Life Sentences #12

The following operates on the theory that nobody can bullshit a bullshitter. If you don’t understand that theory, you are at grave risk. Seek assistance somewhere. Not that you’ll find any.

Preamble to Sentence of the Day:

I remember hearing the possibility of Universal Bullshit prophesied many years ago, at Slim’s Saddle Bar in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, drunk at nine-thirty in the morning with my co-workers from the overnight shift. We would buy shots of Schnapps and shoot them together and light cigarettes and collect ourselves and somebody would inevitably say, after a long thoughtful exhale, “Yeah, it’s all bullshit.” We would nod and laugh in the manner of fuckin-A right but nobody there at Slim’s believed it was all bullshit, only that most of it was.

These days? Bullshit is literally passing through our bodies in wireless-signal waves twenty-four hours a day and apparently, even though the bullshit’s inside our bodies, we still want to access this bullshit on every electronic device available whenever we’re conscious, which is how fucking much of the time?

Like the man once told me: Mag, you ask too many goddam questions and don’t have too many goddam answers.

This is how I’m watching March Madness: I’ve got the laptop set up in front of the TV and next to my laptop I’ve got my cell phone. While the game’s on, I’m working on a secret document and checking my email and checking my Facebook and following the Sportsguy’s live chat on ESPN.com and texting my buddy The Champ and my buddy Chef Guido and my daughter and a number of other people all at once, and holy Jesus if I haven’t had A.D.D. all my life, circumstances have conspired to make me test positive for that shit now. There’s just so much bullshit going on at once!

I guess I should take the old-guy approach and be a standard-bearer of the past and say, “Friends, this multitasking behavior will signal the death of the novel and of art and of music and of film. Please learn to concentrate.” But you know what? Fuck that. Our mental environment is a bit scattered, is all. We just have to find a way to get everything we need to get done within this context. In cyclocross racing, when the conditions are horrible and everybody’s bitching about the conditions, the strongest racers still come to the front. Why should the rest of life be any different?

Sentence of the day:

Mag loves the constant bullshit and the lack of focus that comes from it.

Analysis:

Mag (subject) loves (ditransitive verb, meaning it carries two objects) the constant bullshit (direct object with imbedded adjective) and the lack of focus (second direct object built from a noun phrase) that comes from it (restrictive verb phrase with pronoun referring back to the first direct object).

Further analysis:

That's really all bullshit, folks.

Life Sentences #11 SPECIAL 100th POST EDITION

You gotta find amusement in higher learning, right? If you don’t, fuck it: I gotta laugh when I think about some of the classic examples of genius I witnessed at work during my time in the halls of low-grade academe. I guess I shouldn’t think some of this shit is funny but I can’t help myself because what can I say? It’s just so goddam funny.

So one time, I got my hands on the copy of a textbook a fellow professor was using as a lecture prompt for a creative writing course. An anthology of some canonical material, of course. And I couldn’t help flipping through the pages and reading the margin notes, even though I knew this was sort of like reading somebody’s diary and that when I eventually arrive in hell this is the type of behavior that will merit extra-high flame on my proverbial eternal ass-burner. Oh well.

Eventually, I found in this textbook D.H. Lawrence’s famous story “The Rocking Horse Winner,” about which my enthusiasm is roughly the same as it is, say, for Major League Baseball, meaning I don’t mind it; it’s not bad; but I might change the channel when the commercial break comes. I noted that my fellow professor had annotated the following sentence:

Everybody else said of her: "She is such a good mother. She adores her children." Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so. They read it in each other's eyes.

