Looking to kill some time during the dog days of summer? Here’s one option that John Ptak came up with. On his intriguing blog, The History of Ideas, he writes: “Isn’t this great? I bumped into a wonderful site called kloth.net that provides a free-to-all and unrestricted use of their punch card emulator. It was found while looking for dating ideas for an IBM 5081 card that I have that has programming information for the BINAC computer (ca. late 1940’s), and kloth.net had info on the history of IBM cards as well as the emulator–plus other stuff. Completely distracted from the BINAC quest, I created some cards using some great first lines of literature. You can play too!” I created two of my own, using The American Book Review’s list of 100 great opening lines.
What exactly is a punch card, our younger readers might rightly ask? An IBM web site tells us:
Perhaps the earliest icon of the Information Age was a simple punched card produced by IBM, commonly known as the “IBM card.” Measuring just 7- 3/8 inches by 3- 1/4 inches, the piece of smooth stock paper was unassuming, to be sure. But taken collectively, the IBM card [like the floppy disks that came later] held nearly all of the world’s known information for just under half a century—an impressive feat even by today’s measures. It rose to popularity during the Great Depression and quickly became a ubiquitous installment in the worlds of data processing and popular culture. What’s more, the punched card [see examples from Columbia University here] provided such a significant profit stream that it was instrumental to IBM’s rapid growth in the mid-twentieth century.
Despite its occasional use in spoken monologue, the Very Long Literary Sentence properly exists in the mind (hence “stream-of-consciousness”), since the most wordy of literary exhalations would exhaust the lungs’ capacity. Molly Bloom’s 36-page, two-sentence run-on soliloquy at the close of Joyce’s Ulysses takes place entirely in her thoughts. Faulkner’s longest sentence—smack in the middle of Absalom, Absalom! —unspools in Quentin Compson’s tortured, silent ruminations. According to a 1983 Guinness Book of Records, this monster once qualified as literature’s longest at 1,288 words, but that record has long been surpassed, in English at least, by Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, which ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955 word sentence. Czech and Polish novelists have written book-length sentences since the sixties, and French writer Mathias Énard puts them all to shame with a one-sentence novel 517 pages long, though its status is “compromised by 23 chapter breaks that alleviate eye strain,” writes Ed Park in the New York Times. Like Faulkner’s glorious run-ons, Jacob Silverman describes Énard’s one-sentence Zone as transmuting “the horrific into something sublime.”
Are these literary stunts kin to Philippe Petit’s highwire challenges—undertaken for the thrill and just to show they can be done? Park sees the “The Very Long Sentence” in more philosophical terms, as “a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself.” Perhaps this is why the very long sentence seems most expressive of life at its fullest and most expansive. Below, we bring you five long literary sentences culled from various sources on the subject. These are, of course, not the “5 longest,” nor the “5 best,” nor any other superlative. They are simply five fine examples of The Very Long Sentence in literature. Enjoy reading and re-reading them, and please leave your favorite Very Long Sentence in the comments.
At The New Yorker’s “Book Club,” Jon Michaud points us toward this long sentence, from Samuel Beckett’s Watt. We find the title character, “an obsessively rational servant,” attempting to “see a pattern in how his master, Mr. Knott, rearranges the furniture.”
Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window and the washand-stand on its feet by the fire; and on the Tuesday…
Here, writes Michaud, the long sentence conveys “a desperate attempt to nail down all the possibilities in a given situation, to keep the world under control by enumerating it.”
The next example, from Poynter, achieves a very different effect. Instead of listing concrete objects, the sentence below from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby opens up into a series of abstract phrases.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Chosen by The American Scholar editors as one of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy Peter Clark, achieves quite a feat: “Long sentences don’t usually hold together under the weight of abstractions, but this one sets a clear path to the most important phrase, planted firmly at the end, ‘his capacity for wonder.’”
Jane Wong at Tin House’s blog “The Open Bar” quotes the hypnotic sentence below from Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home.”
I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the goldfish living in a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the stairs creaked, the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot boiled, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches heavy with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin…
Kincaid’s sentences, Wong writes, “have the ability to simultaneously suspend and propel the reader. We trust her semi-colons and follow until we are surprised to find the period. We stand on that rock of a period—with water all around us, and ask: how did we get here?”
The blog Paperback Writer brings us the “puzzle” below from notorious long-sentence-writer Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the water of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the Mouth —- rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
Blogger Rebecca quotes Woolf as a challenge to her readers to become better writers. “This sentence is not something to be feared,” she writes, “it is something to be embraced.”
But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.
Sentences like these, writes Barnes & Noble blogger Hanna McGrath, “demand something from the reader: patience.” That may be so, but they reward that patience with delight for those who love language too rich for the pinched limitations of workaday grammar and syntax.
Nadine Gordimer, whose novels of South Africa portray the conflicts and contradictions of a racist society, was named winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature today as her country finally begins to dismantle the system her works have poignantly explored for more than 40 years.
In a brief citation, the Swedish Academy, which confers the awards, referred to her as “Nadine Gordimer, who through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity.”
