Thursday, June 14, 2012

Sentence of the Day

A pair of 'em, actually. (Swear to God, the block quote you see below consists of two sentences.) Have you ever seen such riotous punctuation? And there's more, much more where these came from.*

If I ever start writing like this, you're free to send me brownies laced with rat poison.

Call it the speculative science fiction epic willing to flirt with cosmic pessimism; the eternally recurring saga of the space voyage toward our point of origin or ultimate destiny (they generally turn out to be pretty much identical); the drama of metamorphosis in which animals become human and humans become machines; the proleptic chronicle of a future depicted as so endangered it may not even come to pass, and so unappealing we might well wish it wouldn’t. This in its various cinematic permutations constitutes our theater of dread, cunningly disguised as a game; our stab at a commercially viable form of Wagnerian sublimity: The Twilight of the Humans, an existential cosmic opera-in-progress sketched out in the 1950s in Forbidden Planet and the BBC television serial Quatermass and the Pit, ennobled by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and continually reconfigured ever since. 


*Courtesy of the New York Review of Books, full article here.

3 comments:

Chris said...

All I see is "blah blah blah blah"...

K. Z. Snow said...

:-D

It reminds me why I left academia.

Chris said...

You and me both.