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Pete DRAKE, Talking Steel GuitarS, Alvino Rey AND STRINGY, TROUTMAN, WALSH, AND Frampton 'FEELS Like We Do' AND GETS AWAY WITH SAYING IT 14 MILLION DOUBLE ALBUM TIMES!
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•π•Pete DRAKE, Talking Steel GuitarS, Alvino Rey AND STRINGY, TROUTMAN, WALSH, AND Frampton 'FEELS Like We Do' AND GETS AWAY WITH SAYING IT 14 MILLION DOUBLE ALBUM TIMES!
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speaking of doubling-up, Rey's wife was behind a curtain dubbing lyrics for a tuxedoed puppet with an attitude whom she could not see from her secret place, but had to jibe with the puppeteers manhandling mechanizing synchronization which gave le petit chanteur poupee his zippity-zoppity-doo-day -- doubling lyrics with a crazy modulating, phased out, quacky, pitch-shifting, dog-whistling, matching exactly the pitch, tone, and timbre of Rey's otherworldly introduction of a Gibson Electric Steel Guitar, Deluxe Edition, as lead and solo and puppetmaster of ceremonies for the suggestion that his guitar and his playing of it were the driving cause of what the audience heard as a mind-blowing Houdini Act whose Ochim's Razor had been left behind for one manufactured by Rube Goldberg.
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Rey, dressed in Tails -- his brand as leader -- fronting this whacked-out orchestra, pulling out stops with kitschy but pure pre-exotica of les baxter future which included his feature number, a bouncing, swing blues sung by a frontman whose style was a cross between nepalese throat singing Tibetan Monks, half-human, questionally open otolaryngeal glottis with modal ululating vocalization (we'd have to wait 40 years to see or hear again with Yoko Ono) Appalachian holler-calling, Middle Eastern war cry / mother's wail of mourning, and a pitchshifting akin to the tweaky noise made when changing radio stations -- a modal imperfection degraded from electrical transfere maps occluded with strange new electrical lighting nightmare scenarios, then through an early amplifier and back, to produce a vision whose experimental lunacy involved a woman in a ball gown, furtively singing into a mic 'The St. Louis Blues' to a curtain from a david lynch film -- And it all seemed to emanate from an awfully cute, well-dressed puppet Named Stringy as he did the dozens with a wiry Mid-Western bumpkin character called Skeets who was holding a licorice stick in his hand and currently involved in a big band high-note dual / sing-off -- his clarinet and the wiseacre puppet's ethereally disembodied voice.
some of whose citizens, though never having taken Mr. Owsley's acid, were leaving the room positively stoned and surely perplexed upon waking with visions of a singing puppet in a Tux singing an up-tempo Blues whose body was shaped like a ukulele and whose head like that of a guitar -- with crazy googly eyes that made him hit his head while slopping his pigs.
Alvino Rey inspired every Musical Ttesla from Pete Drake to @rogertroutman to @thezappband with room for @joewalsh and other mad musical scientists like Les Paul and Seth Lover and McCarty over at Fender to perfect Rey's act into Peter Frampton's Smash Hit whose multi-platinum novelty was an obligatory must when I saw him play it live on his very well-attended Frampton Comes Alive, which saw the device change throughout its other technical changes over the forty years taking on an unimaginable to Rey positively obsecene delivery device the courage to transmit his message of wanting to fπ³ck you, saying so while blowing through a plastic tube.
• #mrjyn • @dougmeet •. A post shared by dougπmeet (@dougmeet) on Oct 9, 2020 at 1:04am
“Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognized a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St.
“Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew that a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was just his insecurity, that he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and that this sometimes manifested via projection as the feeling that people he was trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his whole being and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Ξy, or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized through his whole character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Ξy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Ξy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July > picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat &.