My fellow professor had underlined ‘herself’ and ‘themselves’ and wrote in the margin (and I can’t remember the exact wording), “Reflexive pronouns establishing a pattern for reflexive action throughout the story.” Nice theory. Plausible, too. A kid in the story gets a hold of a rocking horse and appears in a few spazzy scenes on this rocking horse and I guess that’s reflexive, right? Might be some other reflexive actions occur in the story, too – hell, give a non-stupid person any adjective and apply it by analogy to any text and this shit’s going to line up into something meaningful (this same principle works with playing Mahavishnu Orchestra’s album Inner Mounting Flame at top volume and watching a Lakers game with the sound off: Kobe and Pau will dribble in perfect sync with the music every time). So we can imagine this professor conducting a seventy-five-minute thoughtful lecture/discussion on the reflexive nature of “The Rocking Horse Winner” and the students in class becoming so enlightened that blood trickles from their ears. Trouble is – and I hate to break this shit to you, former colleague – those pronouns you underlined? Herself and themselves? They are intensive pronouns, not reflexive pronouns. So your theory on reflexive action, as my friend the Iranian Redneck would say, is basically a high-brow form of goat-fucking.

See, a reflexive pronoun does have a -self attached to it, but it appears in the objective case of the sentence and it reflects back on the subject. Thus: I (subject) hate (transitive verb) myself (direct object and reflexive verb). An intensive pronoun, on the other hand, generally occurs in an appositive position or directly after a noun or a pronoun, and the intensive pronoun’s function is to intensify or amplify another noun. Thus: Mike himself showed up on his bike for group ride. Or why not let D.H. (the H stands for Horsecock: little known fact) Lawrence do it for us? Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so.

I gotta write in the margins of this blog: “Intensive pronouns establishing a pattern that this story is gonna be totally intense, dudes!”

See how much fun this shit is?

Sentence of the day:

Fuck yourself, Mag.

Analysis:

(Implied subject: You) Fuck (transitive verb) yourself (direct object and of course a lovely reflexive pronoun), Mag (noun in direct address: note, people, that a comma precedes it).

Further analysis:

I will. I will. I have been. I have been.

Life Sentences #10

Barry Hannah. April 23, 1942 - March 1, 2010

Sentence of the Day:

From “Testimony of Pilot.”

I knew a large boy with dirty blond hair, name of Wyatt, who played viola in the Jackson Symphony and sousaphone in our band – one of the rare closet transmutations of our time – who was forever claiming to have discovered the central Bolero one Sunday afternoon over FM radio as he had seven distinct sexual moments with a certain B., girl flutist with black bangs and skin like mayonnaise, while the drums of Ravel carried them on and on in a ceremony of Spanish sex.

Analysis:

I (subject) knew (transitive verb) a large boy (direct object and also a noun phrase) with dirty blond hair (free modifier functioning as an object complement), name of Wyatt (appositive, further defining the boy by giving him a name), who played viola in the Jackson Symphony and sousaphone in our band (non-restrictive relative clause with parallel prepositional phrases functioning as adverbials) – one of the rare closest transmutations of our time (another appositive, or parenthetical, which in this case expands the sentence into a broader historical context beyond the boy named Wyatt who is the object of it) – who was forever claiming to have discovered the central Bolero (parallel non-restrictive relative clause) one Sunday afternoon (time marker, an adverbial, and if one should discover the central Bolero, is it not perfectly fitting to do so on a Sunday afternoon?) over FM radio (adverbial) as he had seven distinct sexual moments (subordinate clause functioning as an adverbial) with a certain B. (adverbial introducing character), girl flutist with black bangs and skin like mayonnaise (appositive that further defines B, and note also that we have ‘flutist’ instead of the proper ‘flautist,’ which serves to reinforce the often improper voice of our first-person narrator), while the drums of Ravel carried them on and on (subordinate clause functioning as an adverbial) in a ceremony of Spanish sex (prepositional phrase functioning, as most of them do, as an adverbial).

Further analysis:

This may be my favorite of Barry Hannah’s sentences, but then again, he wrote so many hundreds of magnificent, original, precise sentences in his life that it’s a shame to pick out one and say, “Yeah, this one I like best.” At any rate, I know this sentence by heart, and a lot of writers of my generation know this one by heart, too. I’ve stood with writers at parties and listened to them quote Barry Hannah lines and laugh or even just mention some of his story titles and laugh: “Upstairs, Mona Bayed For Dong.” “Herman Is in Another State.” “Ride Westerly for Pusalina.” “The Vision of Esther by Clem.” “Death of a Bitch.” “Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter.” “Pete Resists the Old Man of His Room.” “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet.” And of course the amazing multi-level title of the story from which I took today’s sentence, “Testimony of Pilot.”

