Word: menckenisms
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...with which his History 169 students often greet him. When this urbane figure turns to a discussion of intellectual history, he gives a dramatic, as well as an historical, interpretation of the men treated in the course. Reading from original sources, he tries to convey the sarcasm of H.L. Mencken, the vitality of Theodore Roosevelt, or the pomposity of William Jennings Bryan...
...This may be an acceptable situation in a meat factory or a steel mill, but newspapers are not pork chops or iron fences. Unless everybody from Jefferson to Mencken and Gerald Johnson has been kidding us. our job is to print the news and raise hell, with the kind permission of Bert Powers if possible, but without it if necessary...
...this weren't enough, a pentateuchal plague of minor flaws will further beset your mind. The ships that plow the Suez Canal were all built after the second war to end all wars. The clothes that Arthur Kennedy (a newspaperman with about as much compassion and insight as the Mencken-figure of Inherit the Wind) wears are contemporary with the ships. The music that attacks you stereophonically from every angle is winningly simple-minded: four thousand strings equal desert motif; four thousand strings plus two harps equal sea motif. The beginning, which shows O'Toole meeting his death...
...Mencken...
Auger-tongued H. L. Mencken once described vast stretches of the U.S. as a "Sahara of the Bozart." In those days, grand opera companies or symphony orchestras seldom ventured outside a dozen or so of the largest cities; public art museums, if they existed at all, were usually ill-lit annexes to the local fossil and arrowhead collection. The theater meant Broadway, and the road companies that once trouped every town hall in the land had long since bowed to the onslaughts of celluloid and popcorn...