8:31 PM - Ink-Stained Riches
Cool of dazzle
jordan shoes for cheap,IN
HIS ESSAY ON H. L. MENCKEN entitled Saving a Whale, journalist
Murray Kempton points out that whales are the only mammals that the
museums have never managed to stuff and mount in their authentic
skins. To Kempton, Mencken is a very excellent whale who, almost 40
years after his death, nonetheless defies critical taxonomy. That
is placing it politely-Mencken in death provokes as a lot vitriol
as he did whilst living. He continues to be called a racist, a
humanitarian, an archconservative and a great liberal, and also the
thorny reality is, he was all those issues. Nobody understands what
to create of a man who turned his diary into a manure pile of
anti-Semitism simultaneously he was working diligently to obtain
Jews out of Hitler's Germany.
ããBiographers have been
struggling to take Mencken's measure because the 1920s. Fred
Hobson's Mencken (650 pages. Random Home. $35) will be the newest
and greatest try. Hobson is the initial of Mencken's biographers to
use all of the posthumously published diaries, exactly where the
Sage of Baltimore vented his most odious bigotries and exactly
where he most obviously revealed the alienation and loneliness at
the heart of his personality. Hobson doesn't attempt to resolve the
contradictions in Mencken's personality. Instead, he wisely
utilizes this new materials to portray Mencken as a man forever in
conflict with himself, the carefree cutup coexisting with the
control freak, the comic with the tragedian. Eventually-at least a
decade prior to the 1948 stroke that robbed him with the ability to
read or write-Mencken's darker angels took charge of his soul. In
1942, he wrote, I have spent all of my 62 many years here, but I
nonetheless discover it not possible to fit myself in to the
accepted patterns of American life and believed. After all these
many years, I remain a foreigner.But as Hobson points out, the
darkness was there all along, and the miracle is the fact that out
of this almost paralyzing bleakness, Mencken was once in a position
to spin exuberant, lacerating prose that is as funny because it is
basically severe. At the peak of his powers, in the '20s and early
'30s, he slaughtered each and every sacred cow in sight, from
Prohibition to fundamentalism. But as difficult as he could be on
hillbillies and Klansmen, be was even harder on professors: Of a
thousand head of such dull drudges not 10, with their doctors'
dissertations behind them, ever contribute so much as a flyspeck
towards the sum of human knowledge. Coining phrases like the Bible
belt and aphorisms like Democracy is the theory that the typical
individuals know what they want, and deserve to get it great and
hard, Mencken left his indecorous fingerprints all over American
thought and speech.As a newspaper columnist, a magazine editor
along with a book author, Mencken radically broadened the scope and
raised the standards of American journalism. But most significant,
he proved that an intellectual could thrive in the well-liked
press. Reading Michael Wreszin's new biography of Dwight Macdonald,
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition (590 pages. Fundamental. $30), one
is struck from the believed that had there been no Mencken, there
might well happen to be no Macdonald. Macdonald himself
acknowledged the debt in his well-known attack on American mass
culture, Against the American Grain. And the extremely shape of
Macdonald's career owes everything to Mencken's example. A
freewheeling critic of politics and culture, first in intellectual
journals like Partisan Review, Politics and later in the New Yorker
and Esquire, Macdonald (1906-1982) was the archfoe of middlebrow
and lowbrow taste. In his legendary attacks around the third
edition of Webster's New International Dictionary and the Revised
Regular Version of the Bible, he argued that debasing the language
debased the culture; he wonderfully echoed the Mencken design. To
clinch the comparison, Macdonald is most like Mencken in the way he
is memorable even when he is incorrect. Writing about Orson
Welles's Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil, he accused the filmmaker of
letting himself go, like an over-weight matron indulging in
desserts, in melodramas which seem to have been whipped up
completely for theatrical effect.Murray Kempton proves himself an
even closer student of Mencken's technique in his latest collection
of newspaper and magazine function, Rebellions, Perversities, and
Main Occasions (570 pages. Times. $27.50). Like Mencken, the
76-year-old New York Newsday columnist is initial and last a
newspaper man right down to the his shoes. Skeptical and well-worn
soles of curious, he's equally at home writing about Dwight
Eisenhower, the gangster Matthew Ianniello or the physicist J.
Robert Oppenheimer, and he condescends to no one. With Mencken he
shares a reflexive sympathy for the underdog, a distaste for cant
and an addiction to thickety prose. Praising the singer Bessie
Smith, he says, We would still have no more utilized for her any
title except the bare and stately 'Bessie' than we'd have spoken of
Juno as Mrs. Jupiter. Goddesses do not have last names.But the sad
reality is, Mencken's disciples are not Mencken. Flaws and all, he
was inimitable. As Hobson says, He was our nay-saying Whitman, and
... he sounded his personal barbaric yawp more than the roofs with
the timid and the fearful, the contented and also the smug. With
his inexpensive cigars and his hick's haircut, and with his gaudy,
orotund prose, he looks and sounds like an old-fashioned
vaudevillian-W C. Fields pounding a typewriter. As good as it could
be to stick this curmudgeonly, politically incorrect relic on a
back shelf and forget about him, we require his rancor too much.
Much better than anyone, he still instructs us on the value of the
loyal opposition. At his greatest, he produced his readers believe
and he kept them truthful. No journalist could want a much better
epitaph.Buy Nike Dunks Shoes from Nike Dunk Online Shop
air
jordan 1.