Sunday, August 21, 2016

very cool parentheticals

This is from Megan Garber, "The Many 'Bro's of Kanye West," The Atlantic, August 31, 2015. Now, if you've gone to the link and started reading the article you might think the winning sentence is
During last night's Video Music Awards, accepting the show's Video Vanguard Award for his contributions to the form (an award presented--put away your "imma let you finish" jokes, they have already been made--by Taylor Swift), West gave a long, seemingly off-the-cuff speech about artists and commercialism and politics and pot and the many things we owe to the next generation.
To which I say, "Not bad." No, the really cool one--and, like the one quoted above, it has some embedded parenthicality, but in this case it's the placement (location location location, as they say in the real estate biz, which, make no mistake, I'm not mocking--some of my best friends, as well as some people I don't much care for, are in the biz)--is this.
On what level of reality was this declaration—greeted, the New York Daily News reports, with "much applause and laughter, making it unclear whether or not [West] was serious about a political run, especially after he admitted to rolling 'a little something' before the show"—operating?
I'm not mocking Garber any more than I'm mocking realtors (or maybe it should be Realtors), since it's pretty likely she intended that the parentheticalities be funny.

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