“You know that you will see him again, at least you have told yourself not to worry, not to, in the words of your psychiatrist, Dr. Blackmur, with whom you’ve not spoken in seventy-two hours, “let things snowball,” and that this—whatever it is that’s happening to you right now—is not necessarily an ending so much as an interstice, by which you seem to mean, vaguely, a kind of brief emotive pause, a regrouping, of sorts, during which time you will both try and get your respective shit (s?) together, so that one day, and, you hope, one day soon, you might share a sleazy Sunday afternoon together, hungover, occasionally tumbling into an eager, tingly, greedy kind of sex (a sex so deeply parasitic that you feel, like vampires, a need to drink it), and then, post-coitus, each of you tolerably sated, his head, the benign humidity of his left temple, say, murmuring on your chest, a Sunday, a potted avocado seed beginning to doff its husk on the windowsill, and the window, then, with rain or sun or sleet behind it, and a feeling of gratitude that you are all too grateful to notice, fleeting, you’d call it, this feeling, which, it suddenly occurs to you, you may never again know the daytime delirium of—or so you try not to tell yourself as muscling two suitcases down the narrow, slippery, improbably leaf-blistered steps (of what, technically speaking, is no longer your guys’ apartment) and towards the curb where, any minute now, a cab, a checkered yellow-black hearse, will glide up and take you to the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, where, having puzzled around the Porter Terminal some twenty-three minutes, a kind of wide tugboat type thing will drag you and your two miserable suitcases (of which, just your luck, the heavier of the two has a broken wheel) to the airport proper, where you will, almost finally, fly home—St.
John’s—even though the word home, or, the very notion of home, doesn’t quite make sense to you at this particular moment, because, let’s face it, welling up inside of you—recall, you’re still very much on the curb here—is this horrible and excruciating sense of homelessness that manifests itself as a kind of bowel-deep sphincter-bristling angst, and you feel that what you are leaving, or, no, in the spirit of pained specificity, what you are basically on the precipice of almost leaving—a bright two bedroom apartment with two patios, one windowless bathroom, and a kitchen with beech countertops, sooty-mauve walls and terracotta tiles—feels, even as you are so clearly leaving it, very much like a home, and how the fuck does that work, you wonder, idiotically, just as he, the man you are promising yourself you will one day see again, comes down the steps bearing a small white dog, a Pomeranian, with its simple moist snout, a ludicrous little animal that you’ve come, in recent months, to adore, tic-tac brain, raisin eyes et al.—and it doesn’t help that this man has tears, the beginnings of tears, in his eyes, and that now, quite suddenly, so do you, and it’s almost nine o’clock in the morning on like—this kills you—a fucking Tuesday, you think, and the last thing you want to be doing is saying goodbye to the man you, trite as it sounds, love, while around you surges an indolent chatter of morning traffic, caroming buses and streetcars and somewhere, not so far off, perhaps, the dopplering bray of an ambulance, and maybe, because you still love him, you feel it, this sense of incumbent regret, crawling through your chest so much so that it sends a few nervy jots of phlegm swimming up your throat, and but then—check this out, yes, see—here comes the cabby and now you’re on the clock because, holy shit, this guy’s face—jowly and hale, with telltale pouches of insomnia, like bruisy garlic cloves, slung beneath his eyes—seems stilled in a kind of harried rictus, and yet, and yet, you want this moment, horrible as it is, to last, if not forever, then at least a few minutes more, because, God, it just might be the last time—but, you say, don’t tell yourself this—as the man you are promising yourself you will one day see again leans into you and your five o’clock shadows lock like a bad similes, and he says, in a voice you are already beginning to forget, I love you, and you kiss, for some reason, the dog first, you press your index finger on its wet snout—and, rebuking you somewhat (in this, the dog seems just as impatient as the cabby)—you hold him close, dog and man, and you whisper in his ear, as much for him as for, you suppose, yourself, this isn’t the end of anything, I promise, we’ll see each other soon, even though, all of a sudden, you’re not, you’re in the cab and you’re telling the driver—who, what with his spade chin and lean veiny nose, you feel is pretty wise to what’s going on and (judging from the dour officiousness of his “Where you headed?”) maybe even just a little bit repelled and slightly resentful of you for having implicated him, poor guy, in the middle of it—you tell him: drive man, just like, you know, fucking drive, and, as he begins to edge out onto Queen, the fervid snick of his turn signal beating down on you, an insomnious pulse, you suffer one final glance out the back window and it’s an image of him, looming out of a rearview swell of cirrus, cradling that ludicrous Pomeranian, just standing there, mute and numb, in that upsized Adidas jacket, the one you picked out for him last Christmas at the Sally-Ann in Markham, and which, given its size or his size, you’d purchased more or less as a joke, and which he’d inadvertently loved, and now something, something in the far-flung comedy of this memory, man, it just about kills you (again), and you almost hope he’s crying, to feel how wet his eyes are because you’re crying, his eyes are your eyes—you look at me and eye you, etc.—and you want, suddenly, to scream: PAUSE!, just pull this fucking cab to the side of the road and let me the fuck out, but you don’t—because, and this will be important later, this, as Dr.
