H. L. Mencken with a Remington understrike typewriter
H.L. Mencken as a uniquely American voice was The American Language, a book he believed would be “my swan song.” Through the humid months of 1918, a shirtless Mencken could often be found on the sleeping porch of his home in Baltimore amongst piles of reference works and dictionaries. He sweated through each tome, taking notes and dog-earing pages. He also dug out articles he’d previously published in the Evening Sun, the Smart Set, and the New York Evening Mail. From this chaos of material came a certain order.
In 1918 linguistics was hardly recognized as a science. One of the aims of education was to preserve the sanctity of the King’s English, a pedagogical aim based on the notion that American English was inferior to that spoken in England. Mencken could find but a few scant articles on American pronunciation and even less on grammar. He found this surprising since the difference between the American and English languages was a subject that had preoccupied America since the colonial days. In 1789, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster foresaw that this new country, with its relations with Indian tribes, would forge a new vocabulary. But not just in words alone did the two languages differ — something remarked upon by Mark Twain in 1882 when he wrote that in England his American tongue was unintelligible to most Englishmen. Yet the bulk of the material Mencken uncovered, as he writes in the Preface to the First Edition, was dedicated “to absurd efforts to prove that no such thing as an American variety of English existed — that the differences I constantly encountered in English and that my English friends encountered in American were chiefly imaginary.”
In “Mencken Revisited,” the noted linguist Raven McDavid Jr. wrote: “No professional scholar of the time would have dreamed of presenting a discussion of the totality of American English.” This was a role for which Mencken was well cast. As an experienced journalist, a social historian, and a critic of modern culture (the booboisie), Mencken was skilled at summarizing information in a clear style. The writing of linguists was dull in comparison.
Even for a writer of Mencken’s talent, however, the book wasn’t easy to write. “This tome is infinitely laborious and vexatious — a matter of writing and rewriting,” Mencken told his future biographer, Ernest Boyd. Yet by the end of six months, Mencken had typed the last sentence of The American Language. He wrote in the Preface: “It is anything but an exhaustive treatise upon the subject . . . . All it pretends to do is to articulate some of those materials — to get some approach to order and coherence into them, and so pave the way for a better work by some more competent man. That work calls for the equipment of a first-rate philologist, which I am surely not.” He described “that damned American language book” to friends as “a heavy, indigestible piece of cottage cheese.” As for continuing with the subject, he wrote to Ernest Boy, “Never again! Such professorial jobs are not for me.”
The indexes remained, and throughout the autumn of 1918 Mencken struggled to complete them while an outbreak of influenza struck the nation. As many as 1,500 obituaries filled newspaper columns each week. More civilians were dying at home from influenza than troops abroad. In August Mencken wrote, “All that could be seen from our house were funerals.”
Alfred A. Knopf published The American Language in 1919, and the first edition was a runaway success. With one powerful stroke Mencken had severed the umbilical cord which linguistically bound America to England. In addition it was clear that the center of American cultural gravity had shifted and had swung toward Mencken though not all were pleased about this. As his most virulent critic, Stuart Sherman, put it in his book Americans, Mencken had leapt into the center stage off American culture “at a hard gallop, spattered with mud . . . high in oath.”
In 1920 when Knopf published Mencken’s Prejudices: Second Series, they wanted a revision of The American Language. The orders were rolling in and the royalties on the small first edition were more than on any of his previous books, leading Mencken to joke, “the moral is plain: fraud pays.” Despite his sarcasm, Mencken would see that his was the first work of its kind to transcend traditional barriers between scholarly and popular books. What at first had been drudgery now enthralled him as he saw how each new edition recaptivated an old audience and captured a new one.
But revising the manuscript filled him with dread. He wrote in “Preface to the Revised Edition” that the corrections and suggestions from the first edition that needed to be incorporated into the second “were of such bulk that they almost alarmed me into abandoning the work altogether.” Mencken’s revision, which included the addition of four new chapters, an appendix, and an extended bibliography, was demanding physically and mentally. Three new sections dealt with American slang. The first, “Specimens of the American Vulgate,” included a facetious translation of “The Declaration of Independence” into common speech. Two pieces by Ring Lardner that showcased the common argot of professional baseball players were also included. A second addition, “Non-English Dialects in America,” acknowledged the influence of Yiddish and Spanish on the American language. The third addition included a section entitled “Proverb and Platitude,” in which Mencken included examples of “the national talent for extravagant and pungent humor.”
