Word: menckenism
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Cold snap and cold brains leave the Vagabond with nothing to do but place feet on the andirons and consider the pretzel divinities of yesterday: the old beery Gods of Examinations that were so glorious until Mencken and the literary smart set made sauerkraut out of them. In that mind's eye of his that has enfolded so much nebulosity, the Vagabond at rest watches with the sad sublimity of a Greek stoic the passing of Harvard into tabloid education, the riveting of its density to gilded monuments of steel and brick. In the dim light that gleams through...
...Moody was included for the first time, her tennis championships being listed under "recreations." Robert Tyre Jones Jr. of Atlanta, open and amateur golf champion of Britain was left out, as was William Tatem Tilden II. Ernest Hemingway joined the U. S. literary contingent of Sinclair Lewis, Henry Louis Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill. Paul Robeson, Negro tenor and actor, not listed in Who's Who in America, is listed in Britain's Who's Who. Charles Augustus Lindbergh's history is recounted as follows: "Enrolled in flying school, Lincoln...
WITH clamorous cavortings, Mr. Benjamin De Casseres bursts once again into a display of orgiastic literary criticism. First giving Mr. Mencken a substantial boost into Olympus, he then proceeds to disclose the very thinly covered bones of Mr. George Bernard Shaw with a withering clarity and veracity that is closely skin to genius. Blaring forth his ideas in a prose that is the essence of strength and polish, he never leaves the reader a moment to catch his breath, but rushes him along through a host of coruscating criticism that is as trenchant as it is illogical. But then logic...
...Casseres characterizes himself as a critic of, "intuitional tastes . . who does not analyze or weigh, but apotheosizes or slays". It is just such treatment he gives Mr. Mencken. He speaks of him as one who, "has everywhere an implied, if not explicit, contempt for those who use any dodge to escape reality. There is something tremendously courageous, almost sadistically so, in this attitude. It is probable, with him, that reality itself is an escape from something he fears more--sentiment, romance, mysticism... "Mencken never describes anything, he tears it to pieces and throws it in your face... His aesthetic...
...spite of an admitted lack of emotional insight, Mr. De Casseres would consider Mencken the greatest stimulator of his age. He says, "Huneker and Mencken did more than any other two men of the century to thin the ranks of the literary stud-horses of Vassar and the fillies of Harvard." Mr. De Casseres forgets that at times he himself is nothing more than a just-mad gelding going through the motions of an aphrodisiacal stallion. But that is the privilege of one whose prose and thought, to twist his own words, "is a boreal rhetoric, a hissing, headlong ecstasy...