"Let's take the fancy-pants by the plait of his felt hat."

Draft is the name of a new Opinionator series on the nature of writing. This columnist examines the nature of the sentence, in literature especially, and here asks readers to offer up their own representative examples.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-sentence-as-a-miniature-narrative/?ref=opinion

And here's my contribution:

"I had the impression that everything was misty and nacreous around me, with multifarious and indistinct apparitions, amongst whom however was one figure that stood out fairly clearly which was that of a young man whose too-long neck in itself seemed to proclaim the character at once cowardly and quarrelsome of the individual."

From Raymond Queneau's 'Exercises In Style', his "Dream" exercise.

The narrator is Mr. Queneau and he is observing an annoying young man on the bus. This is an excerpt from one of 99 literary exercises all treating this very same encounter. There is plenty of space in this work in particular for Queneau to experiment with the sentence and dissect its anatomy, and he meanwhile finds a variety of astonishingly entertaining ways of doing so. 

Here's another excerpt, this time from his "Animism" exercise. If we're being altogether technical it seems as if we'd probably have to call this bit an exciting example of nothing more than a fragment .

"A soft, brown hat with a dent in his middle, his brim turned down, a plaited cord round his crown, one hat among many others, jumping only when the bumps in the road were transmitted to him by the wheels of the automobile vehicle which was transporting him (the hat)."

Anyway, the subject is, of course, the hat given life, and the predicate is somewhere I haven't yet been able to locate precisely.

NYT pulp novel intro contest entry

The New York Times "City Room" blog editor challenged readers to create the very beginning of a hypothetical 1950's-era pulp novel.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/want-to-be-a-pulp-fiction-writer-heres-your-chance/

My humble entry:

Somehow the sunshiny color of her dress didn't match the way she was wearing it. The dress's shoulder was shifted all askew baring skin and bra strap, leaving the outfit looking shabby and sad. Her too thick lipstick was a shade of red that didn't quite copy the color of the glass rubies strung 'round her slender, milk white neck. Apparently she'd dressed in too much of a rush to have time to notice these details, or didn't have time to care. More important matters needed fussing over, this was plain in her harried eyes and hurried step down the street.

Ralph gazed on until her colorful streak disappeared around the corner. The fumes of the rye he had been sipping were giving him that dizziness that made his mind see things with a kind of poetry never written in any of the books he was used to reading.

What could be more ominous than the sight of a disturbed brood of partridges?

As I was cantering across the soft, newly-turned soil of the fields, with nothing more ominous in sight than a startled brood of partridges and the large, setting sun in the distance above the rolling landscape, that cellar, crowded with the death throes of a swarm of rats, suddenly opened up inside me . . . the high-pitched death screams echoing off mildewed walls; the contorted spasms of unconsciousness; all the confused and frenzied dashing about; the crazed lunges . . . the cold leers of rage . . . gnashing of teeth!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "The Lord Chandos Letter"

He explains exactly why I'd rather quote than compose, and why he's speaking for me here, now

Lucidly, slowly, piece-by-piece, I re-read everything I've written. And I find it all worthless and feel it would have been better never to have written it. The very fact of completing or achieving anything, be it an empire or a sentence, contains what is worst about all real things: our knowledge that they will perish. But that isn't what I feel or what hurts me about what I've created. What hurts me is that it wasn't worth doing, and that all I gained from the time I wasted is the now shattered illusion that it was worth doing.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The Great Poets of Crime Reporting

Did Onofrias Scarcello kill someone in Charmes, Haute-Marne, on the 5th of June? He was in any case arrested at the train station in Dijon.

Felix Feneon

An author who had written only one play, which he would allow to be performed on only one occasion in what in his opinion was the best theater in the world and, likewise, only directed by, in his opinion, the best director and acted by the best actors in the world, had installed himself, before the curtain rose on the first night, in a seat in the gallery that was best suited to his purpose but was invisible to the audience, had sighted his machine gun, specially constructed for the purpose by the Swiss firm of Vetterli, and, after the curtain had risen, had put a bullet through the head of every member of the audience who had, in his opinion, laughed in the wrong place. At the end of the performance only those members of the audience whom he had shot, and who were therefore dead, remained seated in the theater. The actors and the theater manager had not allowed themselves to be disturbed for a moment by the self-willed author and the events he had perpetrated.

Thomas Bernhard

Now properly Eastern Time.

Below is what I think will be the first chapter, the prelude, prologue, just some little bit of a much larger whole, but enough of a window into a unreal but too real world I intend to unfold right here in probably a zig-zag motion, fragmentary episode by fragmentary episode, but as determinedly as my limitations as a human allow. Feedback, criticism, critique, heckles, constructive and gentle or otherwise, will be quite humbly received and appreciated.