There was a big jump in subscribers over the past week, I think because Daniel Pink highlighted Perfect Sentences in his newsletter. Hello new readers, hope you have a nice time and thanks Daniel Pink, who I've never met and I didn't know was a subscriber.
The waiting room across the hall / was filled with hostile stepsons.
"From Cantos for James Michener: Part II", David Berman
I had a different sentence from a poem in Actual Air in mind for this week. I read it in an essay somewhere online. But I only remembered to write down the title of the book and not the actual sentence (or the source where I originally read it). On Saturday I just started reading poems from the book at random to see if I could find it again, and I didn't, but I did find some other gems, like this one.
I have to draw a crocodile in the sewers of Constantinople.
From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey by Edward Gorey, edited by Tom Fitzharris
Submitted by Jeannie.
It was not the first lyric I'd written about a man who believes he is a pig, but it's the only one anybody's ever heard.
This Year: 365 Songs Annotated, John Darnielle
But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies.
"If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you", Sam Kriss for his newsletter Numb at the Lodge
Submitted by Jenny. Some picks from me:
We share this planet with an alien intelligence, and the sensuous world is buckling around it.
Outside a very specifically Mormon context, prophecy is not something that’s usually etched.
And, this sentence that follows Jenny's submission:
The language of angels does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work.
If there’s a singular drink of the everyman in today’s United States, it’s stuff that tastes like soda, inebriates like liquor, and (as a thoroughly contemporary invention) evokes exactly zero nostalgia for some imagined, egalitarian past.
"Reject Miller Lite slopulism, embrace BuzzBallz alcopop-ulism", Dave Infante for his newsletter Fingers
Submitted by Kelsey.
Taxonomy can be the enemy of wonder, and sometimes of survival.
A Natural History of Empty Lots, Christopher Brown
The online far right simultaneously creates porn based on their political beliefs and base their political beliefs on porn; it's a horny, racist ouroboros.
"The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything", Cameron Cummins-Smith for Liberal Currents
Submitted by @mechanicalberk.bsky.social.
This is a woman who would change genders midsentence.
Darius James in an interview in The Whitney Review of New Writing
Perhaps important context: James is describing Kathy Acker.
Much of the attraction we feel for guitars is actually the microplastic within our own bodies reaching out to touch its kin.
Ted Woodford in a video on YouTube
Submitted by JS.
You just read issue #179 of Perfect Sentences. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.
