Word: funiculi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Awed Wobbler. His interest in music started early (piano) and continued through the rest of Mencken's life; once a week he played with the Saturday Night Club, a group of Baltimore amateurs and professionals who met to drink beer and wobble through everything from Funiculi, Funiculo to the Brahms Second Symphony. Mencken's writings on music, which appeared in his newspaper columns and in the two magazines he edited (Smart Set and American Mercury), show neither the musical erudition of Britain's Ernest Newman nor the impeccable taste of that other musical iconoclast, George Bernard Shaw...
There follow in rapid succession the Vale of Tempe, the summit of Parnassus, scaling the Acropolis at midnight, wooing the Maidens of the Porch by Attic moonlight, swimming the Hellespont, climbing Stromboli and Vesuvius, trying to swim from whirling Charybdis to rocky Scylla, singing "Funiculi, Funicula" in the Blue Grotto to an English girl with an Alice-blue Rolls-Royce, climbing Aetna, playing Ulysses ("handsome, heaven-sent Greek") to a 65-year-old bobbed grandmother's Calypso, and reading "The Return of Ulysses" at Ithaca, having completed what was begun, a trip in the wandering wake of Ulysses doing...
| 1 |