Word: menckenisms
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...sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, held monogamy to be comfortable, laudable and sanitary. This is the sort of no-frills domesticity that would appeal to Macon Leary, also from "Bawl-mer" and the main attraction of Anne Tyler's tenth novel. After his wife leaves him, Leary reduces homemaking to an antic science. A percolator and an electric corn popper hooked up to a clock radio allow him to wake up to brewed coffee and popped corn. Bed making is eliminated by stitching a sleeping bag from a sheet. To save time and kilowatts, the laundry is thrown into...
Ulysses Grant eventually receded to become a haunting half mystery of American life. Down the generations he has stayed cocooned, in memory, in a stoical mediocrity. H.L. Mencken said Grant was the kind of man who would say to someone he encountered, "Meet the wife." He possessed an eerie philistine equilibrium, remarking once that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. What stuck mostly in memory as the decades passed were the shabby things: the scandals and swindles and, ignominiously, the talk about his drinking. He did drink too much now and then, when he was depressed...
Compare Royko and Mencken's nostalgic reminiscences of crooked coroners. Here, is Mencken, from the 1942 Newspaper Days...
Royko is at his best, like Mencken, when he is lampooning the social conventions and pretensions of the small set. In "Crisis in a Cool High Rise," he conducts a mock dialogue with "a modern young High Rise man," a different specie, who cannot picture life before air conditioning: "But what about people who were living together. You mean they would be in bed and both would be sweating?' Why yes. 'How uncool. Didn't your hairspray get gummy?" He pokes fun at exercise fanatics as well. When he interviews real people, the results are sometimes even funnier, as when...
...York Times Best Seller List, number four for the week ending October 31. I can only hope that Halloween had something to do with it, but people this month, too, are preferring the trick to the treat. Royko should expect this, though, for it was Mencken who noted. "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people...