Single-Sentence Stories, Part II: Sentence of Dave, and a Math Problem About Literature

Cuing off Zed's sly tip-of-the-cap post yesterday, I thought I'd take us all there more fully. You know, a ham-fisted sequel after a cleverly crafted original.

So, as of today, Dave has written 6,365 posts at Sentence of Dave. As such, presumably he has written 6,365 sentences.

6,365 sentences. Wow.

Except... do you guys remember his existential crisis where he went over to that Park the Bus site and wrote lots of sentences and said goodbye to SoD and then a year later or so came back and just picked the old site right back up New Coke Bobby Ewing style?

What was that about? We're going to call that period his "Lost Weekend" a la John Lennon and go with the 6,365 sentences. Moving right along...

So… has Dave written the equivalent of a novel?

Of course it would be a rambling, hard-to-follow novel. I contend that it would be no harder to follow than Faulkner's novels for me when I read them in high school, or Dave when he's rambling at the Fishing Trip after Tortuga's and some afternoon fun. 

How can we simply evaluate if he's written and published (in blogform) as much as a novel over these 18 years?

AI says that: 

• "Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities contains an estimated 6,400 to 7,400 sentences, based on an approximate word count of 135,000 to 140,000 and the typical long-winded Victorian sentence length of around 19 to 22 words per sentence. For instance, the famous opening line alone runs 119 words long, which is very SoDomish and perhaps Dave's original inspiration."
• "Based on the novel's total word count, To Kill a Mockingbird contains an estimated 6,800 to 7,500 sentences. Total Word Count: The novel has approximately 100,000 words. Average Sentence Length: Standard 20th-century American fiction typically averages 13 to 15 words per sentence. BTW, Dave = Boo Radley."
• "Mark Twain’s American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains an estimated 5,300 to 5,800 sentences. While Mark Twain's prose is highly conversational and written in Huck's unique colloquial voice, his narrative sentences tend to be longer and more fluid than modern fiction, often linking multiple clauses with conjunctions like "and". However, this is balanced out by rapid-fire, localized dialogue between Huck and other characters along the Mississippi River, bringing the statistical average down to about 20 words per sentence. Also, Dave has never used racist vulgarities in SoD."
• "An analysis of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath estimates the sentence count to be between 11,000 and 15,000 sentences. While it is a massive, sweeping novel, its total sentence count is incredibly high because Steinbeck’s sentence-level complexity is uniquely low. Like SoD, it's also super uplifting."
• “An analysis of Ernest Hemingway's modernist classic The Sun Also Rises estimates the sentence count to be between 5,600 and 6,800 sentences, similar to SoD in the way that Jake Barnes is similar to Dave in his sexual virility."

So Dave has worked harder than Twain, nearly as hard as Dickens and Harper Lee, and he’s halfway to Steinbeck. (“Halfway to Steinbeck”… a podcast episode or Random Idiots song title if there ever was one.)

Dave is pretty much Ernest Hemingway. Papa Pellicane strikes again.

Here’s the thing, though. Those authors didn’t work as hard per sentence. Not nearly!

Only the people highlighted in Zman’s recommended Totei article “The Strange Allure of the Single-Sentence Novel” have! Faulkner and his 1,288-word sentence in Absalom, Absalom!, or Joyce and his 4,391-word sentence in Ulysses. (Joyce’s has to be the Lou Gehrig record of his time… and maybe Dave can be Cal Ripken.)

So, in order to do comparative math, we need to know how long the average SoD entry is, wordwise. How do we figure that?

We’re in luck, Super Sleuths! My buddy Arch the AI Archivist gave me this to work with:

If your goal is “give me a defensible ballpark, not a dissertation,” I think we can get there without turning this into the Human Genome Project.

From the archive material I can actually inspect, my best current estimate is:

 An average Sentence of Dave post is probably about 200–250 words.

If you made me put one number on it right now, I'd use ~225 words per post.

