-
-
Notes on Democracy
H.L. MENCKEN was a literary critic, an "iconoclastic observer" of American life. He was, writes Marion Rodgers in her introduction, neither right nor left but simply radical. "When every phrase must be examined for political correctness," she writes, "many find it impossible to enjoy Mencken without apology."
Mencken wrote most of his life for the Baltimore Sun. He wrote 30 books, most famously "The American Language"; "Notes on Democracy," published in 1926, was not well-received. The tone is beyond satire, almost caustic, like the guy at the bar who sidles up to you with bad news -- the guy you can't help thinking has a point. Mencken (who read a little too much Nietzsche) believed that democracy would inevitably be brought down by the mob -- "homo boobensis" and "homo vulgaris." Democracy is a beautiful pipe dream, he wrote, conceived by and for a superior breed of man, braver, more intelligent and possessing more character than the ordinary bloke, who could care less about freedom. The ordinary guy just wants to feel safe (from the Other). The ordinary, uneducated citizen is driven by fears and delusions, and he responds to politicians who promise him safety and security. "Out of the muck of their swinishness the typical American law-maker emerges," he wrote. "He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot polish. . . . His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes. . . ."
Between the absurd (Mencken believed) electoral college and the politicians, democracy doesn't stand a chance. "It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing," he wrote. "How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?"
Notes on Democracy
A New Edition
H.L. Mencken
Dissident Books: 206 pp., $14.95 paper H.L. MENCKEN was a literary critic, an "iconoclastic observer" of American life. He was, writes Marion Rodgers in her introd... more -
Infinite Loss
David Foster Wallace, 1962–2008
------------------
The first thing that struck me about the suicide of David Foster Wallace, after the initial catatonic sadness, was my complete verbal inadequacy to describe anything about it. Our obituaries, next to his work, are inevitably going to look weak and limited: rushed by the news cycle, squeezed by space constraints, sterilized by the safe generic distance of obit-writing—crippled, in other words, by precisely the things against which DFW stood in open (yet somehow polite, humble, apologetic) rebellion. He was the great enemy of word limits, proportion, and journalistic restraint. He aimed, in every single project, for the grand totalizing exhaustive gesture—whether it was a 1,000-page novel seeking to catalogue an entire culture (Infinite Jest) or a 100-page “experiential postcard” recounting his week on a cruise ship (“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”). For Wallace, a thought could never, in good conscience, realistically, be finished—there was always one more reversal, one more qualifying clause, and an honest writer had to follow it out. Hence his famously never-ending sentences that spun off into even more famously never-ending footnotes. The black hole of his self- consciousness drew everything into it, even and especially self-consciousness itself.
Public deaths usually strike me with all the emotional force of the deflation of a giant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Wallace’s was the first ever to cause in me a visceral reaction: It knocked the spiritual wind out of me—made me actually, shockingly, cry, and then, for a good 24 hours, choke up whenever I tried to talk about it. He was my favorite living author, and the contest wasn’t particularly close. (Judging by the thousand-odd appreciations that bloomed instantly across message boards, this was not a minority opinion.) For a generation of aspiring intellectual-populist writers, he represented the shining ideal of literary glory: the perfect hybrid of hilarious-serious, colloquial-formal, personal-public, emotive-analytic, youthful-ancient. He was one of very few writers to pick up the DeLillo-Pynchon mantle and have the shoulder strength not just to stand there showboating but to carry it off into his own territory, where it could do real emotional work. At his best he managed to dissolve his personality so purely into text that it felt like he was in the room with you, or more accurately right there inside of your head—as Emerson once wrote about Montaigne: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” I didn’t realize, until he was gone, how much emotional energy I’d invested in the fact that he was actually a living human being. He consistently, to quote his own highest praise for the writers he loved, “rang
cherries.”
