August Lines

Impressive writing turns up in all manner of places, from the dependably sharp-witted New York Magazine to the more serviceable yet equally as amusing reviews in Entertainment Weekly. A roundup of the latest bits that caught my eye:

1) From a New York Magazine article by John Heilemann on Rick Perry’s fledgling candidacy:

But a more problematic side of Perry’s persona also came through last week: a hotness that if left unchecked can easily turn self-scalding.

This isn’t necessarily Pulitzer-worthy prose, but to characterize Perry’s hot-headedness as “self-scalding” gives the sentence a nice internal consistency. It’s a turn of phrase subtle enough to be overlooked but appropriate enough to make for a satisfying read.

2) From a New Yorker reviewof the exhibit “Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum” by the inimitable Peter Schjeldahl:

Frans Hals' "Portrait of a Man," 1636 (photo via metmuseum.org)

I’d cross the street to avoid meeting most of the people Frans Hals painted.

Schjeldahl goes on to say that Hals’ subjects “impress me as bores of one caliber or another: oafish, supercilious, run-of-the-mill,” but that first sentence is perfect by itself. Anyone who’s seen a Hals knows exactly what he’s talking about.

3) From a piece in Vogue by Jacob Weisberg about Jon Huntsman:

With his tanned face and salt-and-pepper hair, he looks so good in checked shirts and denim jackets that The Wall Street Journal recently compared the launch of his campaign to a Ralph Lauren product rollout.

Perhaps the credit here should go to the WSJ, but the description is tailored to Vogue’s audience and rings particularly true to anyone who’s seen even a headshot of Huntsman. This is a man whose very eyebrows scream “dapper.”

4) From a capsule review by Keith Staskiewicz of the movie The Smurfs in Entertainment Weekly:

The smurfs may be blue, but their movie is decidedly green, recycling discarded bits from other celluloid Happy Meals like Alvin and the Chipmunks, Garfield, and Hop into something half-animated, half live action, and all careful studio calculation.

If you ignore the irksome Oxford comma after Garfield, this sentence is nearly perfect. It tells you everything you need to know about the movie, tweaking the over-commercialization of children’s flicks while simultaneously landing a punch on the lack of creativity in Hollywood today.

5) Again from New York Magazine, in an article by Robert Sullivan about a mega-mall being built in New Jersey:

If you disregard military bases and airports, and maybe the dam the Chinese government is beginning to regret it built on the Yangtze, the mall currently under construction at the Meadowlands will be one of the biggest feats of construction in history: the world’s largest commercial space, with at least six zeros attached to all the calculations.

The inclusion of “beginning to regret” gently suggests that the Meadowlands project may be similarly ill-advised, and the “six zeros” bit is the cherry on top of this prose pie. (Yes, go ahead and groan. I never said my own writing would meet the “impressive” standard. Let’s all roll our eyes at my cutesy “august lines” while we’re at it.)