William Faulkner, “Absalom, Absalom.” 1289 words.
“Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realised at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realises that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realises that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel.
Donald Barthelme, “The Sentence.” 2,569 words.“Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom-if not the bottom of this page then some other page-where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think out the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and doesn’t see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won’t respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding, and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn’t want to waste anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through the mind more or less, and there is another way of describing the situation too, which is to say that the sentence crawls through the mind like something someone says to you while you are listening very hard to the FM radio, some rock group there, with its thrilling sound, and so, with your attention or the major part of it at least already rewarded, there is not much mind room you can give to the remark, especially considering that you have probably just quarreled with that person, the maker of the remark, over the radio being too loud, or something like that, and the view you take, of the remark, is that you’d really rather not hear it, but if you have to hear it, you want to listen to it for the smallest possible length of time, and during a commercial, because immediately after the commercial they’re going to play a new rock song by your favorite group, a cut that has never been aired before, and you want to hear it and respond to it in a new way, a way that accords with whatever you’re feeling at the moment, or might feel, if the threat of new experience could be (temporarily) overbalanced by the promise of possible positive benefits, or what the mind construes as such, remembering that these are often, really, disguised defeats (not that such defeats are not, at times, good for your character, teaching you that it is not by success alone that one surmounts life, but that setbacks, too, contribute to that roughening of the personality that, by providing a textured surface to place against that of life, enables you to leave slight traces, or smudges, on the face of human history-your mark) and after all, benefit-seeking always has something of the smell of raw vanity about it, as if you wished to decorate your own brow with laurel, or wear your medals to a cookout, when the invitation had said nothing about them, and although the ego is always hungry (we are told) it is well to remember that ongoing success is nearly as meaningless as ongoing lack of success, which can make you sick, and that it is good to leave a few crumbs on the table for the rest of your brethren, not to sweep it all into the little beaded purse of your soul but to allow others, too, part of the gratification, and if you share in this way you will find the clouds smiling on you, and the postman bringing you letters, and bicycles available when you want to rent them, and many other signs, however guarded and limited, of the community’s (temporary) approval of you, or at least of it’s willingness to let you believe (temporarily) that it finds you not so lacking in commendable virtues as it had previously allowed you to think, from its scorn of your merits, as it might be put, or anyway its consistent refusal to recognize your basic humanness and its secret blackball of the project of your remaining alive, made in executive session by its ruling bodies, which, as everyone knows, carry out concealed programs of reward and punishment, under the rose, causing faint alterations of the status quo, behind your back, at various points along the periphery of community life, together with other enterprises not dissimilar in tone, such as producing films that have special qualities, or attributes, such as a film where the second half of it is a holy mystery, and girls and women are not permitted to see it, or writing novels in which the final chapter is a plastic bag filled with water, which you can touch, but not drink: in this way, or ways, the underground mental life of the collectivity is botched, or denied, or turned into something else never imagined by the planners, who, returning from the latest seminar in crisis management and being asked what they have learned, say they have learned how to throw up their hands; the sentence meanwhile, although not insensible of these considerations, has a festering conscience of its own, which persuades it to follow its star, and to move with all deliberate speed from one place to another, without losing any of the “riders” it may have picked up just being there, on the page, and turning this way and that, to see what is over there, under that oddly-shaped tree, or over there, reflected in the rain barrel of the imagination, even though it is true that in our young manhood we were taught that short, punchy sentences were best (but what did he mean? doesn’t “punchy” mean punch-drunk? I think he probably intended to say “short, punching sentences,” meaning sentences that lashed out at you, bloodying your brain if possible, and looking up the word just now I came across the nearby “punkah,” which is a large fan suspended from the ceiling in India, operated by an attendant pulling a rope-that is what I want for my sentence, to keep it cool!) we are mature enough now to stand the shock of learning