The academy also added that “her continual involvement on behalf of literature and free speech in a police state where censorship and persecution of books and people exist have made her ‘the doyenne of South African letters.’ ”
Yesterday, The New Yorker commented that, although she wrote 15 novels, it was “through her short fiction Gordimer made her presence felt the most.” Gordimer published her very first short story, “Come Again Tomorrow,” in a Johannesburg magazine in 1938, when she was just 15 years old. Thirteen years later, there came another first — the first of many stories she published in The New Yorker (“A Watcher of the Dead”). Although many of Gordimer’s New Yorker stories remain locked up, available only to the magazine’s subscribers, we’ve managed to dig up several open ones. Above, you can watch Gordimer read her 1999 story called “Loot” while visiting Harvard University in 2005. The text has since been re-published on the Nobel Prize web site. Below, you can also listen to author Tessa Hadley read “City Lovers,” first published in The New Yorker in 1975. The story “focusses on a love affair between a white man and a ‘colored’ woman in Apartheid South Africa. It’s deeply political in its details—the man is a geologist at a mining company, the couple’s affair is illegal, and they cover it up by pretending that she is his servant. ”
Other Gordimer stories available online include “The First Sense” and “A Beneficiary”, published respectively in The New Yorker in 2006 and 2007. “The Second Sense” came out in The Virginia Quarterly, also in 2007. If you, dear Open Culture readers, happen to know of any other Gordimer stories published online, please let us know in the comments sections below, and we’ll add them to the roundup.
Last Wednesday, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England unveiled the wax sculpture above, which they say is the closest “anyone has come to the real Jane Austen in 200 years.” The figure, The Guardianreports, is the creation of forensic artist Melissa Dring, a “specialist team using forensic techniques which draw on contemporary eye-witness accounts,” and Emmy-winning costume designer Andrea Galer.
Austen often introduced her characters with broad descriptions—Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich,” Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bingley simply “a single man in possession of a good fortune.” But her talent consisted in undermining such stock descriptions, and the societal assumptions they entail. Instead of types, she gave readers complicated individuals squirming uncomfortably inside the bonds of propriety and decorum. But what of Austen herself? Readers initially knew nothing of the author, as her novels were first published anonymously.
Since her death in 1817, biographers have told and retold her personal history, and she has become an almost cult-like figure for fans of her work. Some of the author’s first biographers were family members, including her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1872 (above). In it, Austen-Leigh describes his aunt as “very attractive”: “Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls round her face.”
Based partly on that description and others from niece Caroline, the wax figure, Dring told the BBC, is “pretty much like her.” Austen “came from a large… family and they all seemed to share the long nose, the bright sparkly eyes and curly brown hair. And these characteristics come through the generations.” Dring used Austen’s sister Cassandra’s famous portrait as a starting point, but noted that the sketch “does make it look like she’s been sucking lemons […] We know from all accounts of her, she was very lively, very great fun to be with and a mischievous and witty person.” All descriptions with which her devoted readers would doubtless agree. See more photos of the Austen wax sculpture here.
Sci-fi author B.C. Kowalski recently posted a short essay on why the advice to write every day is, for lack of a suitable euphemism, “bullshit.” Not that there’s anything wrong with it, Kowalski maintains. Only that it’s not the only way. It’s said Thackeray wrote every morning at dawn. Jack Kerouac wrote (and drank) in binges. Every writer finds some method in-between. The point is to “do what works for you” and to “experiment.” Kowalski might have added a third term: diversify. It’s worked for so many famous writers after all. James Joyce had his music, Sylvia Plath her art, Hemingway his machismo. Faulkner drew cartoons, as did his fellow Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, his equal, I’d say, in the art of the American grotesque. Through both writers ran a deep vein of pessimistic humor, oblique, but detectable, even in scenes of highest pathos.
O’Connor’s visual work, writes Kelly Gerald in The Paris Review, was a “way of seeing she described as part of the ‘habit of art’”—a way to train her fiction writer’s eye. Her cartoons hew closely to her authorial voice: a lone sardonic observer, supremely confident in her assessments of human weakness. Perhaps a better comparison than Faulkner is with British poet and doodler Stevie Smith, whose bleak vision and razor-sharp wit similarly cut through mountains of… shall we say, bullshit. In both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, O’Connor set deadpan one-liners against images of pretension, conformity, and the banality of college life. In the cartoon at the top, she seems to mock the pursuit of credentials as a refuge for the socially disaffected. Above, a campaigner for a low-level office deploys bombastic pseudo-Leninist rhetoric, and in the cartoon below, a cranky character escapes a horde of identical WAVES.
O’Connor was an intensely visual writer with, Gerald writes, a “natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations,” fully credible even at their most extreme (as in the increasingly horrific self-lacerations of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). She began drawing at five and produced small books and sketches as a child, eventually publishing cartoons in almost every issue of her high-school and college’s newspapers and yearbooks. Her alma mater Georgia College, then known as Georgia State College for Women, has published a book featuring her cartoons from her undergraduate years, 1942–45.
