I would spend hours writing a description of something simple like a pencil, which would run over two pages.
This is a lofty description of something that began, somewhat whimsically, with a forty-eight-page, paperbound booklet called "Twentysix Gasoline Stations".
There are metaphors about date palms, and a description of something being "as merciful as rain on mud huts".
(Or, write your own, perhaps creating a basic description of something specific to your school community, like a recent football game or a local hangout).
About a third of the way through his all-encompassing, brave and deeply humane book, "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression," Andrew Solomon writes a vivid description of something called an ndeup (pronounced nn-DUPP).
The surprise of this passage is followed by an even more astonishing revelation by Crimp: "Not only do we recognize this as a description of something we already know — the primal scene — but our recognition might extend even further, to the Moravia novel from which it has been lifted.
She tends to think in shortish scenes, which might be quick character sketches of people she has known, wry self-inquiries into feelings that she's hidden from herself, old memories revisited or a description of something she saw this morning.
Nightmarish and illogical is also what I'd have taken from a description of something as Kafkaesque, with an insectile undercurrent beneath it all (I don't think that last bit is right, incidentally, but it's what the word makes me think of).
But if there is one modern usage I would wipe from existence, it is the word "monster" as a description of something big, like the monster truck rally I went to (which should feature monster-shaped trucks, rather than monster-sized ones. The reality was a grave disappointment and my "Go Godzilla" banner remains folded up in a dark cupboard).
