So farewell, Bernard Levin

[chickenfeet]

I see from today’s Grauniad that Bernard Levin, master of the convoluted sentence; so convoluted indeed that it is said he once wrote a sentence of fifteen hundred words which was famously parodied in Not Yet the Times; organ of the striking journalists during a strike at the Times in the 1970’s though one must doubt whether Mr. Levin himself participated given his oft expressed distaste for combinations of working people or similarly subversive coruscations on the body politic, and single handed champion of the semi-colon; a once recherché punctuation mark which Mr. Levin recued from obscurity and helped to reach its apotheosis in his famous columns about the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in which he would wax poetic over the charms, and occasionally the voice, of the latest diva to grace that famous stage; a personal peculiarity which the writer found incomprehensible until the debut of the lovely Bayrakdarian as Cleopatra, déshabillé and in chains, at the Canadian Opera; a company not without its charms but whose stark, nay modernistic, stage bears no more resemblance to the rococo adumbrations of Covent Garden than does my humble effort to the truly baroque style of the late Mr. Levin.

Comments

[radinden]

Bravo! A bold effort; and one in which the semicolon, under threat from other punctuation marks - such as the roguishly dashing dash, as noted by Lynne Truss - makes a bold and sweeping gesture of contempt to the full stop, and restores itself to its rightful place as master of the art of stream-of-consciousness writing; a style which you masterfully parody... (that's enough - Ed.)

;;;;;

[atpotch.livejournal.com]

Hooray for the semi-colon!

TCH