Barry Hannah was easily the funniest and smartest writer of his generation, and without question he was the most interesting prose stylist of his time. His trademark sentence pattern, much like the one I selected from “Testimony of Pilot,” avoided including material in the optional slot before the subject, which is to say he tended to begin his sentences with the subject. When you first read Barry Hannah, you will notice this immediately; his rhythm, his cadence, his variation of pace and tone, these things grow out of the subject and the predicate – they come from within – as opposed to coming before the reader knows what the sentence is about. What’s so fascinating about the sentence from “Testimony of Pilot” is that the full subject and predicate of the sentence is “I knew a large boy,” and the brilliant and funny flow of information about this boy is actually separate from the basic meaning of the sentence’s independent clause. This type of sentence is known as the cumulative sentence – meaning the sentence completes it subject and predicate and then elaborates, often in a list form, on the completed meaning. Another long type of sentence is known as the periodic sentence, which often delays the completion of the subject and the predicate through a series of appositions and other forms of modifiers. The great miracle of Barry Hannah’s sentences is that he essentially has written them all in the cumulative sentence pattern, but at the same time all of his sentences tend toward the periodic because they continually modify themselves and generate delays in meaning or amplifications of meaning in the process. This means, my friends, that Barry Hannah’s sentences are able to walk and chew bubblegum and juggle bowling pins at the same time. No one has ever been a greater writer of sentences than Barry Hannah.

He died yesterday. This is a sad occasion for American literature. He changed the lives of so many writers and lifted a light over dark places that, without him, we would never have seen. Rest in peace, Mr. Hannah. Your words will not die in those of us left to wander for a time longer on this earth.

Life Sentences #9

Still Life of Males in Liberal Arts Academia

Ah, the hallowed halls of higher learning. It’s no secret that some of the most incompetent dipsticks ever to wander this planet have secured themselves fulltime, tenured positions at various prestigious universities across this fair land and, nay, across this fair planet. There’s a few brilliant people in the higher-learning mix, true enough, but ‘a few’ isn’t the same thing as ‘a lot.’

I really want to joke about this, about the mass-scale foolishness at universities and colleges, about the people who were once the subject of ridicule on the playground who now have positions of power, who are on committees that decide other people’s futures, often not based on the person’s merit as an intellectual but on the person’s personality, which is a sort of sick way the people in power have of getting back at the ‘cool’ people in high school who didn’t let them into their ‘cool clique’ or whatever, but then again, sometimes this problem isn’t funny at all. Last week – you can’t have missed this in the news – a professor who was being denied tenure at a university in Alabama shot and killed and wounded a number of people who were instrumental in denying her tenure. Deplorable act, for sure. Murder is never a way to solve a problem. But I’m honestly surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. The professorate in higher education is constantly trying to fuck each other over, to get a leg up on somebody, to bring somebody down, to exert power and to prove superiority in an environment where, at least in the quantitative sense, there’s no real way to prove superiority or to prove inferiority. There is not one academic department in this country wherein several groups of people don’t hate each other’s guts to the point where they avoid each other in the hallways or in the local grocery stores or they literally choke on their lamb chop when their academic enemy’s name is mentioned during a dinner party. Professors, you see, become their own administrators, and what does a professor of English Literature or Mathematics or Biology know about administration? They certainly haven’t received formal training in administration, yet there they are, in charge. In any case, at no point in academic life does this professor-against-professor situation come to a boil more than during the promotion process. It’s factional. It’s personal. It’s hateful. The merit of the person up for promotion is not nearly as important as the manner in which the person up for promotion has fit into the political system of the department. People’s lives routinely get thrown over the side in the process – people with children and mortgages and responsibilities as human beings that extend far beyond the institution where they happen to have a position, an institution that most people in the country probably have never heard of. Last Friday, the nature of the process changed. A professor took out a gun and started shooting. It’s a shame. But the system that produced the tragedy is a shame, too.