More recently, Gerald edited a collection called Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons for Fantagraphics. In his introduction, artist Barry Moser describes in detail the technique of her linoleum cuts, calling them “coarse in technical terms.” And yet, “her rudimentary handling of the medium notwithstanding, O’Connor’s prints offer glimpses into the work of the writer she would become” with their “little O’Connor petards aimed at the walls of pretentiousness, academics, student politics, and student committees.” Had O’Connor continued making cartoons into her publishing years, she might have, like B.C. Kowalski, aimed one of those petards at those who dispense dogmatic, cookie-cutter writing advice as well.
Quick note: Earlier this year, J. K. Rowling began writing new stories about the 2014 Quidditch World Cup Finals for Pottermore, the website for all things Harry Potter. Today, she followed up with a story that takes the form of an article published in The Daily Prophet: “Dumbledore’s Army Reunites at Quidditch World Cup Final” by Rita Skeeter. Here, Rowling gives us the first glimpse of the adult Harry Potter.
About to turn 34, there are a couple of threads of silver in the famous Auror’s black hair, but he continues to wear the distinctive round glasses that some might say are better suited to a style-deficient twelve-year-old. The famous lightning scar has company: Potter is sporting a nasty cut over his right cheekbone. Requests for information as to its provenance merely produced the usual response from the Ministry of Magic: ‘We do not comment on the top secret work of the Auror department, as we have told you no less than 514 times, Ms. Skeeter.’ So what are they hiding? Is the Chosen One embroiled in fresh mysteries that will one day explode upon us all, plunging us into a new age of terror and mayhem?
Norman Mailer wrote prolifically, but that didn’t mean cranking out insubstantial volumes. The books whose names we all remember always feel, when we take them down off the shelf, somewhat weightier than we remember: Advertisements for Myself at 532 pages, The Naked and the Dead at 731, The Executioner’s Song at 1072. But the ones with titles which don’t come to mind quite so readily can feel even more physically monumental, and deliberately crafted that way. “Mailer liked to think of his books as his children,” wrote Louis Menand in the author’s 2007 New Yorker obituary, “and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated” — he answered, “Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost, great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer.” Ancient Evenings takes place in Egypt, among the actual pyramids, but if you want to visit the much more labyrinthine landmark of Harlot’s Ghost, you’d best take a map. Conveniently, Mailer drew one up himself, in the form of the outline above.
It would never before have seemed possible to me to reduce Mailer’s 1191-page novel of the CIA in the 1960s — a tale of the Mafia, the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution and Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, and all those events’ attendant complications both real and imagined — to a single sheet, but here we have it. You can click on the image at the top of the post to enlarge it, and then click on the section you’d like to read in detail. Read Harlot’s Ghost with this outline handy, and perhaps you’ll find yourself not on the side of those (Menand included) who dismissed the book upon its publication in 1991, but of those who consider it Mailer’s masterpiece. Christopher Hitchens took the latter position in his own obituary for Mailer, calling the novel “a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it. What a shame that it was so dismally received by the critics and that he never delivered the second volume of it that he had promised.” And imagine the size and complexity to which Mailer would have grown that book.
A great deal of mythology has built up around the life of Jack Kerouac, and especially around the experiences that went into his best-known work, the 1957 novel On the Road. Even the very act of its composition — perhaps especially the act of its composition — has, in the imaginations of many of Kerouac’s readers, turned into an image of the man “writing the book on a long scroll of teletype paper in three coffee-soaked-benzedrine-fueled days.” With this image in mind, illustrator Paul Rogers of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design created On the Road, the illustrated scroll, featuring “a drawing for every page” of the novel, and depicting the historically researched “cars, buses, roadside architecture, and old signs” from Kerouac’s America of the late 1940s and early 50s, one that “looked awfully different than it does now.” You can scroll, as it were, through this work in progress at Rogers’ site.
We’ve here included only four of the over 100 drawings Rogers has so far made, but these examples capture the novel’s multigenerationally intoxicating mix of Americana and pure momentum. You’ll also notice that, underneath each image, Rogers excerpts a passage of Kerouac’s. “Adding Kerouac’s words as captions to the drawings makes the series feel like a journal and not a carefully planned out illustrated book,” he writes, “and it seems to capture some of the spirit of Kerouac’s ‘this-happened-then-this-then-this’ writing style.”
You can read the scroll part-by-part on these pages: one through three, four, five, six, seven. Though I never took quite the lifestyle inspiration from On the Road some have, I can’t wait to see what visual inspiration Rogers draws from the bit about fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
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Looking to kill some time during the dog days of summer? Here’s one option that John Ptak came up with. On his intriguing blog, The History of Ideas, he writes: “Isn’t this great? I bumped into a wonderful site called kloth.net that provides a free-to-all and unrestricted use of their punch card emulator. It was found while looking for dating ideas for an IBM 5081 card that I have that has programming information for the BINAC computer (ca. late 1940’s), and kloth.net had info on the history of IBM cards as well as the emulator–plus other stuff. Completely distracted from the BINAC quest, I created some cards using some great first lines of literature. You can play too!” I created two of my own, using The American Book Review’s list of 100 great opening lines.
