Sentences that make me want to kick things
Most of the time I stand in awe of New Yorker copy. And then I come across a couple “not uncomplicated” sentences like the following from Hilton Als’ blurb on Diane Keaton’s new memoir (“Critic’s Notebook,” 12/5/11 issue):
Writing in a collaboration of sorts with her late mother, Dorothy Hall, a great beauty—she was named Mrs. Los Angeles in 1955—Keaton, now sixty-five, has incorporated pictures and other ephemera that Hall, an inveterate collagist and photographer, kept throughout her life before succumbing to Alzheimer’s. People respond to Keaton because her personality is based on a desire for self-expression that does not supercede her desire to be a child—which is to say a comedic and melancholic performer—in dialogue with a mother’s intimacy. ‘Then Again’ is deeply feminist in spirit, a poem about women living in one another’s not uncomplicated memories.