Holy soapbox, Magnuson. What brought that on?

Excuse me. I’ll try to stick with cycling issues in the future.

Anyway, the sentence of the day demonstrates not only the kind of petty bullshit that goes in higher education but also an excellent sentence-structure element known as the object complement. As you might guess, an object complement is similar to a subject complement in that it expresses an equivalence – essentially, this thing is like that thing.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

The sentence of the day:

In an English Department meeting, a Distinguished Female Professor called a Distinguished Male Professor a Neanderthal.

Analysis:

In an English Department meeting (prepositional phrase functioning as adverbial), a Distinguished Female Professor (the subject of the sentence, also a noun phrase, also, given her behavior, probably not an accurate title for her position at the university) called (transitive verb) a Distinguished Male Professor (the object of the sentence, also a noun phrase, and also, to keep this bullshit equal, probably not an accurate title for his position at the university) a Neanderthal (the object complement, meaning it expresses a this-is-that equivalence with the direct object, which is something even a goddam Caveman can understand).

Life Sentences #8

Possibly ‘inspired’ by Marcel Duchamp. Inspired in any case.

Once upon a lousy time in college – could have been most any day I was in the vicinity of a college: could have been when I was teaching at a college instead of attending one: it all blurs into a sort of cooperatively ignorant haze in my memory – I heard someone talking in the English Department hallway about verbs, about how verbs were all about action and wow, a life without action in it simply isn’t a life! Total bullshit. Consider this sentence, which is what I should have said to that person in the English Department hallway: You are a dumbfuck. Are is your goddam verb all right, but where’s the action?

Speaking of which, my mind wonders toward progressive verbs lately, if only because ‘progressive’ is a word that seems regularly to annoy the double-chin crowd over at Fox News. How much you wanna bet Fox News would support a ban on progressive verbs in the nation’s universities? Of fucking course they would. They’d be wasting their jowly wind-bags, though: most universities aren’t teaching progressive verbs in the first place because progressive verbs, as it turns out, aren’t very progressive after all. Progressive verbs – like journalists used to be back in the day, back when journalism was really journalism – summarize activity better than they specifically express an action.

Prime example (not from Fox News, obviously): Mike is stuffing his rear wheel in the toilet. Is stuffing is our happy little present-progressive verb, and if you think about this conjugation, you can see that it doesn’t isolate one instant in time. If you ask the question What’s Mike doing? and receive the answer He is stuffing his rear wheel in the toilet, you can conclude logically that it’s going to take more than an instant to stuff that wheel in. Is stuffing, therefore, refers to a collection of instances working together in concert as an activity not an individual action. The simple present tense – stuffs – is the verb we have for precise action. Mike stuffs his rear wheel. That implies a nice, neat, complete action with no hard feelings afterward. We want that. More than anything.

Lordy. Getting scary around here, ain’t it?

Oh, and if we’re bored, which we apparently are, we can shift through time and space with progressive verbs, too.

Backward: Mike has been stuffing his rear wheel. See how present perfect progressive (which we now know is more than a mere member of MoveOn.Org) actually moves backward in time and summarizes an activity leading back into the present moment?

So because today is Friday, because I’ve got a shitload of work to do this weekend, not to mention riding bike and walking dog and watching Olympics and perhaps, in a Viking ritual involving fire, separating animal flesh from animal bone, I’m all about looking forward.

Behold, the future perfect progressive:

Sentence of the day:

By Monday morning, Mike will have been stuffing his rear wheel in the toilet for forty-eight hours.

Analysis:

By Morning morning (a time marker, a prepositional phrase functioning as adverb), Mike (our always-willing subject) will have been stuffing (transitive verb, present perfect progressive tense) his (indirect object) rear wheel (direction object) in the toilet( prepositional phrase functioning as adverb) for forty-eight hours (another motherfucking time marker, another prepositional phrase that functions as an adverb).

