Five more sentences in the past

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was a dark and stormy night.

It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea. It was just one of those things.

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Write five sentences in the past

Write five sentences in the past

Another Google search: write five sentences in the past. Okay:

“You did too.”

“I did not.”

“Did too!”

“Did not!”

And thus the years flew by.

I have written several five-sentence posts in the past: about clothes, life on the moon, “the ship,” and smoking. And one in the future, about the past.

Doers of homework: instead of searching for five sentences, take the time to write sentences of your own. That’s how to learn.

Infinite Jest, description

Mario Incandenza is taking a walk on the grounds of the Enfield Tennis Academy:

The whole area running along the tree‐line and the thickets of like shrubbery and stickery bushes and heaven knew what all was covered with fallen leaves that were dry but had not yet quite all the way lost their color. The leaves were underfoot. Mario kind of tottered from tree to tree, pausing at each tree to rest. It was @ 1900h., not yet true twilight, but the only thing left of the sunset was a snout just over Newton, and the places under long shadows were cold, and a certain kind of melancholy sadness was insinuating itself into the grounds’ light. The staggered lamps by the paths hadn’t come on yet, however.

A lovely scent of illegally burned leaves wafting up from East Newton mixed with the foody smells from the ventilator turbines out of the back of the dining hall. Two gulls were in one place in the air over the dumpsters over by the rear parking lot. Leaves crackled underfoot. The sound of Mario walking on dry leaves was like: crackle crackle crackle stop; crackle crackle crackle stop.

An Empire Waste Displacement displacement vehicle whistled past overhead, rising in the start of its arc, its one blue alert‐light atwinkle.

He was around where the tree‐line bulged herniatically out toward the end of the West Courts’ fencing.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

So many things to like:

The nervous qualifiers: “like shrubbery and stickery bushes,” “not yet quite all the way,” “kind of tottered,” “a certain kind of melancholy sadness.”

The clumsinesses: “whole area,” “heaven knew what all,” “yet, however,” “foody,” “out of the back,” “Displacement displacement,” “around where.” Re: “yet, however”: Wallace likes strings of conjuctions. “And so but,” elsewhere in the novel, is my favorite.

The statements of the obvious: “melancholy sadness.” Is there another kind? The leaves “underfoot.” Where else would they crackle? And the tree-line bulging “out.”

Best of all, the strain to be descriptive: the “snout” of the sunset, “staggered lamps,” “crackle crackle crackle stop,” “two gulls in one place,” the “whistling” vehicle, its light “atwinkle.” And that “herniatically” bulging tree-line!

Wallace is parodying, of course, writing practices encouraged in workshops across the North American continent. Make the reader feel that bulge!

Four more elements I like:

The misused tree-line. A tree-line is not simply a line of trees.

The ambiguity of the verb was in the first sentence. If area is the sentence’s subject, then subject and verb agree. If area and thickets (and more?) form a compound subject, was is wrong. The wonderful thing about the sentence is that its clumsiness makes the verb seem wrong, even if it isn’t.

“1900h.” Yes, the world runs on military time.

The E.W.D. vehicle — one thinks “garbage truck” — whistles past not on a road but in the air. Yes, it’s a different world from the one we’re (still) living in, in which, as Elaine reminds me, there is no East Newton, Massachusetts.

[Correction, after reading further: there may be a tree-line after all. The Academy’s hillside driveway slants at a seventy-degree angle.]

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Infinite Jest, attention

Hank Jones (1918–2010)

[U]nlike his younger brothers Thad, who played trumpet with Count Basie and was later a co-leader of a celebrated big band, and Elvin, an influential drummer who formed a successful combo after six years with John Coltrane’s innovative quartet, Mr. Jones seemed content for many years to keep a low profile.

That started changing around the time he turned 60.

Hank Jones, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 91 (New York Times)

Hank Jones was a brilliant pianist. If I had to choose one recording to recommend: Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs, with bassist Charlie Haden (Verve, 1995). For now, here is one small sample of Jones alone, a performance of Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”

My dad the tileman (and jazz fan) once did some work in Jones’s northern New Jersey house and got to hear him practice all day.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, May 17, 2010.]

The rear window. The ICE store (bar?). The U CONN DAD and MOM hoodies — when your oldest child is in high school. The cars, facing the wrong way. Either that or the street itself is facing the wrong way. Either that or Connecticut is England.

In the words of the poet, “Everything is broken.”

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

[With apologies to Bob Dylan.]

Pocket notebook sighting: Cat People

[“It’s my duty to remember. I have it all here.” Psychiatrist Louis Judd (Tom Conway) makes notes with a Sheaffer Balance fountain pen as Irena Dubrovna Reed (Simone Simon) describes her condition.]

Cat People (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1942) is a terrifying delight, full of shadows and implications — and a pocket notebook. Irena Dubrovna fears that she is a descendant of her Serbian village’s cat-people and will turn into a panther if stirred by deep passion. Thus she refuses even a kiss from her brand-new, all-American, right-as-rain husband, naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), who is trying his best to keep this impossible marriage afloat. But it’s complicated: Oliver’s co-worker Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) is deeply in love with him. Irena doesn’t like that at all.

Cat People reminds me of Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), two more low-budget masterpieces that tell their stories with great economy of means and and maximum visual interest. Here’s my favorite shot from Cat People, Alice and Oliver standing by a light table as a panther stalks them in their office. Three cheers for cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca.



Other pocket notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound

Corrections of the Times

From the Corrections page in today’s New York Times:

Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about GPS driving devices misidentified the country in which the Black Forest is located. The forest, in which the author found the device particularly useful, is in Germany, not Poland.

Worry Wheel

“Loneliness.” “Death.” “Money.” “Bedbugs.” “The New York Knicks.”

Andrew Kuo, “My Wheel of Worry, May 2010” (New York Times Magazine)

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Outsourcing worry

Anti-plagiarism legislation plagiarizes

In Argentina: Gerónimo Vargas Aignasse’s proposed legislation to outlaw plagiarism borrows three paragraphs from the “Plagio” article in the Spanish-language Wikipedia — without attribution. Read all about it:

Argentinian Politician’s Proposal For New Anti-Plagiarism Law Plagiarizes Wikipedia (Techdirt)

I do like the “tres a ocho años” part (prison!).

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Plagiarism policy plagiarized (At Southern Illinois University)

New directions in advertising

Heard earlier today, in the AM radio wilderness of western Indiana:

“Let God use me to help you sell your house.”