Word: menckenisms
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...that millions of Southerners hate grits and could not quote the King James if threatened with hellfire. Scholars often fail to see that actual Mississippi is related to Yoknapatawpha County only as the tones of the musical scales are related to the symphonies of Beethoven. Even the grating H.L. Mencken did not manage to cut through the spoon bread. After a smart assessment of the Sahara of the beauxarts, Mencken paused to mourn the passing of a more "cultured" South that existed only in legend. The old iconoclast had swallowed the antebellum myth almost whole. And so have the generations...
Understandably, there was a time when Farrell was a lodestar of the non-Communist left. His Studs Lonigan trilogy is a genre classic, a cluttered memoir of graceless Irish poor whose lyricism and potential are crushed in the struggle to survive. H.L. Mencken called their creator "the best living novelist," and Critic Alfred Kazin noted respectfully that "Farrell was the archetypal novelist of the crisis and its inflictions ... all the rawness and distemper of the thirties seem to live in [his] novels...
...MENCKEN would have enjoyed No Big Deal: certainly in the strangled locutions of Fidrych he would have had dozens of entries for his Dictionary of the American Language. Tom Clark spent five days interviewing Fidrych and the product is this engaging, somewhat sophomoric account of the player's short career. Clark organized the narrative with some witty captions, which are an incongruously deadpan contrast to Fidrych's fractured lingo...
DIED. James M. Cain, 85, author (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce) known for stark portrayals of violence and sexual betrayal; of a heart attack; in University Park, Md. After a stint as an essayist for H.L Mencken's American Mercury, Cain moved to Hollywood. Although he failed as a scenarist, his crime stories and novels won critical acclaim for his portrayal of what Cain called "the dreadful, the impious, the shame of God." His adrenal, brooding style influenced later writers, including Albert Camus...
...Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery," H.L. Mencken once observed, "but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them." In 1976 six people died, and two have been killed so far this year. Minor mishaps usually result merely in awkward landings-in the midst of neighbors' cocktail parties, or atop trees. A balloonist once alighted on the grounds of the Santa Rita county prison in California and was hastily evacuated by officials...