The American Language was nothing less than a declaration of linguistic independence. No more would America suffer the oppression of literary colonialism. A new day had dawned on American literature. “American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect,” Edmund Wilson observed. “Mencken showed the positive value of our own vulgate heritage.”
Despite his belief that the book was filled with errors, he was able to explain to linguist Raven McDavid that he had achieved his “central objective” of “convincing[ing] 100% of Americans that language is really interesting, and not only interesting but important.”
The Museum of London said Wednesday that an archaeological dig had uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. The site is situated behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment just east of London’s business district.
The remains are of a polygonal structure, typical of 16th-century theaters. It is believed to be the venue immortalized as “this wooden O” in the prologue to “Henry V.” The Curtain opened in 1577 and was home to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597-1599, until the players moved to the Globe Theatre across the Thames.
Among the plays premiered at the Curtain were the Bard’s “Henry V” and possibly “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as Ben Jonson’s “Every Man in His Humour.” Shakespeare and his troupe moved to the Curtain after a dust-up with the landlord of their previous venue, known simply as The Theater.
The troupe’s experience at the Curtain was not a happy one, according to Patrick Spottiswoode, director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe. The venue staged sword fights, acrobatics, and bear-baiting — in addition to plays — and attracted a rough, demanding audience. “It was a different kind of house and they were probably desperate to leave,” Spottiswoode said. “Crowds would flock to The Curtain to see all sorts of activities — they didn’t go there to see thesps.”
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men abandoned the site in 1599 for the Globe, the theater they’d built using timbers smuggled from the original Theatre and pushed across the frozen Thames on large sleds. The Curtain survived at least until the 1620s, which makes it the longest-lived of London’s Elizabethan playhouses.
The real estate company redeveloping the site said it plans to preserve the site.
The Theater and the Curtain were London’s first successful playhouses — before then, plays were staged in inn yards and various makeshift spaces. Elizabethan playhouses were built outside the city walls, making them free from regulation by civic leaders, who were hostile to theaters and other disreputable forms of entertainment.
Despite recent discoveries, there is still much to learn about the Elizabethan theater. According to Heather Knight, a senior Museum of London archaeologist, “The late 16th century was a time of a theatrical arms race in London. The proprietors of these building were making improvements to attract customers. So to have the chance to look at the earliest of these buildings (The Theater), and the one that had the longest life is a real opportunity.”
Amazon.com Inc. plans to open two new fulfillment centers in California over the next year, a move in response to an online sales tax deal between the online retailer and the state of California.
The move comes after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law in September requiring large online retailers to begin collecting sales tax from state residents next year. Amazon won a postponement of the sales-tax collection requirement until next year after promising to build warehouses in the state, which will create at least 10,000 new full-time jobs and 25,000 seasonal jobs by the end of 2015.
As early as this fall, Amazon plans to take over a 950,000 square-foot facility in San Bernardino, in Southern California. Additionally, Amazon plans to open a 1-milion-square-foot fulfillment center in Patterson, just east of the San Francisco Bay area. That facility should open in the second quarter of 2013.
By the end of the second quarter of 2012 Amazon will create “hundreds of full time jobs with benefits” in Patterson, California, said Dave Clark, Amazon vice president, global customer fulfillment.
We appreciate USAA Real Estate Company’s hard work, the support from Governor Brown and state and local officials, and we look forward to creating hundreds of full time jobs with benefits in Patterson when the facility begins shipping to customers in 2013.
The two new fulfillment centers apparently represent only the initial warehouse moves by Amazon in California, coming as they do on the heels of a 34% sales increase in the first quarter for the online retail giant.
The Kindle Fire is burning up the tablet competition — on the Android side.
Amazon.com Inc.’s tablet computer is catching fire on in a big way, having grabbed 54.4% of the Android tablet market during February, the fourth month it was on the market, according to new data from comScore Inc. That represented almost double of the Fire’s Android market share since December.
The Kindle Fire is in warp drive — far outpacing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (15.4% of Android), Motorola Xoom (7%), the Asus Transformer (6.3%) and others by Dell, Lenovo and Sony.
