How (Not) to (Dis)Connect

[Image: “Superman” (strip #220 January 16, 1944), by Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster.
Click to enlarge; see the whole page here.]

From whiskey river:

I go to a pub and talk to another man. He is experienced deeply part of the time, and shallowly another part of the time, depending on the quality of my consciousness. If I am very conscious, meeting him can be an experience comparable to great music or even an earthquake; if I am in the usual shallow state, he barely “makes an impression.” If I am practicing alertness and neurological self-criticism, I may observe that I am only experiencing him part of the time, and that part of the time I am not-tuning-in but drifting off to my favorite “Real” Universe and editing out at the ear-drum much of what he is saying. Often, the “Real” Universe hypnotizes me sufficiently that, while I “hear” what he says, I have no idea of the way he says it or what he means to convey.

(Robert Anton Wilson [source])

…and:

Adage

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

(Billy Collins [source])

Not from whiskey river:

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is done in a circle. And that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round… the sky is round, and I have heard the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours… even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.

(Black Elk [source])

…and:

It seems as if the subject and verb of a main clause can appear in almost any location and without much regard to the distance between the two. So a sentence could look like this:

Subject ———————————————————————————————— Verb.

…Novelist Robert K. Tanenbaum almost achieves that effect in a much longer and more ostentatious sentence:

On Monday morning, Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi and several hundred other assistant district attorneys, the district attorney himself and his aides and assistants, learned judges by the dozens and clerks and secretaries in the hundreds, and brigades of police, and regiments of witnesses and victims, the bored and the anguished, squads of jurors good and true, and uncounted lawyers, young and harried or suave and grave, depending on whether they worked for the poor or the rich, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press, merciless and cynical; and, of course, a varied mob of criminals, the cause and purpose of this whole cavalcade, the petty thugs, the thieves and robbers, whether by stealth or weaponry or clever papers, the whores of both sexes, the cold killers, the hot killers, the rapists and torturers of the helpless, the justly accused, the falsely accused, together with their keepers, parole officers, social workers, enemies, friends and relations, converged, all of them, on a single seventeen-story gray stone building, located at 100 Centre Street on the island of Manhattan, there to prod into sullen wakefulness that great beast, the Law. (from Depraved Indifference)

The author is showing off, of course, but the sentence is fun to read the second or third time through. On the first try, it takes a bit of work because that first element in the very compound subject, “Butch Karp,” appears as the fourth and fifth words in the sentence, but the verb “converged” is a bit tardy, showing up 151 words later.

(Roy Peter Clark [source])

…and:

Full Moon

From my window, one hand on the phone, I strain
to hear the argument playing out below in a parked car,

a loud fight punctuated by slammed doors, a revved engine,
the man pounding the dashboard, yelling, “I didn’t do anything!”

while the woman shouts back, over and over, “Just shut up!”
A giggling troupe of girls emerges from the pool hall

that serves anyone. They toss a pack of cigarettes back and forth,
stray out of the dark alley toward the lights of Main Street,

while hurrying the other way, a lawyer who’s been working late,
briefcase bulging around mounds of paperwork,

heads now for her car, the last one left in all-day parking.
A collection of elderly restaurant-goers strolls purposefully

down the sidewalk, well-dressed, inaudible, unflinching
as they pass the arguers’ car. I should be asleep.

It must be after eleven; the movie marquee’s lights
have just shut off. Something large crashes out back

behind the building. My bed is empty.
When I lean out at just the right angle, I can see the ocean

scarred by moonlight, the glowing zero of the moon’s face
poised above the window, looking in.

(Kristen Lindquist [source])

And finally: remember Dancing Matt, of “Where the Hell Is Matt?” fame? He’s back, with the 2012 edition — the first in four years — of his connect-the-world-with-crazy-dancing series: