THE KING OF SENTENCESBYJONATHAN LETHEMDECEMBER 17, 2007This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentencesnothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldnt rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esthers cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You cant have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, wed rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.We worked in bookstores, the only thing to do. Nobody who didntand that included every one of our customersknew what any of the volumes throbbing along those shelves was worth, not remotely. Nor did the bookstores owners. Clea and I were custodians of a treasury of sentences much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Though we mostly handled the books only by their covers (or paged briefly through to ascertain that no dunce had striped the pages yellow or pink with a Hi-Liter), we communed deeply with them, felt certain that only we deserved to abide with them. Any minute wed read them all cover to cover, it was surely about to happen. Meanwhile, every customer robbed us a little. At the cash registers we spoke sentences tailored to convey our disdain, in terms so subtle it was barely detectable. If our customers blinked a little at the insults we embedded in our thank-yous, we believed, they just might be worthy of the marvels their grubby dollars entitled them to bear away.We disparaged modern and incomplete forms: gormless and garbled jargon, graffiti, advertising, text-messaging. No sentence conveyed by photons or bounced off satellites had ever come home intact. Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, insuring that a souffl or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. Wed rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the Administrations lousy grammar.But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody elses dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips wed find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxxs of regret. I scurried to read Cleas manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.”Others might hail kings of beer or burgerswe bowed to the King of Sentences. There was just one. We owned his titles in immaculate firsts and tattered reading copies and odd variant editions. It thrilled us to see the pedestrian jacket copy and salacious cover art on his early mass-market paperbacks: to think that hed once been considered fodder for dime-store carrousels! The newest editions of the titles hed allowed to be reprinted (four early novels had been suppressed from republication) were splendidly austere, their jackets, from the small presses t