Categories
Archives
-
-
-
-
Recent Posts
- Happy Birthday, Dean Stockwell
- “Character roles definitely age better than your ingenues. You don’t get to keep doing that.” — Catherine O’Hara
- “Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.” — Ryszard Kapuściński
- Jafar Panahi on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show
- 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Romeo & Juliet
- “I wasn’t born an actress, you know. Events made me one.” — Jean Harlow
- “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- “I was going upstream, against the current. I was coming from the North before the North had broken”. — John Montague
- Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
- “What a writer asks of his reader is not so much to like as to listen.” — poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Recent Comments
- sheila on R.I.P. Tom Noonan
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 2: “Everybody Loves a Clown”
- Dan on R.I.P. Tom Noonan
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 1: “In My Time of Dying”
- sheila on Jafar Panahi on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show
- sheila on Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
- sheila on Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
- sheila on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- sheila on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- sheila on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Romeo & Juliet
- sheila on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Love’s Labour’s Lost
- dres on Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 22: “Devil’s Trap”
- dres on Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 21: “Salvation”
- Melissa Sutherland on Jafar Panahi on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show
- Iwillbetrue on Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
- Kelly C Sedinger on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Romeo & Juliet
- Mike Molloy on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Love’s Labour’s Lost
- dres on Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 20: “Dead Man’s Blood”
- dres on Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 20: “Dead Man’s Blood”
- dres on Supernatural: Season 1, Episode 20: “Dead Man’s Blood”
-
Tag Archives: H.L. Mencken
“Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.” — poet Anne Spencer
Anne Bethel Scales Bannister Spencer was yet another poet-librarian, like Dudley Randall, and many others. As the daughter of a librarian, I am always drawn to these particular journeys, since libraries are not just buildings, they are symbols, and librarians … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Anne Spencer, H.L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, poetry
4 Comments
“I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” — Jonathan Swift
“When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him.” — Jonathan Swift I don’t have much time to read for pleasure these … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, Charlotte Bronte, Dr. Samuel Johnson, fiction, Gulliver's Travels, H.L. Mencken, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jane Eyre, Jonathan Swift, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats
12 Comments
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” — H.L. Mencken
“You know what H.L. Mencken said one time about religious people? He said he’d been greatly misunderstood. He said he didn’t hate them. He simply found them comical.” – Kurt Vonnegut Today is the birthday of one of the greatest … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged A Mencken Chrestomathy, essays, H.L. Mencken, nonfiction
12 Comments
“Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, England, Ernest Hemingway, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.L. Mencken, Harold Bloom, John Keats, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams
14 Comments
“If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.” — poet Countee Cullen
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing! — Countee Cullen It’s his birthday today. Cullen is often compared to Langston Hughes (my post on Hughes here), seems a little unfair, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Countee Cullen, H.L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, poetry
8 Comments
“When I aim at praise, they say I bite.” — Alexander Pope
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! -— Alexander Pope, from “Eloisa to Abelard” Alexander Pope was born on this day in 1688. He was so huge … Continue reading
Posted in On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Christopher Smart, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Eminem, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, H.L. Mencken, Jonathan Swift, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, poetry, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Jefferson, William Blake, William Wordsworth
2 Comments
“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.” — Joan Acocella
Joan Acocella, longtime dance critic for The New Yorker, and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books died in 2024 at the age of 78, and I did not mark her passing. It’s her birthday today. Acocella brought … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged ballet, Bob Fosse, dance, Dorothy Parker, essays, H.L. Mencken, Joan Acocella, Martha Graham, nonfiction, Nureyev, Primo Levi
2 Comments
2018 Books Read
2018 Books Read 1. Tamburlaine, Part 1, by Christopher Marlowe I finished 2017 with Paradise Lost, in the mood to continue with rigorous challenging poetry. I decided to read the complete plays of Christopher Marlowe (re-read in most cases). The … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce
Tagged Animal Farm, Annie Proulx, books read, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Marlowe, Clifford Odets, Edgar Allan Poe, England, Evelyn Waugh, fiction, Finnegans Wake, friends, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Ian McEwan, Ireland, Italy, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, nonfiction, Olivia Laing, Pauline Kael, poetry, Poland, politics, Robert Kaplan, Romania, Ron Chernow, Russia, Ryszard Kapuściński, Sergei Kirov, Stalin, The Soccer War, Tom Wolfe, true crime, Truman Capote, Victor Serge, Waiting for Lefty
7 Comments
Bookshelf Tour #10
An extremely dog-eared section of my library. These books are rarely on the shelf since I dip into them so often. — The mighty Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker, but also so much more. Her dance writing … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged bookshelves, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Joan Acocella, Lester Bangs, William Hazlitt
4 Comments