I also think the median is appreciably lower — probably around 150–175 words. That's because Dave's distribution is extremely lopsided: there are lots of short posts, but then occasional 500-, 700-, or 1,000-word Dave extravaganzas drag the arithmetic mean upward. You can see that variation directly in the archives: 2010 has compact posts alongside very long one-sentence narratives, while 2024 likewise jumps between tiny entries and several-hundred-word stories. And contemporary Dave does appear wordier.

I'd put a fairly broad uncertainty band around it — say ±50 words — until we've done a genuine large sample. But I'm much more comfortable with 225 now than with my original 150–200 guess.

Oh, and then there's this exchange:

Anyway, I’m actually content to know how much Dave has written, guesstimate-style (like most of my college exam submissions), so let’s do this.  

Holy crap. Sentence of Dave is 5 times wordier than that relative leaflet Ulysses! 

I know, my Math about his English a bit dicey in its precision, but it’s on the right track. Dave’s collective work doesn’t qualify for Single-Sentence Novel acclaim, because, like the unluckiest gal I know, he’s had over 6,000 periods… but if we could tap a few keystrokes and make them all semi-colons… oh, boy. 

Let's face it. Dave is Cal. 

[This is not helping my case with my hometowners that W&M people aren’t nerds.]

Totei and the Art of Single-Sentence Stories

I typically don't enjoy non-fiction books.  For whatever reason, I can't focus on one real thing for that long.  But I do enjoy non-fiction magazine articles.  You're in, you're enlightened, you're out.  All in six to nine pages.

To that end, you should check out Totei, "a magazine about the art of making."  They cover art, film, food, music, design.  And writing.  One particular article about writing hooked me.

"The Strange Allure of the Single-Sentence Novel" is a must-read.  Not because the author's name is Naomi Xu Elegant (and for the record she is not related to FsOG:TB Danny and Jenny Elegance).  But because of the way she writes about people who publish entire works as a single sentence.

Of the Hungarian Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai who wrote Herscht 07769, a frattily titled 400 page book containing one sentence, she asks:

Why does he do it?  Is it because, simply, he’s a weird man who just wants to write terribly long sentences, and he doesn’t want you to get a word in edgeways?

That's not an unreasonable way to think of authors who write lengthy stories in one sentence.

Of Ducks, Newburyport, a thousand-page sentence by Lucy Ellman, Elegant quotes a review stating "It feels dense at first, a bit like drowning, without a period or paragraph break in sight."  And when she interviewed Ellman she got this quote about long sentences: "It’s the literary equivalent of menopause." Again, all very on the nose.

In her interview with Daniel Krautz, the author of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize-winning 304 page sentence Angel Down, Elegant pulled this insight: "I didn’t know if people would take one look at it and just be like, 'I don’t want to deal with this.' I really didn’t know if I’d just ruined the book. All I knew is that I really liked it—it was really exciting for me to write.” I can see both sides of this based on my own experience reading long stories told in one sentence—not everyone wants to deal with it, but it's an exciting exercise in self-indulgence for the author.

Mike McCormack, author of the exceedingly long sentence Solar Bones, told Elegant that he "is wary of the long sentence. 'John Banville says the sentence is what sets us above and apart from the animals,' he said. 'I would share that esteem. You want to have some seriously good reasons for renouncing the sentence and for writing long outpours.'"

Go read Elegant's article and maybe some others in Totei like this one about a guy who makes guitars using antique wood salvaged from lower Manhattan, or this one about a living sculpture (which is a bit of a knock-off of my man Ben Behin), or this one about Tape Op, or this one about La Marzocco espresso machines.

And when you're done with that, go read Sentence of Dave, pound-for-pound the best single sentences you can get online.

