Apr 01, · Satirical essays like Mencken's and Swift's allow the authors to make serious points in humorous, entertaining ways. Teachers can use these essays to help students understand satire and persuasive essays. The Penalty of DeathEstimated Reading Time: 6 mins Apr 20, · In “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism,” a comic essay—one of his most focused—first published in , Mencken argues that the critic should serve as a “catalytic” between the artist and the spectator. If the spectator were “spontaneously sensitive” to a work of art, he wrote, “there would be no need for criticism.”Estimated Reading Time: 6 mins H.L. Mencken essaysIn order to have an opinion regarding the controversial views of artist and their work; one must come to terms with the meaning of art. Art is abstract, it involves the ordinary and entwining it into a creation of many dimensions. Art is creativity, expression, rebirth and a state
H. L. MENCKEN ON GOVERNMENTS AND POLITICIANS
Journalist H. Mencken was renowned for his playfully combative prose style and his politically incorrect points of view.
First published in "Prejudices: Sixth Series" inhl mencken essays, Mencken's essay "The Libido for the Ugly" stands as a powerful exercise in hyperbole and invective.
Note his reliance on concrete examples and precise, descriptive details. It was familiar ground; boy hl mencken essays man, I had been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth—and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight.
From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one insight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. Some were so bad, hl mencken essays, and they were among the most pretentious—churches, stores, warehouses, and the like—that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away.
A few linger in memory, hl mencken essays, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line. But most of all I recall the general effect—of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house within eye-range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards, hl mencken essays.
There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby. It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but not noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building, hl mencken essays, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks.
Nearly every house, big and little, has space on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, hl mencken essays, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides--a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter storms, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall. But what have they done? They have taken as their model a brick set on end.
This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof, hl mencken essays. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands, these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery on their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides, hl mencken essays bury themselves swinishly in the mud.
Not a fifth of them are perpendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously. Hl mencken essays one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks. But what brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring.
Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more than it was necessary to set hl mencken essays of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity. Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain.
But hl mencken essays Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye. I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas.
I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific hl mencken essays to Camden, N.
and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman, hl mencken essays, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, hl mencken essays, Conn. But nowhere on this earth, hl mencken essays, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the hl mencken essays that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg.
They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them.
They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, hl mencken essays, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them, hl mencken essays.
You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain. But in the American village and small town, the pull is hl mencken essays toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley, it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion.
It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind.
They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. They caress it as "The Palms" caresses it, or the art of Landseer, or the ecclesiastical architecture of the United States.
The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for vaudeville, dogmatic theology, sentimental movies, and the poetry of Edgar A. Or for the metaphysical speculations of Arthur Brisbane. For the same money, they could get vastly better ones, hl mencken essays, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly, hl mencken essays was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better.
They might, indeed, have built a hl mencken essays one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They hl mencken essays it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice. After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow, on top of it.
The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth.
The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God.
What, precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in America than hl mencken essays Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem.
Share Flipboard Email. English English Grammar An Introduction to Punctuation Writing, hl mencken essays. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. our editorial process. Updated April 22, Cite this Article Format. Nordquist, Richard. Mencken's 'The Libido for the Ugly'. copy citation.
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H. L. Mencken Interview
, time: 57:44The Agonist Journal
The voluminous writings (nineteen books and thousands of essays, articles and reviews) of H. L. Mencken, one of America’s finest writers and perhaps its greatest journalist and chronicler of American English, are a virtually-forgotten treasure trove of sparkling wit and deep wisdom. Like knowledge of their own history and respect for their own Constitution, decades ago most Americans consigned him to the Henry Louis Mencken () was a controversial American journalist, essayist and literary critic. During the s, he became famous for his vitriolic attacks on what he considered to be the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bigotry of much of American blogger.comted Reading Time: 7 mins H. L. Mencken was born in Baltimore in and died there in He began his long career as a journalist, critic, and philologist on the Baltimore Morning Herald in In he joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, thus beginning an association that lasted until a few years before his blogger.com was coeditor of the Smart Set with George Jean Nathan from to , and with Nathan he Cited by: 14
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