But the tablet market leader remains Apple’s iPad, which, according to the market research firm IDC, owned about 55% of the tablet market at the end of 2011. Android tablets accounted for about 45%. This is all great news for Amazon, meaning about 30% of tablets currently shipping are Kindle Fires, making the Fire a close second to the iPad.
Despite efforts by Apple, dismissing the Fire is increasingly difficult to do so. In February, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook dismissed tablets like the Kindle Fire as inferior:
A cheap product might sell some units … But then [consumers] get it home and use it and the joy is gone. And the joy is gone every day that they use it and they wind up not using it anymore.
No one knows for sure how much use the Kinde Fire is getting, but consumers certainly are buying it.
She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.
When Harriet was young, the family moved to Cincinnati, where they found themselves at the border of the North and South, East and West, and at the center of an increasing antislavery sentiment. Here she began to write for literary and evangelical periodicals.
When she was twenty-five she married one of her father’s colleagues at a theological seminary in Ohio, Calvin Stowe; and when he was appointed to the faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, she returned to New England. It was during services at the Brunswick Congregational Church that she was inspired to write her most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she penned at her kitchen table.
Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”
The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Times obituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”
Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,
His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.
“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”
After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.
He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of the deadliness of Beatrice, and inevitably of Giovanni himself, accumulate with a horrid insistence.
Beatrice’s father is Professor Rappaccini of Padua, who raised her from childhood among deadly plants and flowers of his own creation in order to endow her with “marvellous gifts against which no power or strength could avail an enemy.” Giovanni, a young student, unaware of the secrets of the garden, is deeply attracted to her extraordinary beauty and her intimate tending to the beautiful plants. Gradually he becomes aware of the deadliness of the garden, and despite the warnings of Rappaccini’s rival, Baglioni, Giovanni continues to pursue her until he eventually takes on her deadly power. When he finally realizes the extent of his contamination, he urges her to drink with him the antidote prepared by Baglioni. She drinks it first, and “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death.” The story ends with Baglioni’s horrified yet triumphant cry: “ ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?’ ”
Trailer for the German musical “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
At the time of his trial and execution in 399 BC, Socrates had reached the age of seventy. He had lived through the Periclean Age when Athens was at the pinnacle of Imperial power, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and Athens’ defeat in 404. He did, however, live to see the restoration of democracy. For most of that time he was a well-known character in the streets of Athens, speaking to anyone who’d listen to his philosophy of life. His mission, which he explains in the Apology, was to expound the idea that man was responsible for his own moral attitudes.
Benjamin Jowett’s translations in this volume give Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial and death. Euthyphro is a kind of introduction to Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech to the jury in his own defense. Crito gives the account of how Socrates could have escaped into exile but refused. Meno shows Socrates debating Meno on the nature of human virtue and questioning Meno’s slave boy on a question of geometry in order to prove the preexistence of the soul. Phaedo gives the account of Socrates’ last discussions with his friends on the immortality of the soul.
“Realism” is an element of some of Abrose Bierce’s short stories (particularly those concerning the Civil War), but the term is of little value when discussing his often fantastical imagination. In his essay “The Short Story” he writes: ‘Probability? Nothing so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs . . . Everything being so unearthly improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the audacity to relate anything all.’ ”
Bierce’s stories can be roughly divided into three categories: those about the Civil War, horror and the supernatural, and comic or “tall” tales. Though his plots are mostly contrived, he writes with great economy and vividness, and his stories often have a caustic, almost misanthropic edge to them. The shot story was clearly an ideal medium for him.
His contrivances of plot include reordering of the time scheme such as analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward), exploration of dreams and the surreal, and a preoccupation with the vagaries of perception. Through these techniques, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to record how humans record experience before organizing it conceptually.
In his most horrifying war story, “Chickamauga,” a deaf-mute child witnesses the retreat of the Confederate soldiers after the eponymous battle and wanders out toward the battlefield and encounters men crawling away from battle. The child thinks they are playing a game and tries to ride on the back of one of them, but the soldier flings him to the ground and then
turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.
The child retreats and then drawn by a great fire, leads the men as if into battle with his toy sword. Soon he recognizes the burning building as his own home, his mother lying dead before him, and he utters “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries — something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey — a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.”
The reversal of physical orientation is complete and serves as an emblem of the reversal of the story: war as a matter of youthful enthusiasm and heroism revealed as bloody horror.
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