Change is perceivable in our daily conversations about the weather, how lucky we’ve been so far but how it is now suddenly ushering in this year’s unpunctual shift towards more autumnal atmospheres, as in this digital reflection of our lives, as I’ve recently decided to reposition my focus from instagram towards our website when it comes to the words that I feel I need when I want to praise the beauty in which we revel to whoever’s interested and stating the obvious by calling them a little bulky is just a cordial yet valued euphemism.
“I love your stretched out sentences”, a friendly voice from a long lost past wrote underneath one of my posts, a compliment truly treasured but at the same time spotlighting another friend from a more recent time and age who described my “hysterics” by assigning them to “some purple-haired Youtube teenager with vague references”, although admittedly he referred to a private correspondence as opposed to my public outcries, containing the same antics though.
I used to be skilled in stripping down every single sentence to a bare essence, especially in my theatre work where subordinate clauses were out of the question because nobody talks like that and theatre, or so I then thought, was all about reality, wrapped in imagination but very much real and to the point, always with a strong premiss at its base.
In his fascinating article ‘In defense of purple prose’, first published in The New York Times on December 15, 1985, British-born American novelist Paul West writes: “Purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable. (…) It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that’s rich, succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity.”
Not being a stranger to sassy myself might explain the amount of words I needed to tell you that soon these words will exclusively appear on our website, referred to here with a picture and a link, because algorithms nowadays may rule reality, but it’s when the words blot out the real and displace it, that prose comes into its own. Let purple rule.
