Respect is due to Ingrid Burrington, courtesy of whose Perfect Sentences newsletter I was reminded of this David Graeber classic from The Baffler, whose topic (and, interestingly, some of whose digressions) are serendipitously relevant to an imminent project.

I could pick many perfect sentences from this essay, but I’m going to go with a pair that just slightly precede the lines suggested by Burrington’s correspondent:

Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating.

“Man, I miss David Graeber all the time,” says Burrington; same here. His admonition to “be kind to your reader” is tacked to the wall just above the upper edge of my main monitor—advice which I’m very sure that I honour far more often in the breach, but which I value nonetheless.

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This is not my first experience of weird coincidence with Perfect Sentences, whose editor I do kind of know, but would not presume to go so far as to claim as a friend.

Back in June she posted a line from a page on the website of a business selling circuitbent hardware and other audio oddities, noting that it had been submitted by someone called Paul. This was of great amusement to me, because I happen to know the proprietor of said website, who literally lived in my living room for a period of perhaps two years at the start of century, and his name is also Paul, as is mine.

That Paul was, and presumably still is, known as Crusty Paul—not because this would provide any instant visual distinction between the two of us among our social group, but rather because he’d settled in to that 3am-Glasto-carpark-1992 aesthetic even sooner than I had, and thus got the obvious appellation first. Besides, I had an entirely different nickname for most of the late Nineties, to the extent that I probably could have counted the number of people who knew my given name on one hand.

It’s a small world, and it contains rather more Pauls than one might expect.