Cross-Promotion: A Very Special G:TB Episode

It was genuinely wonderful to have the opportunity to celebrate the life of Dave's father Guy this weekend in New Jersey. Those of you that have been given the honor of eulogizing a parent know that it's both fulfilling and emotionally draining. I'm here to tell you that Dave did a brilliant job capturing his larger-than-life Dad, from the intimate family moments to Guy's (literally) global impact on the corrections profession.

As Dave himself notes over at the Sentence, "...though it was something of a somber occasion, my college and high school buddies brought some joy to the weekend". We did, in fact, pack a lot of joy into a short period of time, and I'm once again reminded of the incredible gift of friendship I'm fortunate to receive every day.

Godspeed, Guy, and much love to all you you, my Gheorghie pals.

Throw Back Thursday: Wordle O.G.

Wordle has officially taken the world by storm. Annoyingly so, but then again, I still do it every day. And share it with a few gheorghies.

But before there was Wordle, there was Wordle. A Word Picture. Where robots scan a document or website and produce a graphic image featuring the most prominent words, with those most recurrent showing largest. 

Thanks to the folks at WordArt, you still can!

So I plugged in our sister site Sentence of Dave. And it's about what you'd think. At first blush, you'd believe that Dave is very high on himself. It's just that every post has "Sentence of Dave" in it, plus he's self-referential a lot. 

Plus Dave is very high on himself. 

But here you go!

Click on it to enlarge. As usual. Enjoy.

Russell Crowe is really Dave Dogfoot?

I have determined that we have an impostor in our midst. The man we know to be Dave Dogfoot is really a famous actor with a different name of animal origin--he's Russell Crowe. This shouldn't come as a suprise given that he name-checked Crowe in song at least once before.

Here's a picture of Helen Hunt and Russell Crowe circa 1992, before Crowe hit it big. They were doing a summer stock revival of Grease in the metro Camden area. This photo was taken back stage. If you look closely through the eyeliner, you can see a striking resemblance to Dave.

Here's a much more recent photo of Dave juggling a ball at one of his myriad youth soccer events.

If you look closely through Dave's flab, you can see that he's the spitting image of Russell Crowe. This explains why he's playing soccer with a football--Australians take the whole "soccer is really football" conceit way too seriously. And who takes things a serious step too far more than Dave?

Not convinced? Fine. I have more facts, alternate facts if you will. Russell Crowe and his wife Danielle Spencer are divorcing. To make the division of assets easier, Crowe is auctioning off a bunch of stuff he "collected" over the years and will split the proceeds with his former wife. The auction is called "Russell Crowe: The Art of Divorce" and it's preposterous in so many ways that Dave has to be involved. In fact the whole thing is so insane that only Dave could gin up this fever dream of collectibles. Here's the cover photo for the catalog:

Sweet toupee Dave! Things get increasingly Dave as you dig through the catalog. For example, he's auctioning off a mosasaur skull that he received as a gift from Leonardo DiCaprio. Dave/Crowe notes that "The fossil relative of the monitor lizard family, which includes the Komodo Drago, the Mosasaur was a giant, serpentine marine reptile, which was prevalent during the Late Cretaceous Period, approximately 65 million years ago. Mosasaurs were formidable hunters, with a double-hinged jaw and a flexible skull enabling them to eat their prey whole. The Niobrara Formation is a geologic formation located in North America that was deposited between 87 and 82 million years ago." Dave totally wrote that--it's taxonomically perfect (mosasaurs were marine reptiles, not dinosaurs) and right on the line between interestingly informative and smarmily pedantic.

And who other than Dave would keep a dead lizard head in his home?

Another Dave-only gem is this antique leather athletic supporter. Who else would wear a used leather jock strap (read the comments)? In fact, on the night of the Tonka truck incident zwoman saw Dave staggering around the house, looking for the bathroom, wearing nothing but this very same cup. zwoman said "Dave wears a codpiece? I guess he really does teach Shakespeare."

