Quotes thread

Trajan Monday 13 Aug 2012

Fake quote :thumbsdown:

Vuk Monday 13 Aug 2012

Fuck me. Looks like OpEdNews is citing The Onion now. :tard2:

Trajan Monday 13 Aug 2012

i hate teh goyim, kill them all, im hitler -- Abraham Foxmen

Thoughts Monday 13 Aug 2012

H. L. Mencken remains one of those people who are never appraised quite rightly - one whom the general public (who has never heard of him) places far too low, but whose actual supporters etc., place far too high.

I thought Mencken was cool until I read this (from volume 1 of his autobiographical magnum opus ):

All this made me smile in a sly way, for I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from new-fangled. They differed from the hot-dogs of today in one detail only, and that one was hardly of statistical significance. They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of back-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.

Another extract from "Hot Dogs", the Baltimore Evening Sun Nov 4. 1929:

[German sausages] run in size from little fellows so small and pale and fragile that it seems a crime to eat them to vast and formidable pieces that look like shells for heavy artillery. And they run in flavor from the most delicate to the most raucous, and in texture from that of feathers caught in a cobweb to that of linoleum, and in shape from straight cylinders to lovely kinks and curlycues. In place of the single hot dog of today there should be a variety as great as that which has come to prevail among sandwiches. There should be dogs for all appetites, all tastes, all occasions. They should come in rolls of every imaginable kind and accompanied by every sort of relish from Worcestershire sauce to chutney. The common frankfurter, with its tough roll and its smear of mustard, should be abandoned as crude and hopeless, as the old-time ham sandwich has been abandoned. The hot dog should be elevated to the level of an art form.

There's no need for me to ridicule this, and how Mencken is being essentially a big baby with his whining about the "texcha" of various things.

Possibly the only thing more "puerile" than the way he channels (elsewhere) Schiller's superficialicies about how music at its highest is "pure" form (based on, of course, a false and confused notion as to what "form" even is[*]), is his elevation of "food" and such as to being "art forms". Pure sensation, without any form at all, is not an art form any more than sex is. Both ingestion and sex are, in fact, embarassing, primitive and violent activities.

[*] This is the false analogy he [Mencken] keeps drawing between music and architecture - that the effect should be the same regardless of what "color" that the the overall "structure" is painted in - and so anything not notated in the score (i.e., all of the nuances of instrumental performance) is irrelevant. This we know to be flatly false, since "ornamentation" etc. can definitely enter into "relation" with the other elements of music, just like those other elements relate to... one another. This was definitely the case with Mozart vs. Haydn - for example, Haydn's style, filled with extreme harmonic and rhythmic contrasts, is far less dependent on tone color and textural richness than is Mozart's, and Mozart always wrote with textural ornamentation in mind. Is Mozart "inferior"? The fallacy seems to be based on overlooking the fact that in music, it is not just variations in the "color" (in terms of tone) but nuances in the rhythm that changes the entire effect of the piece - and the second finds no analogy at all in the visual sphere. (This is the difference between, e.g. vulgar violinists who amaze you with the great "sound" of the passing moment, and then structural players like Schnabel etc.) Also, the nature of musical composition is still mostly the art of appreciating music, of how component tunes and such might be further developed - composers like Schubert were almost completely derivative (he modeled everything after "motifs" from Mozart, Beethoven). More here , on the computer generation of music (Mozart, Chopin etc. can be fairly easily imitated).

popfop Tuesday 21 Aug 2012

" We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we're masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power." - The Duke. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 21 Aug 2012

One of the most memorable lines from the film.

Thoughts Saturday 25 Aug 2012

Mencken has a sort of dogmatic way of stating everything, so it's not really possible to "disagree" without insulting/denouncing him (I'd like to imagine him being right there in front of me). Nevertheless he (as Maynard Keynes said in an unrelated context) "can be amazing when one agrees with him", and the best part of someone's output is not something any fault can "detract from" - whatever might be said for the person himself.

Mencken at or near his best:

The crowd [according to Le Bon], as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, as individuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is very low; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic, almost simian. Crowds, properly worked up by skillful demagogues, are ready to believe anything, and to do anything.

Le Bon, I daresay, is partly right, but also partly wrong. His theory is probably too flattering to the average numskull. He accounts for the extravagance of crowds on the assumption that the numskull, along with the superior man, is knocked out of his wits by suggestion - that he, too, does things in association that he would never think of doing singly. The fact may be accepted, but the reasoning raises a doubt. The numskull runs amok in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely. In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon. He refraints from all attempts at lynching a capella , not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it.

-- From Damn! A Book of Calumny

Niccolo and Donkey Thursday 30 Aug 2012

O'Zebedee Roland supplanter

Jose Canseco on Vampires

O'Zebedee Thursday 30 Aug 2012

I, uh - what?

President Camacho Wednesday 5 Sep 2012

My favorite Mencken piece is "The Libido For The Ugly", in which he describes in scathing/hilarious terms the architectural appurtenances of the people of Central/Western PA: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/hlmlibidougly.htm . Anyone who's been to the area will find some of the same monstrosities there today...

I also really enjoyed his account of the Cuban revolution he witnessed by accident while returning from the Great War front and reported in his column "Gore In The Caribbees". There is the constant element of the white man's eternal sarcasm and disdain for the politics of the colonial world:

[the Sunpaper office in Baltimore] said, in brief, that a revolution had broken out in Cuba, that both sides were doing such rough lying that no one north of the Straits of Florida could make out what it was about, and that a series of succinct and illuminating dispatches describing its issues and personalities would be appreciated. I wirelessed back that the wishes of my superiors were commands, then sent another wireless to a friend in Havana, Captain Asmus Leonhard, marine superintendent of the Munson Line, saying that I itched to see him the instant my ship made port.

Captain Leonhard was a Dane of enormous knowledge but parsimonious speech, and I had a high opinion of his sagacity. He knew everyone worth knowing in Latin America, and thousands who were not, and his estimates of them seldom took more than three words. "A burglar," he would say, characterizing a general played up by all the North American newspapers as the greatest trans-Rio Grande hero since Bolivar, or "a goddam fraud,'* alluding to a new president of Colombia, El Salvador or Santo Domingo, and that was all. His reply to my wireless was in his usual manner. It said: "Sure."

.... The captain himself was waiting in front of the Pasaje Hotel in the Prado, eating a plate of Spanish bean-soup and simultaneously smoking a Romeo y Julieta cigar. "The issues in the revolution," he said, tackling the business in hand at once, "are simple. Menocal, who calls himself a Conservative, is president, and Josi Miguel Gomez, who used to be president and calls himself a Liberal, wants to make a come-back. That is the whole story. Jose Miguel says that when Menocal was reelected last year the so-called Liberals were chased away from the so-called polls by the so-called army. On the other hand, Menocal says that Jose Miguel is a porch-climber and ought to be chased out of the island. Both are right."

Mencken then meets with reps from both warring factions and then attends the victory party-- full article in various formats (p. 57): http://archive.org/details/mencken017105mbp

Yes, I agree with this assessment... Mencken was first and foremost a critic-- and a first-rate critic at that-- but his best commentary, for all its acerbic wit, was always purely negative. His inborn skepticism innoculated him from suggesting any high-minded positive ideas to counter the idiocy and corruption he so frequently lambasted, so he stood aloof from the great political questions of the day.

Still, its incredible how he's been totally erased from the American consciousness given his enormous influence... and he was even "progressive", for his time, on issues such as race and religion. The real reason Mencken is verboten is because of his wholesale demolition of the American democratic system.

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