For the Love of Sentences
Frank Bruni's opinion column in the NYT about words and speaking. I can't resist this column! ENJOY!
Archivio GBB/Contrasto, via Redux
This space last week put more than glittering prose on display. It also showcased my musical ignorance. I included a reader-nominated sentence that likened a rushing-heavy football offense when Tom Brady is your quarterback to a bevy of drum solos when Eric Clapton is your guitarist. Many of you justly wrote in to note that when Clapton played with Cream, there were many extended solos by the band’s renowned drummer, Ginger Baker. I offer this paragraph as my percussion penance.
And now I turn to the death of Queen Elizabeth II — or, rather, to a mere sprinkle of the hundreds of thousands of excellent words written about it. In The Times, Hari Kunzru mulled the queen’s surrender to her peculiar station: “She seemed to accept that her role was to be shown things, so very many things.” (Thanks to Scott Kolber of Brooklyn, N.Y., for nominating that.) And Tina Brown described the queen’s cultured and deliberately opaque voice as having “the cut-glass tones of an everlasting British teatime.” (Chris Sheola, Ithaca, N.Y.)
In The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead posited that Elizabeth “spoke so seldom that even people who didn’t care what the queen said cared what the queen said.” (Ed Gallardo, Sun City West, Ariz.) And Anthony Lane looked beyond the queen to the trajectory of the nation that curtsied to her: “Could it be that what was once an empire, and then a commonwealth, will shrink to a single country, and then at last to one quiet village in Gloucestershire, with an empty church and a thriving line in marmalade?” (Eric Walker, Black Mountain, N.C.)
In The Washington Post, Ron Charles had great fun with his review of a hurried, bare-bones new thriller, “Blowback,” by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois. “The scenes are so short they could be written on napkins,” he wrote. “Several times the chapters break during conversations, as though somebody forgot to put a dime in the pay phone.” Additionally: “The dialogue is so corny it’s not delivered, it’s shucked.” (Carolyn Harrison, Kearney, Mo.)
Also in The Washington Post, Monica Hesse’s take on a new Apple TV+ road trip/interview show starring Hillary and Chelsea Clinton included Hesse’s description of Hillary’s tenseness when she re-emerges in the public eye: “It’s like the vague sense of unease when it’s been too long since your toddler made an appearance, and the cat and the finger paints are missing, too.” The Clintons, Hesse wrote, “approach comedy much as the Coneheads approached Earth.” And through their conversations with other celebrities, they “discover that comedy is more difficult for women, and fame is trickier for women, and moms are more judged than dads. If any of this is news to you, then I wish you a swift recovery from your head wound.” (Valerie Congdon, Waterford, Mich., and Christina Mitchell, Voorhees, N.J.)
And to return to — and end with — The Times, Katherine Rundell gorgeously distilled the poet John Donne’s belief in the expansiveness of our souls: “Tap humans, he believed, and they’d ring with the sound of infinity.” (Liz Keuffer, Cincinnati)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, put “Sentences” in the subject line and include your name and place of residence.
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