DFW's Sentence Mr. Yeagle's spouse herself, a redhead, although in the infant's case its extreme pallor and the light- yellow pajamas or jumper it wore made its fine wisps and spirals of cupreous hair appear, in the light of the office's overhead fluorescents, to be the color of old blood, and its fierce and concentrated blue eyes appeared to be pupilless and the overintense blue of a Popsicle; and to complete the incongruous horror, the infant had set aside its teething ring- rather carefully and deliberately, as a man might set aside a file on his desk once he has completed it and is ready to turn his professional attention to another-which ring now lay moist and shiny next to an upright bottle of what appeared to be apple juice, and had placed its tiny folded hands adultly together before him on the vivid blue plastic of its play station (I noted that one of the elastic wristlets of its yellow chamois jumper was soaked through with saliva and appeared, for several inches up the infant's forearm, darker than the other wristlet, which the infant appeared to ignore and I certainly did not mention or foresee doing anything about), exactly as Mr. Yeagle or any of the other Group Managers or District Commissioner's senior staff might place their clasped hands before them on the desk to signal that you and the issue that had brought you into their office now occupied their full attention, and cleared its throat again-for it had indeed been it, he, the infant, who, like any other Group Manager, had cleared its throat in an expectant way in order to get my attention and at the same time in some subtle way to upbraid me for requiring it to do something to get my attention, as if I had been daydreaming or digressing mentally from some issue at hand-and, gazing at me fierce- ly, said-yes, said, in a high and I-deficient but un- mistakable voice- "Well?"

My Sentence Clifton struggled with an aggrieved state of persistent output, a creative Tourettes trigger by the touch of paint brush, and this lead to horrific choices, which he realized as he stood back from a once decent painting of a water lily to look upon a cupreous swirl of colors he thought resembled a shit one might take after an ill convinced dinner of beets and red beans, and it was at this exact moment, while battling an urgent need to add a sunrise to his canvass, that it dawned on Clifton this was the same affliction that haunted Grady Tripp, but unlike Grady, whose curse was yet one more fucking page of unique quality, Clifton had to deal with a studio overflowing with paintings that resembled fat shits of similar shapes and sizes because paintings, unlike pages, when yielding to perpetual impulsive production, become a singular, undifferentiated artifact.

¶ DFW Source: The Compliance Branch (p.18)

¶ Definition Source: Wiktionary

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