that much of what we were taught in our youth was wrong, or improperly understood by those who were teaching it, or perhaps shaded a bit, the shading resulting from the personal needs of the teachers, who as human beings had a tendency to introduce some of their heart’s blood into their work, and sometimes this may not have been of the first water, this heart’s blood, and even if they thought they were moving the “knowledge” out, as the Board of Education had mandated, they could have noticed that their sentences weren’t having the knockdown power of the new weapons whose bullets tumble end-over-end (but it is true that we didn’t have these weapons at that time) and they might have taken into account the fundamental dubiousness of their project (but all the intelligently conceived projects have been eaten up already, like the moon and the stars) leaving us, in our best clothes, with only things to do like conducting vigorous wars of attrition against our wives, who have now thoroughly come awake, and slipped into their striped bells, and pulled sweaters over their torsi, and adamantly refused to wear any bras under the sweaters, carefully explaining the political significance of this refusal to anyone who will listen, or look, but not touch, because that has nothing to do with it, so they say; leaving us, as it were, with only things to do like floating sheets of Reynolds Wrap around the room, trying to find out how many we can keep in the air at the same time, which at least gives us a sense of participation, as though we were Buddha, looking down at the mystery of your smile, which needs to be investigated, and I think I’ll do that right now, while there’s still enough light, if you’ll sit down over there, in the best chair, and take off all your clothes, and put your feet in that electric toe caddy (which prevents pneumonia) and slip into this permanent press hospital gown, to cover your nakedness-why, if you do all that, we’ll be ready to begin! after I wash my hands, because you pick up an amazing amount of exuviae in this city, just by walking around in the open air, and nodding to acquaintances, and speaking to friends, and copulating with lovers, in the ordinary course (and death to our enemies! by and by)-but I’m getting a little uptight, just about washing my hands, because I can’t find the soap, which somebody has used and not put back in the soap dish, all of which is extremely irritating, if you have a beautiful patient sitting in the examining room, naked inside her gown, and peering at her moles in the mirror, with her immense brown eyes following your every movement (when they are not watching the moles, expecting them, as in a Disney nature film, to exfoliate) and her immense brown head wondering what you’re going to do to her, the pierced places in the head letting that question leak out, while the therapist decides just to wash his hands in plain water, and hang the soap! and does so, and then looks around for a towel, but all the towels have been collected by the towel service, and are not there, so he wipes his hands on his pants, in the back (so as to avoid suspicious stains on the front) thinking: what must she think of me? and, all this is very unprofessional and at-sea looking! trying to visualize the contretemps from her point of view, if she has one (but how can she? she is not in the washroom) and then stopping, because it is finally his own point of view that he cares about and not hers, and with this firmly in mind, and a light, confident step, such as you might find in the works of Bulwer-Lytton, he enters the space she occupies so prettily and, taking her by the hand, proceeds to tear off the stiff white hospital gown (but no, we cannot have that kind of pornographic merde in this majestic and high-minded sentence, which will probably end up in the Library of Congress) (that was just something that took place inside his consciousness, as he looked at her, and since we know that consciousness is always consciousness of something, she is not entirely without responsibility in the matter) so, then, taking her by the hand, he falls into the stupendous white puree of her abyss, no, I mean rather that he asks her how long it has been since her last visit, and she says a fortnight, and he shudders, and tells her that with a condition like hers (she is an immensely popular soldier, and her troops win all their battles by pretending to be forests, the enemy discovering, at the last moment, that those trees they have eaten their lunch under have eyes and swords) (which reminds me of the performance, in 1845, of Robert-Houdin, called The Fantastic Orange Tree, wherein Robert-Houdin borrowed a lady’s handkerchief, rubbed it between his hands and passed it into the center of an egg, after which he passed the egg into the center of a lemon, after which he passed the lemon into the center of an orange, then pressed the orange between his hands, making it smaller and smaller, until only a powder remained, whereupon he asked for a small potted orange tree and sprinkled the powder thereupon, upon which the tree burst into blossom, the blossoms turning into oranges, the oranges turning into butterflies, and the butterflies turning into beautiful young ladies, who then married members of the audience), a condition so damaging to real-time social intercourse of any kind, the best thing she can do is give up, and lay down her arms, and he will lie down in them, and together they will permit themselves a bit of the old slap and tickle, she wearing only her Mr.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.” 2156 words.
