Hangings.

Yesterday, I was reading the Nicholson Baker essay "The History of Punctuation" (in "The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber" (commission earned)), when I came across a passage about John Lennard’s "But I Digress," which is, we are told, "gracefully written and full of intelligence, decked out with a complete scholarly apparatus of multiple indices, bibliographies, and notes, whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo (shaved head with up-sticking central proto-Mohawk tuft, earring on left ear, wilted corduroy jacket, and over-laundered T-shirt bearing some enigmatic insignia underneath), put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts. (A discussion of Elvis Costello’s use of the parenthesis in 'Let Him Dangle' figures in a late chapter.)"

I would buy "But I Digress" so I could quote the part about "Let Him Dangle," but though Amazon shows 13 Kindle books titled "But I Digress," none are by John Lennard. I did find a hardback edition, but it's $239.00 and out of stock. So I can't tell you precisely what it has to say about the parentheses. 

So here's Elvis, doing his song, which is about Derek Bentley, who did dangle (for having uttered the ambiguous words "Let him have it"):

Did you notice the parentheses? It's a song! We'll have to look up the lyrics. The parentheses are in the bridge:

"... writhing in the throes of transphobia—expressed as homophilia..."

A striking phrase, found in Nell Zink's "Sister Europe: A Novel" (commission earned).

A bit of context: "He felt an unexamined, eminently absurd pity for the lonely royal. In parallel (the two trains of thought never crossed), he felt that additional exposure to him would be good for Demian, who was writhing in the throes of transphobia—expressed as homophilia—and clearly hoped Nicole would emerge from her gaudy chrysalis as just another twink in golf duds."

"Greenland is not for sale and will not be for sale, so you can forget about your plans for Greenland to become part of the USA."

"Nothing about us without us, and Greenland’s future is solely up to us. A majority does not want to become Americans, we do not want to be taken over by another country...."

Said Aaja Chemnitz, "a Greenlandic politician serving in the Danish Parliament," quoted in "Trump appoints Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as special envoy to Greenland/The Danish territory has long been in the president’s sights. Trump said the Republican governor “understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security" (WaPo).

From the text of the article: "Trump has said repeatedly that the United States will 'get' Greenland, casting it as a national security objective for the U.S. His administration also covets Greenland for its untapped rare earth metals, an industry dominated by China globally. In April, The Washington Post reported that the White House was preparing an estimate of what it would cost the federal government to control Greenland as a territory."

"How big is Greenland?" — that question came up in a novel I'm reading. A child asks the question of her father who was telling her a story about the Greenlandic ice sheet melting and flooding the world and had said "Imagine, a slab of ice the size of Greenland!" The father "had no idea," only that Greenland "was notorious for being smaller than it looked on a Mercator projection, but he felt sure it was large, given that its melting would cause global sea levels to rise by something like seven meters."

The WaPo article offers an answer to the question: Greenland is "around three times the size of Texas."

"Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone."

Wrote Nell Zink, in "Sister Europe,” quoted in the Dwight Garner section of the NYT piece "Our Book Critics on Their Year in Reading," and that's a free link to the NYT because Garner does such a fine job of finding sentences to quote.

Here's his book — which I've bought for myself and others — collecting quotes in the same manner you'll find in that "Year in Reading" piece: "Garner's Quotations/A Modern Miscellany" (commission earned). 

And here's the commission-earned link for "Sister Europe," which I bought on the strength of that one sentence.

Here's one more quote from that "Year in Reading" (this one's by Mariel Franklin): "There was something about air travel that made me think of Swiss euthanasia clinics."

"Respectfully, it's an odd thing to say that Coates's debut is essentially long and shallow, but compare him to some of the most masterful storytellers in the canon."

"I understand it's challenging in this day in age to just say one or the other for fear of being cancelled, but you don't need to bring in Octavia Butler or Toni Morrison in order to do so. None of the sentences highlighted here suggest the tonality of any of the writers you've compared his debut to, either, except for Stephen King — even then, the most comparable thing seems to be pace and plot, not the shape or substance of the novel."

That's the top-rated comment at the NYT review of "The Water Dancer," the first novel by the high-profile nonfiction writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. I can see how the unsung fiction-writers of the world can be very easily irked when somebody who's already successful for some other reason suddenly presents himself as a novelist.

