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.
Having read almost everything the prolific Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson ever wrote, I don’t know if I would call him paranoid, per se. Nor do I know if I would call him not paranoid. He certainly trusted no entity with power, especially not governments, and really especially not the United States government. So by the time September 11, 2001 came around, he had little goodwill to spare for any of the major players involved in its aftermath. “The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country,” he wrote in his September 12 ESPN column. “Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides.”
A year later, Australia’s ABC Radio National got Thompson’s assessment of the situation. Host Mick O’Regan opens the now famous interview above by asking how he thought the U.S. media had performed in the new post‑9/11 reality. “ ‘Shamefully’ is a word that comes to mind,” responds Thompson. “American journalism I think has been cowed and intimidated by the massive flag-sucking, this patriotic orgy that the White House keeps whipping up. You know if you criticise the President it’s unpatriotic and there’s something wrong with you, you may be a terrorist.” And does he think 9/11 “worked in favor of the Bush Administration?” For Thompson’s full answer, blogger Scratchingdog tracked down the original recording of the interview, not the edited version actually aired on ABC, and heard this:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well, in the White House and you know, campaigns and I’ve known enough people who do these things, think this way, to know that the public version of the news or whatever event, is never really what happened. And these people I think are willing to take that even further, so I don’t assume that I know the truth of what went on that day, and yeah, just looking around and looking for who had the motive, who had the opportunity, who had the equipment, who had the will. Yeah, these people were looting the treasury and they knew the economy was going into a spiral downward.
9/11 conspiracy theorists have made much of this response and other Thompsonian analysis found in the unedited interview, going so far as to suggest that maybe — just maybe — the writer died three years later of something other than suicide. Given Thompson’s compulsion to speak truth to power, and sometimes to wave firearms around in front of it, any fan of his work can’t help but harshly scrutinize, and often pre-emptively dismiss, any and all “official stories” they happen to hear. We’ll never know whether Thompson would have approved of the “9/11 Truth” movement in the forms it has taken today, but they do share his spirit of creative distrust. And perhaps a touch of paranoia gave his writing its distinctive verve. Nobody moves into what they unfailingly describe as a “fortified compound,” after all, without at least a little bit of it.
“Ramones Reunion Nearly Complete,” announced The Onion just about ten years ago, after the death of the band’s guitarist Johnny Ramone. His bandmates Joey and Dee Dee Ramone had each taken their leave of this mortal coil a few years before, and now, with the passing of drummer Tommy Ramone, all the group’s original members have gone to that big CBGB in the sky. In the video above, you can see the Ramones playing at the small CBGB down here on Earth — way down here on Earth, given the setting of downtown Manhattan in 1974. That year alone, after the revelation they brought about after first taking the stage in their bangs, ripped jeans, and black leather jackets on August 16, they played the now-historic rock club no fewer than 74 times. Show length averaged about seventeen minutes, which means this video, at just seven minutes, includes quite a few songs. The setlist includes “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement,” and “Judy Is a Punk.”
This performance happened on September 15, 1974, six months after their debut at Performance Studios in March of that year. They wouldn’t sign a recording contract until late the next year, but they would do it because the wife of Sire Records co-founder Seymour Stein saw them at CBGB. Though the Ramones always prided themselves on the rawness of their sound, this show catches them at a moment when, though they’d already armed themselves with looks and the attitude that made them instant icons, they still had to feel their way through exactly what this “punk rock” thing would turn into. You can see their music taking an even clearer, more distilled form in the 1977 CBGB set we featured last year. They may have lived fast, the Ramones, but they played even faster. Could they have done it without the borderline-unpunklike skill of their drummer?
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.
It’s entirely possible that James Franco has a doppelganger. Or maybe access to some alien space/time bending technology. Otherwise, I really can’t figure out how Franco manages to do all the things he does. On top of starring in movies like Milk, Spring Breakers and Pineapple Expressandgetting nominated for an Academy Award for 127 Hours, Franco is also a published novelist and poet, an artist and, as an odd performance art routine, a guest on General Hospital. He received an MFA in writing from Columbia, and is currently a PhD student in English at Yale.
And, of course, he’s a film director. His first feature was an adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and his second directorial effort, which comes out next month, is based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel Child of God. Clearly, Franco is not interested in making light-hearted family fare. Yet perhaps his darkest, most disturbing movie is Herbert White, a short he did while a film student at NYU. (Oh yeah, he went there too.) You can watch it above. Warning: while not graphic, it probably is NSFW.
Based on a poem by Frank Bidart, Herbert White is a glimpse into the life of a dedicated family man and secret necrophile. The film stars Oscar-nominated actor Michael Shannon, and Franco lets him do what he does best – look pensive, haunted and like he’s on the brink of committing an unspeakable act. If you’ve seen his powerhouse performance in Jeff Nichol’s Take Shelter, you know what I mean. The movie is shot in an understated, elliptical sort of way that slowly gets under your skin. This is particularly the case in the film’s climatic scene, shot in one single take, where Shannon circles his intended victim while he argues with himself over whether or not to succumb to his dark urges. It is deeply unnerving.