Further analysis:

I love bicycle wheels. In case you didn’t know that. I’m pretty sure ‘dumbfuck’ is one word, too. Fifty-percent sure, anyway.

Life Sentences #7 SUPERBOWL EDITION

Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. James Ensor.

Superbowl weekend always opens my Miller High Life memory can and releases a rather unhappy, rather rank-tasting foam from Superbowls past, maybe because I’ve been at too many Superbowl parties with too many drunk people. Don’t get me wrong: I love the game, except maybe when the Packers lost in 1998 or last year, when I had the winning numbers for the final square with a few seconds to go and was about to win something like 750 bucks and the goddam Steelers scored and sure, sure, they were happy, the city of fucking Pittsburgh was happy, but what about me? On the threshold of winning 750 bucks? Grim, grim situation. I keep thinking if only I had gotten up from my chair and been standing behind the bowl of cheese doodles at the snack table, if I hadn’t been sitting where I was sitting when the Steelers connected for the final victorious score, the universe would have been different, the alignments would have changed, and that 750 bucks would have been mine.

That reminds me of another unhappy Superbowl memory. Years ago, I had the same theory about space and time and alignments and such – to wit, any change in game-viewing location may alter the outcome of the game, just because the universe is undeniably different if you move from one spot to the next. Also years ago, I had a girlfriend who would hear me discuss my theory and she would tell me, “Mag, you have a huge Christ complex.” I would be like “What the fuck?” She would say, “You really believe one little thing you do can change the entire universe?” The correct answer, in her opinion, involved me admitting I’m a childlike idiot and that I’ve always watched football the wrong way, at least till she set me straight on the essential arrogance of my change-location theory, and once I had admitted as much, that she knew her shit and that I didn’t even know what shit was, then we could go on enjoying the ballgame. The relationship technique she was using – and you’re familiar with this, I’m sure – is known as ‘whittling down.’ I guess it’s a tried and true way to come out on top when time runs out on the swampy, cowshit-strewn gridiron of love. And you know what I told that woman when she said things like that to me, when she tried to make me feel small?

Nothing. I took it. Most people do.

Okay then. Today’s sentence is an example of not only what I wish I could truthfully write in response to the question above but also of the time-honored tradition of using an infinitive phrase as a direct object in a sentence. An infinitive phrase, as we know, is a phrase that begins with a root form of a verb. In this case, our infinitive will be the classic ‘to blow.’

Sentence of the day:

I told her to blow it out her ass.

Analysis:

I (subject, and what a fucking fantastic subject it is) told (transitive verb) her (indirect object) to blow it out her ass (infinitive phrase as direct object).

Further analysis:

Thanks to the late James Ensor for, um, donating the painting used to illustrate this discussion. The painting most definitely corresponds to my change-location theory, don’t you think? In any case, this painting hangs at the Getty in Los Angeles. Go there. See it.

Life Sentences #6

Photograph by Seth Townsend (posed)

A sweet dog. Friendly. Obedient. As pure at heart as Karen in Frosty the Snowman used to be before the big lug melted in that desolate greenhouse on that horrible Christmas Eve all those years ago. Sure, Santa reconstituted Frosty, and Frosty said, “Happy birthday,” but Karen never got over the trauma and her cheery life never regained its spring. I saw Karen a few weeks ago, predictably enough on Hollywood Boulevard, standing outside Musso and Franks. She wasn’t coming out or going in – just occupying a space on the sidewalk and smoking a cigarette. She looked great, for a 46-year-old woman with enough problems to fill a few dozen Greyhound busses and drive them into the desert and leave them there till the vultures pick the bodies clean.

I said, “Hey, Karen, you look great. Nice to see you.”

She said, “You look great, too.”

I’m forty-six years old, and maybe about the only leg I have up on Karen right now is that I don’t smoke cigarettes.

