My staff of thousands finally came up with a bright idea: Issue a daily or, to make the job less
demanding, sort of daily Purple Prose Alert. So here’s today’s, from the swiftly rising
purplemeister David Brooks. He writes this morning that “Bush
believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in [the] struggle to complete democracy’s triumph over
tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror.” When the “triumph over tyranny” does “drain the
swamp of terror,” maybe it will also do a clean-up job on the purplemeister’s prose.
POSTSCRIPT: Martin Bernheimer has issued a purple opera alert in his review
today of “Benvenuto
Cellini” at the Met. He writes that “the conductor James Levine
tended to stress the ponderous. Meanwhile, the director Andrei Serban tended to err on the side
of whimsy.” The whimsy featured a constellation of “fugitives from a commedia
dell’arte circus, a corps of angels and archangels plus looming figures of the inquisition. He [also]
threw in a couple of nearly naked warrior-youths, flew symbolic commentators on wires, and
made dancing, prancing and miming a hectic way of life.”