What makes Wallace’s death exponentially sadder is that the bedrock of his work was always simple human connection, and the basic daily struggle to be happy—questions on which he struck me as uncommonly wise. Over the last week we’ve seen the obligatory rifling through his oeuvre in search of latent suicidal messages, the most quoted of which has been a little paragraph from the 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” That passage, along with a handful of others, is unfortunately always going to glow now with a little extra flare of significance. David Foster Wallace, 1962–2008 ------------------ ... more -
David Foster Wallace, writer, is dead at 46
CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) -- A police spokeswoman says writer David Foster Wallace has been found dead in his Southern California home. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department, says Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday.
Wallace's first novel, ''The Broom of the System,'' gained national attention, but his best known work was 1996's ''Infinite Jest.''
He received a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1997 and he taught creative writing and English at nearby Pomona College. CLAREMONT, Calif. (AP) -- A police spokeswoman says writer David Foster Wallace has been found dead in his Southern California home. H... more -
Esmée Denters Hits 100 Million YouTube Views
Nineteen year old Dutch singer Esmée Denters has managed to gather an impressive 100 million views on her YouTube channel in less than two years! That’s more than the 50 Cent (91 million views) or Michael Jackson (74 million views) YouTube channel! Only female singer Britney Spears has more all time total views: 181 million.
Denters who started posting videos of herself in August 2006 to YouTube from her bedroom in Oosterbeek, using her sister’s (crappy) webcam, quickly became a huge internet sensation in just a few short months by singing covers of famous pop artists, and later with her own compositions. In June 2007 she signed with Justin Timberlake’s record label Tennman Records.
Since her first video on August 25, 2006 the Dutch teenager has attracted massive global attention with a performance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, an article in Billboard Magazine, duets with Natasha Bedingfield, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Tedder, as opening act at Timberlake’s 2007 concerts in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Gothenberg and with appearances in several televisions shows in The Netherlands (DWDD, Jensen, Goedemorgen Nederland, Het Land van Maas en Geel, Life & Cooking), United States (CelebTV) and in Norway. Nineteen year old Dutch singer Esmée Denters has managed to gather an impressive 100 million views on her YouTube channel in less than... more -
70+ Tools For Job Hunting
Job search has evolved over recent years, with hundreds of companies piling in to the space. We’ve picked out ore than 70 that should help job seekers get ahead. Job search has evolved over recent years, with hundreds of companies piling in to the space. We’ve picked out ore than 70 that should ... more
-
Take Advantage Of The New Windows Live Writer
If I could name one Microsoft application which has met with the near unanimous approval of the tech crowd then it’s Windows Live Writer. I can only speak for myself, but I know a lot of bloggers who wouldn’t be able to live without this handy piece of software… and now it has just got even better.
Live Dev stated that “this release is largely about updates to the Writer SDK” but once you load it up and have a bit of a poke around you’ll find quite a number of subtle new features and UI changes. Here is a rundown and a guide to making the best use of them as you can:
Word Count
Yep. This is a bonza one.
In the previous Live Writer getting a word count required a plugin. That was still pretty simple, but more involved then it had to be (such as, select all text> insert> word count).
Now its been added into Writer itself and you can simply go to Tools > Options and select “Show real-time word count in status bar” to get it displayed just like this: If I could name one Microsoft application which has met with the near unanimous approval of the tech crowd then it’s Windows Live Writ... more -
Hellride Interview with Larry Bishop...
who, for those who might not know, if the writer, director, actor AND producer
-
Chetan Bhagat - Best Indian Novelist of 21st Century.
FOR all our billion-strong population, 620 million of whom can officially read, India is hardly commercially viable territory for the workaday novelist. The typical Indian "bestseller" sells between 3,000 and 5,000 copies; a true success is one that remains in print for years, with successive reprints of 2000 copies or so every nine or twelve months. In this modest market, One Night @ the Call Center has reportedly sold over 1,00,000 copies in the two months since its publication, and the demand shows no sign of letting up. Its author,
Chetan Bhagat, a 31-year-old whizkid with degrees from two of our country's most prestigious educational institutions — a bachelor's in engineering from IIT and a MBA from IIM — works for Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong and dabbles in didactic fiction in his spare time. The success of his previous novel, Five Point Someone, a tale of three college friends, shows he has a talent for tapping into the zeitgeist; that he is not much older than the people he writes about makes him a particularly credible portrayer of their world.
