By far, my favorite essay of last month was "Does She Love You?" in the Morning News. The essay first ran in September 2005 — a month one could argue the editorial nadir of the Morning News, with the news of Gary Benchley's identity — but it was new to me. Like the collegiate "What she doesn't know will kill you" published a year or two before it, the Pasha Malla question was glory for the inner rampaging romantic.

If you're Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

If you're not Gael Garcia Bernal, but you're willing to sit through a "GGB" marathon and agree for 10 consecutive hours that he is indeed the most beautiful and talented man alive–and so down-to-earth, too!–and afterward agree that his portrayal of Che Guevara would have earned an Oscar nod were it not for the implicit politics, agree that taking Spanish classes is a great idea, or salsa, or tango, whatever, agree, agree, agree, and that night lying in bed after sex that ends with her screaming, "Si! Si!" wonder aloud, "But you're happy with me, right?": She loves you, man–no one can compete with that Latin bastard. Forget about it.

My favorite essay of this month, by far, is one I've read just now. "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place" is published in this month's Believer and is glory for the inner rampaging, writing romantic. If you love words, you find your chin in your palm and your head wondering whether the topic is an acceptable thing to get emotional about. You decide maybe.

I don't know which excerpt of the Gary Lutz lecture-turned-essay to give you. I want to give you the whole thing. Since some moment of awesome but forgotten realization in college, I've thought that good writing was about pacing and its friend tone and not grammar and vocab, and this essay tells me why better than I've ever told myself.

"Many of the words were unfamiliar to me," says the Lutz realization passage, "but the words fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged. I was reading so slowly that in many a word I heard the scrunch and flump of the consonants and the peal of the vowels. Granted, I wasn't retaining much of anything, but almost every word now struck me as a provocative hullabaloo. This was my first real lesson about language–this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround."

Dear God. Later, we begin to break open the sentence for its values. How can anyone fight the urge to read aloud, at least softly? "These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity–a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. … The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other's company–and that they cannot live without each other."

The essay goes on. Like I said, please read. But about those lips.

In Christine Schutt's two-clause formation "her lips stuck when she licked them to talk," the second half of a sentence from the short story "Young," the conspicuous content words are lips, stuck, licked, and talk. These four words are not all that varied consonantically. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common–we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a k that has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminal k (talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don't appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i and c that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the k are side-by-side at last–coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.

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