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Literature

Great out-of-context paragraphs of our time #1

By July 27, 2009October 14th, 2009One Comment

A strange, awful and yet won­der­ful para­graph from a New York Times art­icle on the death of an artist I had nev­er heard of:

A Hamster’s Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hun­dred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intox­ic­ants so that every scrap of sen­tience dis­ap­pears. “It was really intense,” recalled Ms. Snow, whose divorce from Dash was final­ized this sum­mer, though she remained close to him to the end. “We were all really high, and there were con­certs. It was like a whole oth­er world, an intense moment, all these people with paper, piles of Yellow Pages, no air or vent­il­a­tion and fumes every­where. We were already so drunk. The iPods kept get­ting lost in the paper.” Three days later — with no clue how it happened — she woke up in Berlin.

Full pathet­ic story, writ­ten by Alan Feuer and Allen Salkin, here. It also con­tains a sen­tence you don’t expect to find in a news­pa­per: “Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free.”

One Comment

  • Robyn says:

    I really like how the NY Times’ style – which always refers to people as Mr. X or Ms. Y – res­ults in sen­tences that seem to have been spe­cific­ally writ­ten with his sur­name in mind:

    Mr. Snow’s body spent the night of July 13 in a base­ment refri­ger­at­or at the New York City morgue, chilled to 32 to 40 degrees.

    And:

    Mr. Snow’s body, mean­while, was taken to New Jersey and cremated.

    That is an obit­u­ary almost worth dying for.