“Now they’re going to see who I am, he said to himself in his strong new man’s voice, many years after he had first seen the huge ocean liner without lights and without any sound which passed by the village one night like a great uninhabited place, longer than the whole village and much taller than the steeple of the church, and it sailed by in the darkness toward the colonial city on the other side of the bay that had been fortified against buccaneers, with its old slave port and the rotating light, whose gloomy beams transfigured the village into a lunar encampment of glowing houses and streets of volcanic deserts every fifteen seconds, and even though at that time he’d been a boy without a man’s strong voice but with his’ mother’s permission to stay very late on the beach to listen to the wind’s night harps, he could still remember, as if still seeing it, how the liner would disappear when the light of the beacon struck its side and how it would reappear when the light had passed, so that it was an intermittent ship sailing along, appearing and disappearing, toward the mouth of the bay, groping its way like a sleep‐walker for the buoys that marked the harbor channel, until something must have gone wrong with the compass needle, because it headed toward the shoals, ran aground, broke up, and sank without a single sound, even though a collision against the reefs like that should have produced a crash of metal and the explosion of engines that would have frozen, with fright the soundest‐sleeping dragons in the prehistoric jungle that began with the last streets of the village and ended on the other side of the world, so that he himself thought it was a dream, especially the, next day, when he.
saw the radiant fishbowl.
of the bay, the disorder of colors of the Negro shacks on the hills above the harbor, the schooners of the smugglers from the Guianas loading their cargoes ‐of innocent parrots whose craws were full of diamonds, he thought, I fell asleep counting the stars and L dreamed about that huge ship, of course, he was so convinced that he didn’t tell anyone nor did he remember the vision again until the same night on the following March when he was looking for the flash of dolphins in the sea and what he found was the illusory line, gloomy, intermittent, with the same mistaken direction as the first time, except that then he was so sure he was awake that he ran to tell his mother and she spent three weeks moaning with disappointment, because your brain’s rotting away from doing so many things backward, sleeping during the day and going out at night like a criminal, and since she had to go to the city around that time to get something comfortable where she could sit and think about her dead husband, because the rockers on her chair had worn out after eleven years of widowhood, she took advantage of the occasion and had the boatman go near the shoals so that her son could see what he really saw in the glass of; the sea, the lovemaking of manta rays in a springtime of sponges, pink snappers and blue corvinas diving into the other wells of softer waters that were there among the waters, and even the wandering hairs of victims of drowning in some colonial shipwreck, no trace of sunken liners of anything like it, and yet he was so pigheaded that his mother promised to watch with him the next March, absolutely, not knowing that the only thing absolute in her future now was an easy chair from the days of Sir Francis Drake which she had bought at an auction in a Turk’s store, in which she sat down to rest that same night sighing, oh, my poor Olofernos, if you could only see how nice it is to think about you on this velvet lining and this brocade from the casket of a queen, but the more she brought back the memory of her dead husband, the more the blood in her heart bubbled up and turned to chocolate, as if instead of sitting down she were running, soaked from chills and fevers and her breathing full of earth, until he returned at dawn and found her dead in the easy chair, still warm, but half rotted away as after a snakebite, the same as happened afterward to four other women before the murderous chair was thrown into the sea, far away where it wouldn’t bring evil to anyone, because it had.
been used so much over the centuries that its faculty for giving rest had been used up, and so he had to grow accustomed to his miserable routine of an orphan who was pointed out by everyone as the son of the widow who had brought the throne of misfortune into the village, living not so much from public charity as from fish he stole out of the boats, while his voice was becoming a roar, and not remembering his visions of past times anymore until another night in March when he chanced to look seaward and suddenly, good Lord, there, it is, the huge asbestos whale, the behemoth beast, come see it, he shouted madly, come see it, raising such an uproar of dogs’ barking and women’s panic that even the oldest men remembered the frights of their great‐grandfathers and crawled under their beds, thinking that William Dampier had come back, but those who ran into the street didn’t make the effort to see the unlikely apparatus which at that instant was lost again in the east and raised up in its annual disaster, but they covered him with blows and left him so twisted that it was then he said to himself, drooling with rage, now they’re going to see who I am, but he took care not to share his determination with anyone, but spent the whole year with the fixed idea, now they’re going to see who I am, waiting for it to be the eve of the apparition once more in order to do what he did, which was steal a boat, cross the bay, and spend the evening waiting for his great moment in the inlets of the slave port, in the human brine of the Caribbean, but so absorbed in his adventure that he didn’t stop as he always did in front of the Hindu shops to look at the ivory mandarins carved from the whole tusk of an elephant, nor did he make fun of the Dutch Negroes in their orthopedic velocipedes, nor was he frightened as at other times of the copper‐skinned Malayans, who had gone around the world, enthralled by the chimera of a secret tavern where they sold roast filets of Brazilian women, because he wasn’t aware of anything until night came over him with all the weight of the stars and the jungle exhaled a sweet fragrance of gardenias and rotter salamanders, and there he was, rowing in the stolen boat, toward the mouth of the bay, with the lantern out so as not to alert the customs police, idealized every fifteen seconds by the green wing flap of the beacon and turned human once more by the darkness, knowing that he was getting close to the buoys that marked the harbor, channel, not only because its oppressive glow was getting more intense, but because the breathing of the water was becoming sad, and he rowed like that, so wrapped up in himself, that he.
didn’t know where the fearful shark’s breath that suddenly reached him came from or why the night became dense, as if the stars had suddenly died, and it was because the liner was there, with all of its inconceivable size, Lord, bigger than, any other big thing in the world and darker than any other dark thing on land or sea, three hundred thousand tons of shark smell passing so close to the boat that he could see the seams of the steel precipice without a single light in the infinite portholes, without a sigh from the engines, without a soul, and carrying its own circle of silence with it, its own dead air, its halted time, its errant sea in which a whole world of drowned animals floated, and suddenly it all disappeared with the flash of the beacon and for an instant it was the diaphanous Caribbean once more, the March night, the everyday air of the pelicans, so he stayed alone among the buoys, not knowing what to do, asking himself, startled, if perhaps he wasn’t dreaming while he was awake, not just now but the other times too, but no sooner had.
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Keep in mind, though, that longer is not necessarily better.
My god, those are some long ass sentences.
Mahvelous! I’m surprised there are no examples from Poe.
He also had a thing about over-loading his sentences with scads of punctuation marks.
Some of these are breathtaking.
Here’s one, long but certainly not the longest, from the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
He’s known for never breaking paragraphs, and his sentences are often over a page long.
I’m surprised Pynchon was not in the list somewhere.
Yes, long sentences may give the brain quite a workout, especially when English is not one’s first language (even if it be).
However something tells me (and I shall remain adamant in my thinking) that most people would prefer the straightforwardness of Sir Terry Pratchett’s description to the frequent circumlocutory “madness” of Dickens.
But in the end, shouldn’t the idea of written expression be based upon a premise of taking art to the masses, for the edification of the world’s ever-growing population, achieving the ultimate goal of betterment of the society as a whole? Thus, an author bent on heavy prolixity would gain zero advantage in this noble task, being proclaimed as “too hard to read”, while one adopting the opposite quality of being concise and perspicuous would see their compositions work wonders and assure wide acceptance with a solid readers’ base.
Interesting blog.
Slightly false advertising these examples as “the longest in literature”, mind.
There are several in Philip Roth around the 350- to 400-word mark.
American Pastoral and The Plot Against America are full of them.
Here is one for your consideration : Jane Austen, “Persuasion,” Chapter 22—on page 160 in the Modern Library edition, in the paragraph that begins “They found Mrs.
Musgrove and her daughter within.
.
.
She was entreated to give them as much of her time as possible, invited for every day and all day long, or rather claimed as part of the family; and in return, she naturally fell into all her wonted ways of attention and assistance, and on Charles’s leaving them together, was listening to Mrs.
Musgrove’s history of Louisa, and to Henrietta’s of herself, giving opinions on business, and recommendations to shops; with intervals of every help which Mary required, from altering her ribbon to settling her accounts; from finding her keys, and assorting her trinkets, to trying to convince her that she was not ill-used by anybody; which Mary, well amused as she generally was, in her station at a window overlooking the entrance to the Pump Room, could not but have her moments of imagining.
Word gives this a word count of 136.
I found some other > 100 word sentences in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” I will submit these one-at-a-time, in order of length.
Jane Auten: Persuasion, Chapter 4—on page 21 in the Modern Library edition, the paragraph that begins “More than seven years were gone.
.
.
She had been solicited, when about two-and-twenty, to change her name by the young man who not long afterwards found a more willing mind in her younger sister: and Lady Russell had lamented her refusal: for Charles Musgrove was the eldest son of a man whose landed property and general importance were second in that county only to Sir Walter’s, and of good character and appearance; and however Lady Russell might have asked yet for something more while Anne was nineteen, she would have rejoiced to see her at twenty-two so respectively removed from the partialities and injustice of her father’s house, and settled so permanently near herself.
Microsoft Word gives this a word count of 108.
I found some other > 100 word sentences in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” I will submit these one-at-a-time, in order of length.
Jane Austen: Persuasion, Chapter 22—on page 160 in the Modern Library edition, the paragraph that begins “They found Mrs.
Musgrove and her daughter within.