For example, my dog’s name is Rocks, which is derived from Rocky Road, which is the name the good people at the Southern Illinois Humane Society gave her because she’s the color of the ice cream. She’s two years old now, and until yesterday, she was the nicest dog in the entire world, never one hint of aggression, never hardly a bark out of the girl.

I’ve been taking her regularly to a dog park near the reservoir in Silver Lake. This is in a nice section of Los Angeles – healthy-looking, dressed-hip professional types who shop at Trader Joe’s and who oppose categorically the harming of any animals in the making of this film. The vibe is friendly. People say hello to strangers in this neighborhood – rare indeed here in L.A. But when one leaves the friendly streets of Silver Lake and enters the confines of the dog park, one has entered an area akin to the yard at Pelican Bay State Penitentiary during a full-scale riot. Here we see widespread rape and brutality and blood and home-made weapons, and there is nothing the guards in the tower can do to stop it. Rocks loves it. And she does well in the prison yard on account of she’s so fast that none of the marauding rapists can get behind her and make her their bitch. She laughs at those punks and makes obscene gestures at them from the other side of the yard. Till yesterday. She was engaged in some inappropriate yard behavior with a light-brown dog of about her size; the dog managed to get in a few well-placed bites to her ankles; and Rocks totally snapped. She snarled and tossed the light-brown dog to the ground and held the dog down by the neck and said, “You fuck with me one more time and I gonna tear your throat out, ese?”

I wasn’t proud. She used to be a sweet dog. Now she’s a thug.

Now I’m almost too overcome with sadness to present today’s sentence, a simple transitive pattern that even the dogs in the prison yard know how to diagram.

The sentence of the day:

From now on, my dog bites dogs.

Analysis:

From now on (adverbial, expressing time), my (possessive pronoun) dog (the subject, of course) bites (monotransitive verb, meaning it only carries one object) dogs (direct object).

Further analysis:

I think maybe walking the dog is better than taking the dog to the dog park.

Life Sentences #5

One curious aspect of language is that even when you’re in no mood to be amused by it, even when your life is broken down and stranded along the cluttered, infomercial-lined roadside on the highway to happiness, you’ll hear a particular word, catch a particular phrase, and something about it will take the droop right out of your demeanor and you will no longer give a hootski that your circumstances aren’t perfect. When I was a boy, for instance, I was prone to feeling oppressed most of the time, which meant I was perfectly normal and perfectly inclined to sink into the mopes when I had been sentenced to a week’s solitary confinement in my room after I had committed an atrocity like shitting on a ham sandwich and placing it in my piano teacher’s mailbox or taking it upon myself to urinate on the Jane Austen section at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School Library [Ed. Note: despite psychological evidence to the contrary, Mag is not, nor has he ever been, a serial killer. Also, Mag tries to keep the scatological references to a minimum – he’s even in therapy to prevent this sort of subject from continually gurgling to the surface of his writing – but he apparently isn’t trying hard enough]. Particular offense notwithstanding, we can all remember those moments of youthful confinement, how Proustian in scope they were, alone in the early evening, gazing out the window, a few hours left of daylight, the neighborhood children frolicking hither and thither in their back yards, their world a delight, our world a wasteland of proportions as vastly desolate as the mindsets of the adults who banished us to our rooms. Then we’d hear a kid say something, maybe ‘hippopotamus,’ or ‘weiner schnitzel,’ or ‘Diaper Man,’ and we couldn’t prevent the grin from widening our lips into joy!

Hmm. I just totally forgot what I was talking about, hey. This happens once you starting advancing past a certain age, I guess. I think I was thinking about being happy. And maybe if you think about being happy long enough you can become happy? Nah. Fuck that.

Oh yeah: that’s the cliff I was driving toward: Today’s sentence.

One of the most joyful sentences in English is the implied-subject sentence, or the command sentence, or the imperative – any of these terms merit a Grade-A rating in my opinion. In the imperative, we address our subject in a complete sentence but we do not include our subject as the subject of the sentence because the subject of the sentence is implied and with luck the subject of this sentence has the wit to catch the implication.

The sentence of the day:

Fuck that.

