Sentences of the Year

My favorite magazine, The Believer, has a feature this month on the "ten lines from 2005 that stopped one reader in his tracks." The reader is writer and editor Stephen Schenkenberg, and you can read sentences ten through six here. Here are the rest:

5. "Broken windows lie like a tattered dress over the evacuated city, hemorrhaging what remains of its long life of sounds: a radio denying the imminent arrival of Russian troops, the echoing report of a suicide, a phonograph whispering the illegal syncopations of American jazz."

Forgetfulness, Michael Mejia

4. "I embraced my solitude without Jane, or my solitude in the exclusive company of her absence, as eagerly as I had embraced all day so many men and women."

The Best Day, the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall

3. "Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

2. "Yes, sir, boss, I will be what you want me to be, and when you climb into your automobile at five o'clock in the morning with Miss Ann on your arm, and a gentle buzzing in your veins, the lights will be turned off, and the shoes will be eased from my burning feet, and the spit shaken out of my instrument, and the tie loosened from my fat neck, and we men will appear where previously only shades lived, and we men will speak to one another in grave low tones, cutting fatigue with relief and anticipating short bouts of loving before the chain of streetlights blink out one after the other and the sun clears the horizon and sleep finally reaches down and smoothes our furrowed American brows, bringing us some kind of peace until the afternoon is new and strong and full again."

Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips

1. "Enough for me to keep our Goose and in myself the truth of him and the dogs grow fat and eat of him and by the silken sweet of glue we spread across our palms to peel the skin I feel him with me and feel of the seeds that split in me and of the living harvest, shell and hide and cloven tongue and of the fruit and fowl we strew the yolky eyes the deer we cull the great whales flensed for blubber."

What Begins with Bird, Noy Holland

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The same issue of The Believer also features a fascinating essay on the "psychological craftmanship" of Eminem by Robert Christgau, a critic who continually frustrates and amazes me with his writings on music and popular culture.

Elsewhere, Christopher Hitchens chimes in on the growing controversy over those Danish editorial cartoons depicting Muhammad. Hitchens almost always makes me feel uncomfortable, either because he is being a complete asshole or because he can write so well while being one. Usually, it's both, but this essay had me raising a fist in solidarity.

Amid the hubbub over those cartoons, I was reminded of the stink following Sinead O'Connor after she ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL. Some commentators on the Muhammad cartoons have pointed to the Muslim reaction as unnecessarily extreme, but it's interesting to note that NBC has banned any use of the O'Connor footage for any purpose. The incident effectively ended her popular career and has become a legendary example of the artist's intolerance and instability. My nation for a kettle.

While we're on the subject of earth-shaking demonstrations and cultural collisions, here is an interesting report on new findings regarding the origin of the Man in the Moon.

Stay tuned for a post on the film series I've initiated at Dixie State.