Infinite sentences

Living in a country occupied by the Russian army, deprived of my passport and so without any possibility of leaving, I found it very difficult to defend myself. I succeeded, nevertheless, in publishing a letter of protest in the Times Literary Supplement and even in bringing about the publication in Britain of a revised, complete version, that is, without deletions and with the chapters in their original sequence (Penguin Books, 1970). My satisfaction with this turned out to be only relative: a glance through the book showed me that the translation was still very free; for example, an obviously important matter of punctuation: Helena's monologue, composing all of Part Two, in which each paragraph is one long "infinite" sentence in my original, had been broken up into many very short sentences. I decided to close the book and know no more of it.
--Milan Kundera, "Author's Note," The Joke (Definite Version), 1992

The entire field of outdoor sports

"Her dress of sleazy silk was bright burned orange painted with black sail-boats sailing over purple trees and red football players playing over steeples and white skiers skiing over sail-boats cascading to the hem and locked acrobats, the entire field of outdoor sports, it seemed, being on her body, for her scarf was painted with spidery tennis players and tennis nets and ice-skaters skating on silver ponds and red polo riders riding red horses, and there were little footballs hanging from her charm bracelets, tennis rackets and ice-skates and golf clubs and numerous other trophies, some of field and stream, satin fishes running around the hem of her chiffon petticoat edged with yellow lace, butterflies embroidered upon the knees of her thin silk stocking, and her skirts came up high above her knees, higher when she moved, showing her yellow satin garters and pairs of stuffed red valentine hearts dangling from ribbons and faces which were painted powder puffs, and the coat seemed shrunken or a size too small like something she might have worn in a remote youth." — from p. 2 of Marguerite Young's 1198-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)

Son of Weekend Disambiguation

There's a letter from Bernard F. Dick in the NYTBR, in response to my "One Sentence Says It All" essay. It begins:

Latin scholars, that imperiled species, are not intimidated by the long, sprawling sentence. The periodic sentence is a staple of Latin prose. Phrases and clauses balance one another as each unit generates its own rhythm, until they coalesce in a unity that is all the more remarkable in its fusion of details that would otherwise have been rendered separately, like pieces unable to interlock because no one took the time to connect them.

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There's also a review of Mathias Énard's one-long-sentence-sort-of novel Zone, which I mentioned in my piece.

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What else? Vanessa Place was kind enough to send a copy of her novel Dies: A Sentence, elegantly published by Les Figues. Brian Evenson, who wrote the introduction for the translation of Zone, blurbs Dies:

In a single sentence as bloody and crazed as the history of the 20th century, Place offers up “the untamed cadence of ten thousand feet.” Caught somewhere between Beckett’s The Unnamable, Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ann Quin’s Passages, Dies is an extravagant and ferocious book, a real and uncompromising marvel.

Weekend Disambiguation

The Second Pass shares a favorite long sentence (from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff), and a commenter mentions a fun-sounding game:

Many years ago, I bought a deck of large cards, called Shuffle Cards, at the MOMA in New York City. The cards were illustrated with drawings on each side. On one side of each card were the words, “and the” followed by a noun; on the other side was a verb. You would shuffle the cards, lay them out, and have a wonderful, nonsensical story to enjoy with children.

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Have you listened to any Aimee Mann lately? I was going to delete a bunch of songs off my iTunes, then started listening. She's so good! (This part of the post sounds like an e-mail to my sister.)

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Dwight Garner's NYT review of Timothy Ferriss was like a gift that kept on giving:

"He is said to be very good at Chinese kickboxing."

"If a movie were to be made of Mr. Ferriss’s life, it would star Matthew McConaughey in little rectangular eyeglasses."

"Mr. Ferriss likes to pose without a shirt — in some photographs he sprouts chest hair; in others, it’s been waxed away — and to describe the veins that run across his abdomen. He tosses around words like 'thrashing' and, to refer to inanimate things, 'bad boys.' "

" 'The 4-Hour Body' reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog."

[Now that's the way to do an x-meets-y line in a review.]

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You know who's on a roll? Paul Collins is on a roll. First his Lapham's Quarterly piece, now this NYTBR essay on the first detective novel!

Disambiguations™ for January 3, 2011

I. Paging Charles Fort:

State scientists believe one thing to be almost certain: that the bird deaths were not related to the roughly 85,000 fish that died a few days before near Ozark, in the western part of the state, the biggest fish kill in Arkansas that anyone can remember. —"4,000 Blackbirds Drop From the Sky," NYT

II. I wrote a little note on the NYT's Paper Cuts blog—a followup to my "One Sentence Says It All" essay. (Most of it has been covered here at Disambiguation, with one new twist...)

More long sentences

(Continued from; original piece is here.)

6) A reader in Berlin wrote to me about a new (?) 130-page novel by Vanessa Place called Dies: A Sentence: "It's the ruminations of a dude a moment before his legs get blown off in the trenches of WWI." (This is doubly interesting because all of the examples of one-sentence-or-thereabouts novels I found were written by men—though within this micro-tradition, the form scans "feminine," if we think of Joyce giving the end of Ulysses to Molly Bloom.)

7) Adam Seelig has a 10,000-word novella entitled Every Day in the Morning (Slow), which he says is also "a continuous 'drop poem.'"

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Laird Hunt was gracious enough to answer a few questions about his Ray of the Star, which was inspired by Dürrenmatt's sentence-per-chapter format. (His responses were great, but in the end I couldn't fit them in.)

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It had crossed my mind that I might attempt writing the article as a single unbroken sentence—form follows function and all that—but then realized I'd done a similar thing, years ago, for the PTSNBNLS—"The Precognitions," a one-paragraph article on the works of William Gaddis and W.G. Sebald (with some Thomas Bernhard thrown in).

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I was happy to unload that Faulkner quote (“I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period...I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead"), which has been sitting in my commonplace book since 1995!

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Is it time to revisit the greatness of Faulkner? The weirdness of him? I think so.

Jump out of bed in your underwear

I have an essay in today's New York Times Book Review, on books that are one sentence long (or thereabouts, as the case often—always?—is). Happiest discovery: Jerzy Andrzejewski's “The Gates of Paradise” (1960)—158 pages!

Here's the beginning of the piece:

“No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep,” says the garrulous shoemaker who narrates the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal’s “Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age” (1964), “it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out.” Thirty-three pages into what appears to be an unbroken highway of text, the reader might well wonder if that’s a mission statement or an invitation. “Dancing Lessons” unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence that ends after 117 pages without a period, giving the impression that the opinionated, randy old cobbler will go on jawing ad infinitum. But the gambit works. His exuberant ramblings gain a propulsion that would be lost if the comma splices were curbed, the phrases divided into sentences. And there’s something about that slab of wordage that carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel.

(This is the third of three articles that kept me occupied through much of the fall. The first is here, the second is here!)