Analysis:

(You, unstated, implied subject) fuck (transitive verb) that (direct object).

Further analysis:

Wasn’t that fun? Didn’t that make you happy?

Analysis of further analysis:

Fuck that.

Life Sentences #4

Okay, check this out for grammatical material you can stuff in your pipes and smoke it. Now, it’s true that the written form of the English language is not all that difficult to master, at least in terms of spelling the words correctly and placing nifty punctuation marks correctly between phrases and clauses and items in a series and all that happy horseshit. Studies by prominent scholars have in fact demonstrated that even at the University of Northern Northwest North Dakota, one of the roughest collegiate environments in the entire world, students can learn how to write error-free sentences. Here in Southern California, however, where Harvard-educated people write TV and movie scripts and earn enough money from these scripts to buy fancy houses on hillsides in the sun, overlooking the ocean – ah, forget it. Someday, O ye citizens who appreciate a comma placed in a correct place, take the time to find some professional movie scripts online and see if you’re not reduced to tears at the slop. Oh well, I guess audiences don’t go to the movies to read – that would be like going to the bookstore to play football.

A week or so ago, I heard a writer (non-Hollywood) telling other writers never ever to write “But I digress.” Sage advice, no doubt. But I have to ignore it. For I have digressed. And I must write it. But I digress.

Back to pipes and smoking them:

Here is one of the coolest forms of sentences in the English language, something called the “Matrix Sentence,” which doesn’t have squat to do with the movie franchise. A matrix sentence is a sentence with one sentence imbedded inside another sentence. The embedded sentence often appears in the form of a restricted relative clause for which we have deleted the restrictive pronoun.

Okay. Got your pipes out?

The sentence of the day:

I am tired of hearing Tommy was the guy called in sick yesterday.

Analysis:

First, we have to isolate the independent clauses.

1) I am tired.

2) Tommy was the guy.

3) Tommy called in sick yesterday.

Then we have to recognize that we have omitted the restrictive pronoun ‘that’ after ‘Tommy’ and that we have omitted the restrictive pronoun ‘who’ before ‘called.’ The omissions are common in speech and not always so common in writing.

You still with me?

I (subject) am (verb) tired (subject complement) of hearing (adverbial modifying ‘hearing) Tommy (subject of second independent clause: clause in restriction to the first clause) was (verb) the guy (subject complement) called (intransitive verb, forming the predicate for ‘Tommy’; also, verb in restrictive clause with omitted ‘who’) in sick yesterday (adverbial modifying ‘called’).

Further analysis:

They ain’t making a movie out of that.

Additional comment:

Have you lost your mind, Magnuson?

Life Sentences #3

During one of my unhappier periods – a while back, not long enough back – I knew somebody who kept telling me I was repetitive, that I had like three things I talked about, that’s it, and that everyone was complaining about my repetition problem behind my back. “Everyone” wasn’t really the word, of course; the word was “people,” which, when a person says this in a needling context, has a tad more acid to it. Now, this person was correct: I was, and still am, prone to dwelling intellectually on a narrow range of items, perhaps more than three things but still, I keep it simple because goddamit I’m not a genius and consequently have to take comfort in the familiar: food, music, cycling, sports on TV, and, um, that’s about it, I guess. Probably I could attempt wrapping my peabrain around some other subjects, but then again, even if I could figure out quantum mechanics or additive number theory or the nature of the sixteen cases in the Finnish language, why in the fuck would I want to spend my free time discussing this shit? And what would it say about me if I actually had friends who did? Maybe it would be nice to have smart friends. Check that: I do have smart friends but we remain friends by keeping the standard of conversation nice and low: we never tire of discussing the merits of medium-rare steak or of room-temperature cheese or of the opening speech in Patton, which never fails to stir the heart into an ironic slurry of American military-industrial shame. The point is, if you’re going to be friends with another human being – and I’m talking about being friends for a long time, for the duration – you must accept that human beings, deep down, are creatures of comfort and of habit. To wit, if you are bored by your friends, you are either 1) not meant to be their friend or 2) you are an asshole. If you are bored by people in general, sorry, there’s no hope for you whatsoever. Find a hole, place your head in it, and keep it there.

