"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.