Read More about books and review at
http://www.worldamazingrecords.com FOR all our billion-strong population, 620 million of whom can officially read, India is hardly commercially viable territory for the ... more -
Is God obsolete?
"No, but it should," writes Christopher Hitchens, author of "God is not Great."
-
Former "Laugh In" writer and Emmy award winner Jack Hanrahan Dies Destit...
Jack Hanrahan wrote for some of the most popular television shows in the 1960s and 1970s, including "Get Smart," "Police Woman," "The Waltons" and "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour."
In December of 2006, Hanrahan arrived in Cleveland from Californian by bus, penniless and disheveled, his tangled hair hanging to his shoulders and smoking self-rolled cigarettes.
All he had were the clothes on his back, a bag of tobacco and rolling papers. Even his false teeth were missing. And his Emmy was in hock.
Hanrahan tried to connect with relatives here, but his state of mind and needs were too much to handle, said a nephew. So Hanrahan lived on the streets Jack Hanrahan wrote for some of the most popular television shows in the 1960s and 1970s, including "Get Smart," "Polic... more -
Writer's Strike Is Over
I can only find THIS article about the stike ending, so I'm slightly skeptical. Isn't this big news? Shouldn't more sites have this information posted? I can only find THIS article about the stike ending, so I'm slightly skeptical. Isn't this big news? Shouldn't more sit... more
-
Pulitzer Prize winner, Norman Mailer, has died.
Norman Mailer wrote dozens of plays, stories, and poems. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for The Armies of the Night in 1968, and The Executioner's Song in 1979.
Mailer is also a co-founder of The Village Voice. Norman Mailer wrote dozens of plays, stories, and poems. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for The Armies of the Night in 1968, and Th... more -
Writers Mull the Market
"The film was designed to "keep people's spirits up" ahead of a possible strike." Cute. Are they paying royalties for that music, though? "The film was designed to "keep people's spirits up" ahead of a possible strike." Cute. Are they paying royal... more
-
Why Greg Tate Matters
Gonzales discusses a love supreme for the craft and the rich community that blossoms from the seeds of Tate.
MG blurbs:
"I will always be thankful to the man for being unafraid to be, as Tate himself once described him, a one-man affirmative action committee in the 1980s all because he believed Afro-diasporic musics should on occasion be covered by people who weren't strangers to those communities.
"I am more than happy that Greg Tate had put up the signposts for this black boy to follow. In fact, one of those signs might have read: Enter At Your Own Risk This Means You!"
"Hell, that was during the same period that one prominent Caucasian music editor (who is still in a position of editorial power today) told the same publicist something along the lines of, black music writers dont write that well. Its crazy what some people believe. However, if youve taken a glance at Rolling Stone, Blender, GQ, Esquire and New York magazines lately, that opinion still seems prevalent in 2007.
"hell, even David Byrne and The Clash had discovered Africa by 1986"
"Not to say that we wouldnt be writing for somebody (perhaps medical journals or antique mags), but it was from studying Tates music writing mojo like cold lampin graduate students that helped give us form different options. Like Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, the Beatles and Oasis, Grandmaster Flash and DJ Shadow, it was Tate and all of us." Gonzales discusses a love supreme for the craft and the rich community that blossoms from the seeds of Tate. MG blurbs: ... more -
93-Year-Old Comes Out of the Closet w/ Gay Romance Novel
I love this man. Just shows that it's never too late to be brave.
-
related topics
Writer
Contributors (40)
Writer