This leads into our wonderfully poetic sentence of the day, a sort of trick sentence for the minus-eight percent of the population who enjoy sentence diagramming. The trick will be that ‘shit’ is not actually the object of the sentence because we’re going to use ‘the same,’ normally an adjective, as a pronoun.

The sentence of the day:

Mike says the same shit.

Analysis:

Mike (a noun, also the subject of the sentence) says (transitive verb) the same (a pronoun substituting for any of the three or four things Mike might say) shit (while this is a noun, we can see if we were to eliminate ‘shit’ from the sentence, the sentence would retain its meaning, albeit losing a bit of its charming tone, because we’re not really saying that Mike says ‘shit,’ we’re saying that Mike says ‘the same’).

Further analysis:

What’s for lunch?

Further further analysis:

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe 'same shit' really is an adjective-noun combo expressing the essential truth to living, and I simply prefer not to think of it that way.

Life Sentences #2

Today’s sentence is some easy shit, people. It’s in fact one of the simplest, most valuable sentences in the language, the one without which we’d really have no occasion to elaborate on stuff like why we like cycling, sirloin steak, French wine, Frank Zappa, and many other items that somehow aren’t managing to cross my mind right now. See, in order to elaborate, we must first say what something is. We must first say, This is good. Then we can say why it’s good!

The type of sentence to which I refer (ain’t it amazing I can to that to-which shit?) is what we call the subject/subject-complement pattern. How it works: The subject of the sentence is a noun or a pronoun (a thing) then we have a nifty to be verb and then a noun or an adjective that defines the meaning of the subject, thus ‘complementing’ the subject.

Hold on, Magnuson. What the fuck you talking that fancy shit for?

Let’s make it easier. If I write, Frank Zappa is a God, quite clearly and quite correctly I am according Godlike status to Frank Zappa. The word God is a noun but because it clarifies my view of Frank Zappa, because it further defines Frank Zappa, we consider God to be an adjective.

So the sentence of the day:

Mike Magnuson is a dipstick.

Analysis:

Mike Magnuson (a noun, the subject of the sentence) is (to be verb) an dipstick (a noun used as an adjective that excellent describes Mike Magnuson).

Further Analysis:

You want me to explain why?

Life Sentences #1

I can guarantee you that none of my former students have ever said to me, “Magnuson, I sure would like you to write down a few of your amazing ideas on grammar and sentence structure.” They undoubtedly know I have thoughts on the subject because I about used to go into Scanners-style head-explosion fits in every writing class I taught – usually over stupid, run-of-the-mill mistakes even my graduate students couldn’t avoid making: stuff like don’t put commas betwixt the subject and the predicate; or its is already a goddam possessive pronoun, which means you don’t have to put an apostrophe after it; or if you don’t put the comma in Suck my dick, Sammy, ‘suck my dick’ becomes an adjective implying Sammy has been working in Social Services for quite a long time; and so forth. True, I cussed and threw tantrums in the process of explaining simple grammatical rules that my college students should have learned originally in the fourth grade, and it’s possible my classroom methods might have been off-putting to my weaker, more sensitive pupils, who most certainly desired encouragement in their expensive educations instead of sharp reminders that they didn’t know shit and would never know shit and therefore should save themselves a couple hundred thousand dollars and promptly drop out of college and consider a career in Burger King drive-thru management.

Fuck it. Nobody ever listened.

A few did.

The following feels like an aside after that short, purgative rant, but here is today’s sentence, a classic example of the intransitive, meaning that the independent clause has no object.

Sentence:

This shit sucks.

Analysis:

This (a demonstrative pronoun, a pronoun that points toward a noun) shit (a noun, also the subject of this sentence) sucks (the predicate of the sentence, the verb that completes the independent clause in the same way that mustard completes a Ball Park Frank).

Further analysis:

This shit sucks.