Also up for auction: nineteen (19!) guitars. I have no idea why anyone needs nine guitars, let alone nineteen guitars, but a collection of nineteen guitars sounds like something Dave would amass. Some are acoustic while others are electric. I won't link to them all, and they all look more or less the same to (except for the colors). The most expensive is a limited edition Gibson Elvis Presley "The King" J-200 black acoustic guitar. According to Dave/Crowe "In 2000 I took a road trip from Texas to New York, via West Virginia, for the filming of A Beautiful Mind (2001). I took a detour via Memphis to visit Graceland and I bought this guitar from the shop there. It is no. 90 of 250 produced for 1997." Seems like it would've been easier to fly from Texas to New York but despite all his professed love of and advocacy for all things green and eco-friendly, Dave loves to burn inordinate amounts of fossil fuels by driving SUVs back-and-forth across the country so this is a very Dave story.

Dave's interest in oddball Euro sports like soccer and darts is well documented. As is his interest in cricket. Dave/Crowe's auction contains a batshit crazy volume of cricket memorabilia, including five signed and framed cricket batting gloves, ten game-worn sweater-vests, seven cricket bats, seven signed and framed cricket shirts, two bronze sculptures of Donald Bradman playing cricket (one of which is life-sized), and three framed cricket caps (one of which was apparently worn by W.A.S. "Bert" Oldfield and will allegedly sell for $50,000 to $60,000). Here's the pricey cap:

According to Dave/Crowe's catalog entry, this cap is:

green wool, embroidered with the Australian coat-of-arms worked in gold and silver wire and coloured silk, the series date below '1932-33', with a 'Farmers Sydney' label inscribed in ink 'W.A.Oldfield', framed with a black and white photograph of Oldfield, together with a copy of The Larwood Story: A Cricketer's Biography, (the dust jacket framed separately), opened at the page describing the infamous encounter between Oldfield and the English fast bowler, Harold Larwood, on 17 January 1933, when Oldfield was struck in the head off Larwood's delivery, suffering a fractured skull. An area of separation to one of the seams in the cap where Oldfield was struck, is a further reminder of the incident.

Sounds like a really pleasant piece of cricketing history to display in one's home--the hat hat Oldfield was wearing when he broke his skull, ripped seams and all!

I won't even get into the 1873 Sunbury Cup Australian silver trophy for greyhound coursing, attributed to Edward Fischer (1828-1911) for $10,000-$15,000.

Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence proving that Dogfoot is Crowe is Lot No. 5, a two-piece double-breasted purple suit worn by Russell Crowe in the movie Virtuosity.

Who would wear such an atrocity? This guy:

If you think this "slob with a football" ensemble is a one-off look you're mistaken. Historically, Dave looks like hell even when he's dressed up.

Pleated khakis, unzipped fly, rumpled shirt, oversized paisley print tie tied to a Trumpian length? Hell, this purple suit was probably the crown jewel of Dave/Crowe's wardrobe back in the 90's!

I think I can safely rest my case. Now that we know Dave is a wealthy movie star we should encourage him to pay for lunch at Tortuga's one day. All the more reason to attend OBFT XXV.

Sweeps Month Cross-Promotion

We've had a mini-run of excellent content this week, which is timely, as this is the time of year advertisers assess their content partners' audience counts to determine where to allocate their marketing dollars for the upcoming period.

With that in mind, two birds, one stone today, as we highlight Sentence of Dave's ongoing fascination with taste, supertaste, and/or poseurs masquerading as beer lovers. Says Dave, "Once again, I've found a beer that tastes really good (Sixpoint Sensi Harvest) and once again, I neither have the discriminating palate nor the gustatory diction to describe it properly..."

Fear not, Dave, for as you note in your sentence, there do exist...supertasters:

The Scourge of New Jersey

If Dave is to be believed, Jerseyites need beware. There's a dangerous, fiendish, and very, very persistent new menace on the loose.

Fortunately, Dave is rarely to be believed.