The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Front-Ranger:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on May 31, 2012, 09:18:12 pm ---I'm so pleased to see that the double fiction issue that just arrived has an article by Ray Bradbury and also one by Anthony Burgess of Clockwork Orange fame. The articles are both very good. Bradbury is still whip smart!
--- End quote ---
Now I'm going to reread that article since it's probably the last thing we'll have the opportunity to read from him. :'(
Jeff Wrangler:
I wonder whether Mr. Shawn ever permitted a deliberate sentence fragment, like this one:
(From the July 2 story by William Finnegan about the Mexican drug cartels fighting over Guadalajara)
"They were local people who had recently gone missing. Ordinary citizens, not narcos, kidnapped and murdered. Four were said to have been students at the University of Guadalajara."
At least, I assume it's deliberate.
Front-Ranger:
Well, there were lots of similar fragments in Brokeback Mountain, which was published by the New Yorker in 1997. But I think Tina Brown was editor then.
Is that really a sentence fragment? It has a subject and two verbs.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on July 18, 2012, 04:02:36 pm ---Is that really a sentence fragment? It has a subject and two verbs.
--- End quote ---
Something is certainly wrong with it. Kidnap and murder are verbs--maybe transitive verbs--needing to pass their action on to a direct object? And they don't do that here. The meaning is that ordinary citizens were kidnapped and murdered, not that ordinary citizens kidnapped and murdered other people. But the were is missing.
Front-Ranger:
I agree that something's wrong with it. But Annie Proulx uses wrong sentences effectively. However, this one's confusing too.
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