Jorge Luis Borges describes the meeting of deserter martin Fierro and Tadeo Isidoro Cruz. None of us may ever write a sentence this powerful in our lives."Any destiny at all, however long and complicated, in reality consists of a single moment: the moment in which a man once and for all knows who he is."
A normal run-on sentence is pedestrian. The forceful, marauding use of polysyndeton to drag out a sentence into a multiple page narrative is badass. The comma, the semi colon, the parentheses, and the em dash all feature. Carlos Fuentes wrote in Spanish, as his native language. In translation, his grammar and punctuation was preserved as much as possible. It leaves me to wonder if this one sentence was even longer and more ungainly in the original."I could breathe with the place and see what each one was doing in his own bedroom, in his bathroom, in the dining room, there as nothing either secret or public for me the little witness, Harriett, I who saw them all, heard them all, imagined and smelled them all by simply breathing with the rhythm they didn't posses because they didn't' need it, they took it all for granted, I had to breathe in the hacienda, fill my lungs with its smallest flake of paint, and be the absent witness to every single copulation, hurried or languorous, imaginative or boring, whining or proud, tender or cold, to every single defecation, thick or watery, green or red, smooth or caked with undigested corn, I heard every fart, do you hear, every belch, every spit fall, every pee run, and I saw the scrawny turkeys having their necks twisted, the oxen emasculated, the goats eviscerated, and put on the spit, I saw bottles being corked full of uneasy wine of the Coahuila Valleys, so near to the desert that they taste like cactus wine, then the medicine bottles being uncorked for the castor oil purges, and the fevers running high in death and childbirth and children's diseases, I could touch the red velvets and creamy organdies and green taffetas of the hoopskirts and bonnets of the ladies, the long lace nightgowns with the Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered in front of their cunts: the quivering, humble devotion to the votive lamps quietly sweating away their orange-colored wax as if caught up in a holy orgasm; contrasting, gringa, with the chandeliers of the vast mansion of stylish, expensive wooden floors and heavy draperies and golden tassels and grandfather clocks and wingtip chairs and rickety dining room chairs bathed in golden paint-I saw it all, and then one day my old friend, the most ancient man in the hacienda, a man maybe as old as the hacienda itself, a man who had never worn shoes and did not make noise (Graciano his name was, now I recall it), dressed in white peasant shirt and pants, a piece of rawhide that man, wearing clothes patched over and over again will it was impossible to distinguish between the patches on his clothes and the wrinkles on his skin, as if the body had also been patched over a thousand times: Graciano with his white stubble on his head and chin was the old man charged with winding the clocks every evening, and one night he took me with him."
Annie Dillard is overtly spiritual making most of her books degenerate into insane glossolalia-worthy gibberish. She connects utterly unrelated thing son the way to not ever making a point. But the stories are interesting if you don't mind skipping the pages of drivel. But in that jumble of deeply heartfelt dookie, are some wonderful turns of phrase. My example, For the Time Being Knopf books circa 1999.
" ...the Russian operation in Georgia was straight out of Col. Boyd's playbook: Roll in hard and fast with overwhelming force, administer the cockpunch, and be finished before anyone can prepare a response or start blathering on about peackeepers and/or UN resolutions. Because that's how it's done in the New Century of the Naked Ape."-S.A.W. (courtesy of Strudel and Shotguns)
"I may have fucked my life up flatter'n hammered shit, but I stand before you today beholden to no human cocksucker."It's a rare writer that can do thsi with fluidity and still carry a plot, a dialog or a message. Strudel & Shotguns manages all three.
It's probably one of the best books I ever read. His sentences are short like Hemingway but they stack up better somehow. The voices are truer, and the locale grittier and more tangible. It lacks the 1950s maudlin quality that Hem couldn't help painting all over France, Cuba and Africa."I should never show up in these little river towns until my tug comes in - but I always come early, wait, watch people on the street. Out there vapor lamps flicker violet, bounce their light up from the pavement, twist everything's color. A few people walk along in the drizzle, but they don't stop to look into cheap shop windows."There is a collection of his short stories available. His catalog is short. In 1979 at the age of 26 he shot himself in the head.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200404u/pancake
http://www.appalachianbooks.com/Authors/Breece%20Pancake.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1151208
Linda Yablonsky is a music critic. She's not quite on par with me, but she's much more suave and that's worth something. She also used to be on Smack and you can't beat that real-life experience in writing. Her book "The Story of Junk" is a strangely detached tale of a drug-fiend. While some may recoil at the inhumanity. Sincerity cannot be overrated. I quote a single sentence from a concert review she wrote in another less graphic book: The Show I'll Never Forget."I remember Roach go at his drums as if they were the pages of a book of joy and madness that he was reading and writing at the same time, that Simone picked up to add color and meaning."You had me at "Joy and madness."
Most newspaper writing today is disposable, it's of less substance than magazines or (gasp) blogging. But like any broad encompassing statement, there are exceptions. I found this recently and stopped to re-read the paragraph. It's self-aware like meta text and reads like a narrative magazine article. I am surprised most of all, to find it in the New York Times. Here."Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking. My distress — partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having come this far hoping to find exactly such a scene — struck him as funny. “A gorilla is still meat,” said my guide, a former gorilla hunter himself. “It has no soul.” So he agrees with Spain’s bishops. But it was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother?"
