H L Menken - Merciless, and (in the words of another forum poster) Caustically funny social commentary. DOOOOOO EEEEEETTT!!!
Heh. Likely as not that was me. Humor often has a short shelf life since it can be so heavily dependent on the times, but I'm willing to bet you could google quotes by Mencken and easily find 5-6 that would zing their point home today.
Ok, lol, took my own advice and did so. Here, unedited, are just the first 12 listed quotes from him
on this page:
For every complex problem there is a simple solution... and it is wrong.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. (On Shakespeare)
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truththat the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is
the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
The dude is a true font of comedy gold! :biggrin:
He is more or less the soul of a literary movement, the Lost Generation--or at least, it's msot popular member. TS Eliot, Ezra Pound are better writers, I'd say, and maybe it was Hemingway's rather simplistic style that turns people away from him who want to be turned away.
I'm no huge fan of Hemingway but his is a model of economical writing. But, zin, really, you really think Ezra Pound is better?
I'll give you his place in belle lettres, and some of his poetry is rather good, but his epic "masterpiece" The Cantos is far too steeped (one might say suffocated) in classical allusions and of overly formal construction to be anything that I'd ever personally consider my loss for not having been able to slog through.
Then there is the little matter of his manlove and active shilling for Mussolini and the Facists during WW II.
As for TS Elliot, ok, I'm with you, but it is at least a bit amusing to note that it was
Ezra Pound who edited Elliot's The Waste Land into shape
by removing more than half of it in much the same drastic manner that you fault the editor of Raymond Carver for doing!
Just saying.
For Joyce, people should start with Dubliners--and in particular The Dead
Then maybe PoaAaaYM. Ulysses is not easy for anyone, period. Forget Finnegan's Wake. It is almost not meant to be read.
..and I freaking love Joyce.
Well agreed on Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. I've tried many times to read Ulysses, and I've never gotten further than 10-20 pages. I just don't have the requisite erudition for it.
But whenever Joyce comes up it reminds me of the perhaps apocryphal rejoinder ascribed to him when an admirer rushed up and said, "Allow me to shake the hand of the man who wrote Ulysses."
He is said to have replied, "I'd rather you didn't. It's done lots of other things, too."