> “His clothes were shabby, his coat ill-fitting and with an unnatural gloss, his linen or celluloid— I am not sure that his collars and cuffs were of linen— sel

> “His clothes were shabby, his coat ill-fitting and with an unnatural gloss, his linen or celluloid— I am not sure that his collars and cuffs were of linen— seldom above reproach, and his high hat was always brushed the wrong way.” A random aside… I enjoyed this description as a bit of a puzzle because it’s entirely based on fashion cues that happen to be obsolete. What kind of unnatural gloss? What does a celluloid shirt look like? Or a high hat brushed the wrong way? When reading a story, my mind needs to create little actors to place in scenery. Building up these mental characters is easy and automatic with fiction’s usual introduction formula (which is also used by long form journalism in the New Yorker style where the editor makes sure that a person’s shirt color and posture is described to satisfy readers like myself). But this German student broke my automatic actor-builder process and forced me to make conscious decisions about what his clothing looks like in my mind. Seems like this doesn’t happen very often, probably because usually there are enough cues to get a picture without fully processing everything.