The language is deceptively simple. He only branches off into the wow and flutter in a very measured way. I really like the way he does it. Sometimes it's just country language. It's not real country language, it's shit he made up, like referring to a bulls genitalia as a "calf-maker." It adds color but not at the expense of the tale. I'm going to quote the book twice here to show two other ways he goes about that business."I could imagine stinking heaps of bream and carp, maybe bulletheaded behemoths in torn T-shirts standing in them, bloodied, with fishbillies in their hands, the weeps and near-orgasmical moans of grandmaw in a cotton housedress, a big buffalo lodged and wiggling dumbly between her thighs, others wading for help, clubs raised. I could smell the blood and death of it, could see how the sun woudl be shining down on the carnage at nine o' clock in the morning."The first part is so exaggerated and comical then in the last sentence so Gothic and abrupt. It just ends the run away idea so it can end at all. Here he does the same thing but the feel is comic instead of stark. The grammar is deliberately broken moving the continuity from feeling of a character in control, who has a plan.. then exhibiting doubt, but also awareness of his own folly.
"I approached him slowly, speaking calm words of encouragement. There was a wire gap somewhere along the fence, and it I could just get it open and somehow get behind him without spooking him it might be possible to herd him gently back toward where he belonged, without getting too close to him. I be a man who be afraid of his own bull."
"The buzzard came picking its way across the yard, a dusty and desolate figure: every now and then it lifted sluggishly from the earth and flapped down twenty yards on."-Graham Greene
George Singleton write conversationally, fluidly like real life. He writes like the monologue that narrates our memories, simply and without undue adornment. It emphasizes the singular occasions when he gets artful. It leaves his works relying mostly on players and plot."I'd look down at the lake and wonder why our bodies seemed more water then dirt, more dirt than air or fire."-George Singleton
Batouala was first published in 1921. Rene Maran, while born in Martinique he moved to Gabon in Central Africa when he was 7. It's the setting for his book Batouala. It was written in French of course, my translation was printed in 1930 from a 1922 translation by Thomas Szold Seltzer. The text is now in the public domain. While my copy was $2, your can be free here."Gradually colors faded, from shade to shade, from transparence to finer transparence, and the beams in the immense sky scattered. the last shades of color were blotted out. The indefinable silence that watched over the agony and the death of the sun spread over the whole earth."
"He lay there in this fix, cold as a rock for some time. He were laid out for dead. And after a long spell he were revived up with this song on his lips"This was followed by the tablature for a traditional rendering of "O'Death"
"Of death among our own species, to say nothing of the thousand styles and modes of murder, our best memories, even among happy deaths, yield groans and tears, mingled with morbid exultation; burian companies, black in cloth and countenance, and, last of all, a black box burial in an oll-omened place, haunted by imaginary glooms and ghosts of every degree. thus death becomes fearful, and the most notable and incredible thing heard around a death-bed is , "I fear not to die."
"Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was nada, y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada, nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing it with thee. "Interchanging the Spanish and English tells you thing about the character as does the use of the lords prayer and it's mildly sacrilegious modification. Without revealing anything about the story, you know things about the character.
"The cold was nearly as cruel as it had been the night before. Pitch-blackness closed down over the mountainsides that crowded so close; but across the velley floor bonfires blazed, torches moved among the dark ruins, and the rivers and big pools of dead water were lighted by the fire that raged on at the stone bridge."It’s all on Google books of course
"For years I'd walked suspiciously around the idea, sniffing at it, kicking my leg up occasionally and pissing on it so I'd be able to find it again, then wandering away for a while knowing that the piss smell would help me identify it when I came back. Now I was ready to accept the idea, to piss on it not just so I could find it again, but to mark it as mine, within my boundaries."He totally contorts, reshapes and abuses the metaphor in every way possible. It's really a very strong passage in a totally underrated book.
"This was the conduct of a man who feared nothing, not even death. He, whose eyes were getting dimmer, lived constantly in the blazing light of his own genius."Blazing light is not an entirely unique term. But using it zoomorphicly is odd. Even more oddly he may have stolen it from Sir William Jones in an article written about British Lawyers in 1830. It's in the public domain and can be downloaded here.
"His studies were so various, yet so deep; his knowledge so universal, yet so profound, and his abilities so extraordinary, yet so unlimited, that nothing that the human mind had compassed, however deep and metaphysical its researches had been, whether employed in developing the hidden principles of matter, or of disclosing the secret laws of nature, or of searching into the deep and mysterious truths of philosophy; nothing, however infinite and vast; nothing, however subtle and obscure, but he threw upon it the blazing light of his own genius, or grasped it in the powerful embrace of his gigantic intellect."
"Never measure," he said. "you must never measure. Splash. Pinch. Use your eyes, your instinct. Never spare the oil." What did he think about butter people? "Tontos." he replied. "Fools."
When we got up to leave, finally, I asked Juanito, "Are you sure you never cook anything in butter?"
"Feh," he spat. "Poison."