The review is by Dwight Garner — I don't have a problem with the name Garner — and I was looking at the NYT list of his other reviews and I see he reviewed a novel that I happen to have just finished reading: "With ‘Doxology,’ Nell Zink Delivers Her Most Ambitious and Expansive Novel Yet." As in the "Water Dancer" review, Garner names a lot of other writers, and unlike the "Water Dancer" review, this review has some solid quotes from the author to prove the praise is soundly based on artistic merit:

"The better you are at what you do, the more committed you are, the more you specialize, and the fewer options you end up with. It’s like the only way not to get trapped is to be a hobo."

Says a character in Nell Zink's "Doxology," which I've been reading.

And this is the thinking of the same character, a woman in her early 20s:

The internet was the hunting ground of pushovers, douches, and tools. Nothing and no one turned her on. Falling asleep at night, rather than review the nonevents of her endless days, she pondered her lost future. She had been raised to help save the planet, and she couldn’t. To help save the planet, she had to find out who was saving the planet and offer to help. Nobody was saving the planet. Was it all just a trick that had been played on her?

"I like to think of myself as an ethical person, but there is almost nothing I wouldn’t, in some sense, sell."

"For instance: There are close family relationships that I have cut off, without even really deciding to, for years at a time. I sold them for stability and mental peace — transactions I think of with doubt and unhappiness every single day. This would seem to suggest that I love my stability and mental peace above all else. And yet I sell those too, at cut-rate prices, again and again...."

That's Sam Anderson, commenting (last May) on a single sentence from a novel. The sentence, from "Nicotine" by Nell Zink is "You can’t understand the modern world if you can’t imagine selling what you love best." The idea of having somebody briefly comment on a single sentence is a good one (a bit like my "Gatsby Project"), and it's a regular feature — "New Sentences" — in the NYT that I'd never noticed before. I just happened to run across it today because I was doing a search on "Nell Zink" (after noticing I'd never finished another novel of hers that I'd put in my Kindle). I was looking at my Kindle to see if "Fire and Fury" had arrived (though it's still a few minutes before the promised release time). I said I'd read that for you today, so it's not the day to be reading Nell Zink books, though I'm sure Nell Zink books contain far more sentences worthy of contemplation — beginning with "You can’t understand the modern world if you can’t imagine selling what you love best" — than "Fire and Fury," which I still must wait 4 minutes to begin to read.

"If it weren’t for global warming, we’d be under an ice sheet a mile thick right now."

"He gestured toward the mountains. 'But look at us. Earth as far as the eye can see. I love global warming! And I love you!' Something about the implied comparison made me nervous. I was pretty bad as wives go. Where Stephen was concerned possibly epoch-rending, world-destroying bad. But without me he’d be under an ice sheet, so maybe I was doing him a favor. It was plausible. It was also not enough. I said I wasn’t ready. But I had sex with him, feeling like a very dutiful wife."

From Nell Zink's novel "The Wallcreeper."

"My mother was very, very critical of my early efforts... She was, like, 'At your age, the Brontës were doing X, Y, and Z.'"

"I was definitely a poser as a little kid.... It was just clear to me that—you know, in ‘Little Women’ they’re reading ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and putting out a newspaper and being unbelievably productive, and I was not like that. So I had this feeling of inferiority to past models with or without my mother’s criticisms."

From "Outside In/Nell Zink turned her back on the publishing world. It found her anyway," by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker.

[U]ntil last year, all of Zink’s work was written for a tiny audience—generally as tiny as one or zero.... Burck, her first husband, attributes the clandestine nature and short half-life of Zink’s writing to the Brontë-or-bust standard of her childhood. “The thought that she might write something that wasn’t good was terrifying,” he said, “so it’s safer to not write or not show anybody what you write.” Zink... recognizes that directing her work to one heterosexual man who wasn’t her partner was a way of protecting herself: her writing could be interpreted as flirting, rather than as writing in earnest. “It’s nice to have the excuse of heteronormativity,” she says. “You can explain it away, you can say, ‘Well, she has a crush on him.’ It lowers the risks for me.”