.
.
She was entreated to give them as much of her time as possible, invited for every day and all day long, or rather claimed as part of the family; and in return, she naturally fell into all her wonted ways of attention and assistance, and on Charles’s leaving them together, was listening to Mrs.
Musgrove’s history of Louisa, and to Henrietta’s of herself, giving opinions on business, and recommendations to shops; with intervals of every help which Mary required, from altering her ribbon to settling her accounts; from finding her keys, and assorting her trinkets, to trying to convince her that she was not ill-used by anybody; which Mary, well amused as she generally was, in her station at a window overlooking the entrance to the Pump Room, could not but have her moments of imagining.
Microsoft Word gives this a word count of 136.
I found some other > 100 word sentences in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” I will submit these one-at-a-time, in order of length.
Jane Austen: Persuasion, Chapter 11—in the Oxford University Press edition, the paragraph that begins “After securing accommodation.
.
.
They were come too late in the year for any amusement or variety which Lyme, as a public place, might offer; the rooms were shut up, the lodgers almost gone, scarcely any family but of the residents left—and, as there is nothing to admire in the buildings themselves, the remarkable situation of the town, the principal street almost hurrying into the water, the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay, which in the season is animated with bathing machines and company, the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see the charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better.
Microsoft Word gives this a word count of 144.
I found some other > 100 word sentences in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” I will submit these one-at-a-time, in order of length.
Jane Austen: Persuasion, Chapter 3—on page 16 in the Modern Library edition, the paragraph that begins “It seemed as if Mr.
Shepherd.
.
.
By the report which he hastened over to Kellynch to make, Admiral Croft was a native of Somersetshire, who having acquired a very handsome fortune, was wishing to settle in his own country, and had come down to Taunton in order to look at some advertised places in that immediate neighborhood, which, however, had not suited him, that accidentally hearing—(it was just as he had foretold, Mr.
Shepherd observed, Sir Walter’s concern could not be kept a secret)—accidentally hearing of the possibility of Kellynch Hall being to let, and understanding his (Mr.
Shepherd’s) connection with the owner, he had introduced himself to him in order to make particular inquires, and had in the course of a pretty long conference, expressed as strong an inclination for the place as a man who knew it only by description could feel; and given Mr.
Shepherd, in his explicit account of himself, every proof of his being a most responsible, eligible tenant.
Microsoft Word gives this a word count of 160.
I found some other > 100 word sentences in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” I will submit these one-at-a-time, in order of length.
Jane Austen: Persuasion, Chapter 3—on page 13 in the Modern Library edition, the paragraph that begins “’I presume to observe, Sir Walter.
.
.
“.
.
.
Microsoft Word gives this a word count of 178.
I’m surprised Balzac didn’t make the list.
But since these convoys were made up of porters who carried bark baskets into which, for reasons of economy, up to four infants were placed at a time; since therefore the mortality rate on the road was extraordinarily high; since for that reason the porters were urged to convey only baptized infants and only those furnished with an official certificate of transport to be stamped upon arrival in Rouen; since the babe Grenouille had neither been baptized nor received even so much as a name to inscribe officially on the certificate of transport; since, moreover, it would not have been good form for the police anonymously to set a child at the gates of the halfway house, which would have been the only way to dodge the other formalities … thus, because of a whole series of bureaucratic and administrative difficulties that seemed likely to occur if the child were shunted aside, and because time was short as well, officer La Fosse revoked his original decision and gave instructions for the boy to be handed over on written receipt to some ecclesiastical institution or other, so that there they could baptize him and decide his further fate.
