Friday, December 15, 2017

Appreciation …

 Murray Kempton at 100 | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… Few accounts of his life fail to use the word “baroque” to describe his style. I am not sure that’s right. The word implies gratuitous ornamentation, frill for no purpose, but his style isn’t ornamented. I would call it relentlessly, sometimes perversely, inventive. His word choice is never quite what you would have predicted; his sentences are like little excursions, sometimes resolving in the ordinary way, sometimes fading into grammatical uncertainty or trailing off into a marathon dependent clause. It doesn’t always work, but it’s evidence of a mind steadfastly refusing to think or express anything in the usual tired old way.

We could use somebody like him these days.

2 comments:

  1. The problem with quoting Kempton is that some of the sentences one wants to quote are so long. I will, though, quote the last part of a paragraph-long sentence from "Undertaking Roy Cohn": "it would take a highly combustible tongue to kindle to flame when brought beard to beard with a Grand Inquistor who, even in those days, was commencing to look like some priapic statue incautiously bought at the flea market and left out too long in the garden rains." (Collected in Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events.)

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  2. Long it may be, but hilarious it is. And, the article notwithstanding, decided baroque.

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