Mar 10, · Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart” is one of the most famous essays of 20th century American letters. Since its appearance in , the essay has become widely Nov 5, · H.L. Mencken Explains Economists To the credit of Robert Shiller, an economics professor at Stutts, he warned for years of the housing bubble and its likely consequences. H. L. Mencken’s Analysis. Picture thirty desks, a chalkboard with a teacher standing in front of it, three students sleeping, eleven students on their phones, six students paying attention, and
Chiropractic: An Essay by H.L. Mencken | Quackwatch
Journalist H. Mencken was renowned for his playfully combative prose style and his politically incorrect points of view. First published in "Prejudices: Sixth Series" inMencken's essay "The Libido for the Ugly" stands as a powerful exercise in hyperbole and invective. Note his reliance on concrete examples and precise, descriptive details. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before, hl mencken essays. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation, hl mencken essays. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth—and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. From East Liberty hl mencken essays Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one insight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious—churches, stores, warehouses, and the like—that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away.
A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, hl mencken essays, leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line. But hl mencken essays of all I recall the general effect—of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house within eye-range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards. There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby. It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but not noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks.
Nearly every house, big and little, has space on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides--a hl mencken essays with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter storms, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall, hl mencken essays. But what have they done? They have taken as their model a brick set on end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands, these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery on their deep sides they are three, hl mencken essays, four and even five stories high; on their low sides, they bury themselves swinishly in the mud.
Not a fifth of them are perpendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases hl mencken essays. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks. But what brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring. Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity, hl mencken essays. Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain, hl mencken essays.
But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye. I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, hl mencken essays, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn. But nowhere on hl mencken essays earth, at home or abroad, hl mencken essays, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg.
They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if hl mencken essays titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them. You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England.
There is scarcely an ugly village hl mencken essays the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain. But in the American village and small town, the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley, it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror, hl mencken essays. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, hl mencken essays, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers.
Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. They caress it as "The Palms" caresses it, or the art of Landseer, or the ecclesiastical architecture of the United States. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for vaudeville, dogmatic theology, sentimental movies, and the poetry of Edgar A. Or for the metaphysical speculations of Arthur Brisbane. For the same money, they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly, hl mencken essays, there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better.
They might, indeed, hl mencken essays, have built a better one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice. After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted hl mencken essays staring yellow, on top of it.
The effect is that of a fat woman hl mencken essays a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God. What, precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere? Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem. Share Flipboard Email, hl mencken essays. English English Grammar An Introduction to Punctuation Writing.
By Richard Nordquist Richard Nordquist. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and hl mencken essays author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. Learn hl mencken essays our Editorial Process. Cite this Article Format. Nordquist, Richard. Mencken's 'The Libido for the Ugly'. copy citation. Featured Video. The Curse of Medusa From Greek Mythology. Life and Work of H. Mencken: Writer, Editor, and Critic. Classic British and American Essays and Speeches. The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Marquez.
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Nov 5, · H.L. Mencken Explains Economists To the credit of Robert Shiller, an economics professor at Stutts, he warned for years of the housing bubble and its likely consequences. H. L. Mencken’s Analysis. Picture thirty desks, a chalkboard with a teacher standing in front of it, three students sleeping, eleven students on their phones, six students paying attention, and Mar 10, · Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart” is one of the most famous essays of 20th century American letters. Since its appearance in , the essay has become widely
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