentences this week—they buoyed my spirits and also mean this week was not kind of a wash sentences-wise.
Each one miniaturized an emotional world, matching TikTok’s hummingbird heartbeat.
“The Pulse of Pop Music Is Changing”, Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic
Submitted by Daniel.
I think of it more as an effort at estrangement than introduction; I want this most mundane of technologies to seem odd, bewildering, and uncanny.
Geometry of Empire: radar as a logistical medium, Judd Ammon Case
This is admittedly describing the trick of a whole lot of media studies—what if I told you thing you think is normal is actually weird??—but most things are actually weird. (As far as I can tell a lot of media studies is poets who want to talk about how incredible and weird the world is but for the sake of intellectual legibility they have to explain how that weirdness makes something “media.”)
A fine runner-up from the same dissertation:
Whether this singularity could be God, matter, consciousness, or Halliburton, or whether that singularity was caused by any of those things, or something else, is anybody’s guess.
In the Old Testament, Balaam’s ass saw an angel and uttered prophecies.
“At Long Last, a Donkey Family Tree”, Franz Lidz for The New York Times
Submitted by Sha.
William Carlos Williams once wrote in a letter that he stepped in dogshit on a spring walk in 1921 and was overcome by a desire to learn about French literature.
“100 Years of Spring and All”, Anne Boyer in Mirabilary
Submitted by v, one of this newsletter’s top sentence-finders.
I have enough cyanide there to kill Cincinnati.
Basin and Range, John MacPhee
Technically, a geologist says this so MacPhee only gets credit for including it in the text. Submitted by Charlie, another top sentence submitter, with the caveat “I’m hesitant to submit sentences, because I feel less and less enamoured by it the more times that I read it, but I still think there’s great language so I noted some. Also it’s like a perfect example of exactly the Some Great Reverential Silence you helpfully called out in [Perfect Sentences 09]!”
More selections:
It is a soundless immensity with mountains in it.
lot of Great Reverential Silence energy on this one but also kind of sweetly clumsy? It’s a vibe.
His route was geologically unfavorable, but this escaped his knowledge and notice.
Since I was digging his sample pits, I felt enfranchised to remark on what I took to be the literary timbre of his science.
An extra star for that last one, “the literary timbre of his science” you’re killing me John!!
this movie opened strong with a preoccupation with people drinking their own piss but ultimately proved to be just another climate catastrophe cassandra complex with some of the trappings of an action movie.
the unbearable weight 021, Kit Buckley
This is a sentence that probably shouldn’t work, but does. The total absence of punctuation really elevates it for me. Kit has a new zine coming out soon, by the way!