Nor had they asked her, even out of courtesy, why she was so pale or why she awoke with purple rings under her eyes in spite of the fact that she expected it, of course, from a family that had always considered her a nuisance, an old rag, a booby painted on the wall, and who were always going around saying things against her behind her back, calling her church mouse, calling her Pharisee, calling her crafty, and even Amaranta, may she rest in peace, had said aloud that she was one of those people who could not tell their rectums from their ashes, God have mercy, such words, and she had tolerated everything with resignation because of the Holy Father, but she had not been able to tolerate it any more when that evil Jose Arcadio Segundo said that the damnation of the family had come when it opened its doors to a stuck-up highlander, just imagine, a bossy highlander, Lord save us, a highlander daughter of evil spit of the same stripe as the highlanders the government sent to kill workers, you tell me, and he was referring to no one but her, the godchild of the Duke of Alba, a lady of such lineage that she made the liver of presidents’ wives quiver, a noble dame of fine blood like her, who had the right to sign eleven peninsular names and who was the only mortal creature in that town full of bastards who did not feel all confused at the sight of sixteen pieces of silverware, so that her adulterous husband could die of laughter afterward and say that so many knives and forks and spoons were not meant for a human being but for a centipede, and the only one who could tell with her eyes closed when the white wine was served and on what side and in which glass and when the red wine and on what side and in which glass, and not like that peasant of an Amaranta, may she rest in peace, who thought that white wine was served in the daytime and red wine at night, and the only one on the whole coast who could take pride in the fact that she took care of her bodily needs only in golden chamberpots, so that Colonel Aureliano Buendia, may he rest in peace, could have the effrontery to ask her with his Masonic Ill humor where she had received that privilege and whether she did not shit shit but shat sweet basil, just imagine, with those very words, and so that Renata, her own daughter, who through an oversight had seen her stool in the bedroom, had answered that even if the pot was all gold and with a coat of arms, what was inside was pure shit, physical shit, and worse even than any other kind because it was stuck-up highland shit, just imagine, her own daughter, so that she never had any illusions about the rest of the family, but in any case she had the right to expect a little more consideration from her husband because, for better or for worse, he was her consecrated spouse her helpmate, her legal despoiler, who took upon himself of his own free and sovereign will the grave responsibility of taking her away from her paternal home, where she never wanted for or suffered from anything, where she wove funeral wreaths as a pastime, since her godfather had sent a letter with his signature and the stamp of his ring on the sealing wax simply to say that the hands of his goddaughter were not meant for tasks of this world except to play the clavichord, and, nevertheless, her insane husband had taken her from her home with all manner of admonitions and warnings and had brought her to that frying pan of hell where a person could not breathe because of the heat, and before she had completed her Pentecostal fast he had gone off with his wandering trunks and his wastrel’s accordion to loaf in adultery with a wretch of whom it was only enough to see her behind, well, that’s been said, to see her wiggle her mare’s behind in order to guess that she was a, that she was a, just the opposite of her, who was a lady in a palace or a pigsty, at the table or in bed, a lady of breeding, God-fearing, obeying His laws and submissive to His wishes, and with whom he could not perform, naturally, the acrobatics and trampish antics that he did with the other one, who, of course, was ready for anything like the French matrons, and even worse, if one considers well, because they at least had the honesty to put a red light at their door, swinishness like that, just imagine, and that was all that was needed by the only and beloved daughter of Dona Renata Argote and Don Fernando del Carpio, and especially the latter, an upright man, a fine Christian, a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, those who receive direct from God the privilege of remaining intact in their graves with their skin smooth like the cheeks of a bride and their eyes alive and clear like emeralds.
Long sentences are beautiful on their own, but even if they weren’t, it pains me to think that we may lose them altogether.
We have separated sentences until young people don’t know how to punctuate a long sentence, so they don’t write it.
Furthermore, they can’t read a long sentence.
They literally think there is something wrong with it simply because it is long.
As a teacher of English, I was sad about the declining reading levels, but when I retired, I thought at least the readers of Jane Austen would appreciate the long sentence.
Not so.
The reading level has drastically declined.
Worse, the attention span has decreased to the point that a sentence of more than ten words is frightening.
As an author, I have reviews decrying my punctuation; saying semicolons are obsolete.
I have had so many reviews calling my compound or complex sentences run-on sentences.
I write Regency Romance and love Jane Austen.
These sentences that I read here today warmed my heart.
Moreso, my heart was warmed by the fact that I’ve found some people who agree with me.
You would think that the current readers of the genre would appreciate a longer sentence.
Sadly, no.
I appreciate you.
You have made me feel better after reviews that have broken my heart.
Beautiful sentences.
I propose “Gates of heaven” of Modrzejewski.
The book is made of two sentences which one contain over 40 000 words in original Polish version.
While it was obligatory lecture in Polish high schools, movie adaptation was illegal in 1960’s communistic Poland probably because of some homoerotic scenes (when I think about it now – this is book about medievial French children, so I am not surprised by communist censorship ban of movie).
I dare you to make an analytical essay with sentences this long.
So challenging, both to write and to read, yet so rewarding.
Here is my contribution: a 423-characters-long sentence from “On Being Blue” by William Gass.
Also, an interesting choice of words that sound like musical tones.