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.
He was standing in the doorway, and Maud thought he looked both owlish and more human than usual; an owl that would have liked to join in the simple human pleasures of a sherry party if it had known how to stop being an owl.
A Winter Away, Elizabeth Fair
Submitted by Erin.
Sun-faded pumpjacks languorously sip oil up from underground while others stand completely idle, bleak metal skeletons.
Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond, Christine Dunbar-Hester
Heavy equipment and human flesh have never made for easy bedfellows.
The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Deborah Cowen
There is no America, just a complicated system of PR and political logistics that allows a very small cabal of bureaucrats to fight over control of the world’s most deadly compilation of Excel spreadsheets.
"The President Does Not Deserve Our Grace", Jack Crosbie for Discourse Blog
Submitted by Kelsey.
Imprisoned by four walls / (to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge / a landscape to be invented / to the South, reflective memory / to the East, the mirror / to the West, stone and the song of silence) / I wrote messages, but received no reply.
"Envoi", Octavio Paz
Encountered as an epigraph in The Production of Space, which I haven't actually started because it looks scary and annoying.
Abolish the colony on that height, silence the hundred instruments which buzz and click night and day, cut the cable which connects the Orient and the antipodes with Europe and America, and lo, the oceans will be plunged again in gloom, distance will revert to its ancient tyranny, and the continents will become insular with nothing to connect them but steam and the sail.
Around the Coasts of Arabia, Ameen Rihani
Encountered in Sinews of War and Trade by Laleh Khalili (which has its share of perfect sentences but which I also read in a bit of a "must read so fast" haze that really did the text a disservice; hope to return to it in the winter for an actual close read). I love a deranged high modernist cry for the annihilation of time and space, they're always so bombastic.
Not only are historians of industrial science sometimes trapped in their own whiggishness (that is, the rewriting of history to prove the inevitability of one's success); they often have whiggishness legally thrust upon them.
Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940, Geoffrey Bowker
Who among us has not found themselves faced with whiggishness thrust upon them, I ask you!
I was also dragged along on a nighttime jungle tour in the Monte Verde cloud forest, which was like walking through chicken broth full of poisonous snakes.
"I GO TO COSTA RICA AND DEMOCRACY DIES ", Cintra Wilson in the newsletter Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain
Submitted by Chris, with the next sentence in the paragraph offering another strong candidate for perfection: