Kirk Douglas, a Letter to the Editor, and the Ineffable Bernard Henri-Lévy

Yesterday I came across a marvellous quote from the great Kirk Douglas. Speaking or writing about the way films are classified, he says:
If the good guy gets the girl, it's rated PG; if the bad guy gets the girl, it's rated R; and if everybody gets the girl, it's rated X.
That made me laugh out loud.


There was an article in yesterday's International Herald Tribune (and therefore I suppose in the New York Times) about the newish use of the world like in expressions like I was like oh my God Brad Pitt. In the likely event that my letter is not published, I reproduce it here:
When I read Patricia T. O'Conner's article, I was like wow what's going on here? I was like Henry James must be like turning in his grave. I was like I'm going to write to the editor. Like right now!


Today's issue of the IHT carried a review by Bernard Henri-Lévy of the English translation of Nicolas Sarkozy's autobiography/political testament entitled Testimony France in the Twenty-First Century. I in turn would like to comment very briefly on BHL's review, itself translated from the French.

My first reaction was to criticise the translation but actually, having had some exposure to France's favourite intellectual in the "original version", I can say that the translator captures very well BHL's grandiloquent cadences. These include a habit common to all French intellectuals to string together a long list of rhetorical questions - three paragraphs on this occasion - when surely one or two would have sufficed.

As we progress through the endless Proustian sentences it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether BHL is writing about Nicolas Sarkozy or about another subject particularly close to his heart, namely Bernard Henri-Lévy. At the halfway stage, he asks himself why he didn't vote for Sarkozy in the recent presidential elections and continues: "I will explain elsewhere, in another way, when it is time". Unfortunately he does nothing of the sort. He spends the rest of his review answering his question here and now!