In an interview with Vice — he finds the time to be a regular correspondent for that uber-cool publication too, by the way – he talks about that scene.
I thought Herbert’s struggle with himself would be best captured if we didn’t cut away from him. The racing around the block along with Michael’s screeches and curses (ad-libbed) adds to the depiction of the inner struggle. We shot it three times, racing around the block. I was in the back with my DP. We were both pinching each other because the scene was so intense.
Franco was so moved by the experience of directing the movie that he published a book of poems about the experience (of course) called Directing Herbert White. You can watch him read some of those poems below.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
If there’s ever a Mad Men: The Next Generation, count on a 40-ish Sally Draper to psych a conference room full of BMW execs out of the tried-and-true formula for luxury automobile ads in favor of a groundbreaking, nightmarish, pre-YouTube web series.
As fictional scenarios go, it’s about as likely as having the Hardest Working Man in Show Business James Brown place a winner-take-all bet with the devil (Gary Oldman) that his driver Clive Owen can out-drag perennial movie bad guy Danny Trejo. (In other words, very likely.)
The prize?
Another 50 years of hip-shaking, leg-splitting soul for the Godfather of.
Can’t wait for the soon-to-be released James Brown biopicto find out who wins?
Check out “Beat the Devil,” above, the final installment of BMW Films’ 8‑episode series, The Hire. One of the new millennium’s earliest examples of branded content, each frenetic segment found Owen’s nameless driver going up against a roster of big name guest stars, including Don Cheadle, Mickey Rourke, Marilyn Manson, and an uncredited, pee-soaked Madonna. (You heard me.)
Brown’s episode, directed by the late Tony Scott, quickly ventures into David Lynch territory. Oldman’s Prince of Darkness gets laughs with a prop fluorescent tube and striped suspender tights, but the scene’s not without menace. (Recall Dean Stockwell lip-synching Candy Colored Clown in Blue Velvet…)
The dialogue calls to mind Jim Jarmusch’s blunt snap.
Devil: Stick your face in the hole!
James Brown: My face?
Devil: Stick it in the hole!
James Brown: My face?
Devil: Face in the hole!
James Brown: My face?
Devil: Face in the- oh, shit!”
Elsewhere, Brown’s line delivery gets a boost from same-language subtitles, without which one could easily mishear his concerns about aging as an unexpected, late-in-life racial identification switch. (Say it loud, I’m Asian and proud?)
If the clip above leaves you hungry for more, the complete BMW series, featuring the testosterone-rich work of such high octane directors as John Frankenheimer, Guy Ritchie, and John Woo is available on the playlist below.
When “Weird Al” Yankovic is in the zone, he can spin a parody that is better than the original. He took R. Kelly’s preposterous pop soap opera “Trapped in the Closet” and turned it into “Trapped in the Drive Thru,” one of the best portraits of everyday suburban ennui I’ve ever come across. His hilarious tune “White and Nerdy” got twice as much traffic on YouTube than the song he spoofed, “Ridin’” by Chamillionarie. And off of his latest (and possibly last) album, Mandatory Fun, Yankovic takes Robin Thicke’s bizarre but catchy ode to date rape “Blurred Lines” and flips it into “Word Crimes,” a ditty that is bound to delight grammar pedants everywhere. Watch it above.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
There’s an old truism in Hollywood that a movie shouldn’t last much longer than the endurance of the average audience member’s bladder. Most feature films run around an hour and a half to two hours, though summer blockbusters can last longer. Studios generally resist making long movies for the simple reason that they can’t pack as many screenings per day. While some art house auteurs have made movies that extend to bladder-busting lengths – Bela Tarr’s brilliant Satantango clocks in at seven and a half hours – the place to find truly long movies is in the art world.
Christian Marclay’s masterpiece The Clock is a 24-hour montage of watches, clocks and other timepieces from iconic movies synced to the actual time the film is running. Another incredibly long movie is the aptly named A Cure for Insomnia, which features artist Lee Groban reading a really long poem intercut with clips of porn and heavy metal music. That movie lasts over 3 days. And if you wanted to watch the entirety of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s movie Beijing 2003– which documents every single street within Beijing’s inner ring – it would take you over a week.
But those films have nothing on Swedish artist and filmmaker Anders Weberg, who is making Ambiancé, which is, at 720 hours, the longest movie in the history of cinema. 720 hours. That’s 30 days. To put this into perspective, you can watch the entire special extended cut of the Lord of the Rings trilogy over 60 times in the time it takes for Ambiancé to unspool just once. The first trailer came out July 4th, and it clocks in at 72 minutes long, making it almost a feature unto itself. You can see it above. If this seems lengthy – most trailers are three or so minutes after all – note that Weberg promises that the next trailer will last seven hours and 20 minutes.
Weberg describes Ambiancé as a movie where space and time intertwine “into a surreal dream-like journey beyond places and [it] is an abstract nonlinear narrative summary of the artist’s time spent with the moving image. A sort of memoir movie.” As you can see above, the movie features densely layered images with a haunting, minimal score. Weberg plans to screen the entirety of the movie in 2020 on every continent simultaneously just once before destroying it. The trailer is only going to be available until July 20th, so watch it while you can.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
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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.
