fascinated by
riddle, ready, take refuge
and left wondering
Part of the HL Mencken Haiku project – from A Book of Preferences – and comments comparing the writing of Theodore Dreiser and Joseph Conrad.
Category: Series
3.1.2021 – faces first to last
faces first to last
massive intolerable
fact – conquered, undone
I have always admired the work and writing of HL Mencken.
Mr. Mencken stands alone in his work on American English as a language.
Through his work, his construction and vocabulary is a wonder to behold.
Then there is Mencken the man.
A man with many prejudices say some critics.
Not prejudiced, say others, he hated everyone and everything the same.
At least everything and anything that walked with pretention and falseness.
In the play about the Scopes Trial, ‘Inherit the Wind’, Gene Kelly, plays the reporter, HE Hornbeck, a role modeled after Mr. Mencken.
The Clarence Darrow character named Henry Drummond, played by Spencer Tracy, gets tired of Hornbeck and yells, “Hornbeck, I’m getting tired of you. You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”
The point here is that I am going to work with Mr. Mencken.
I am going to look for his construction and vocabulary and see what kind of haiku might be fashioned.
This haiku is the first one in the Mencken Project.
Adapted from a Book of Prefaces and a comment on the writing of Joseph Conrad.
2.28.2001 – easy to laugh at
easy to laugh at
grandiloquence reading too
much to too little
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
It may be easy to laugh at the grandiloquence of claims directed at objects which on occasion resemble giant earplugs or upturned lawnmowers. But, instead of accusing critics of reading too much into too little, we should allow abstract sculptures to demonstrate to us the range of thoughts and emotions that every kind of non-representational object can convey. The gift of the most talented sculptors has been to teach us that large ideas, for example, about intelligence or kindness, youth or serenity, can be communicated in chunks of wood and string, or in plaster and metal contraptions, as well as they can in words or in human or animal likenesses. The great abstract sculptures have succeeded in speaking to us, in their peculiar dissociated language, of the important themes of our lives.
According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”
What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
Neat trick in writing a book.
If I knew how to do that, I would.
2.25.2021 – sun shines low angles
sun shines low angles
see long stretched shadows walk
sunlight light, not warm
Part of a series based on afternoons spent at the beach on Hilton Head Island.
I wanted to see if I would be ‘inspired’ by what I saw, by what I heard, by what I smelled, by what I tasted, what I felt emotionally and what I felt tactilely.
Some turned out okay.
Some were too forced.
Some were just bad.
Some did involve some or all of those feelings.
As far as it goes, I guess I was inspired by by what I saw, by what I heard, by what I smelled, by what I tasted, what I felt emotionally and what I felt tactilely.
2.18.2021 – whose study might in
whose study might in
modest ways contribute to
an understanding
Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on whereto travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.
Adapted from the book, The Art of Travel (2002, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton.
According to the website, GOOD READS, Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why.
As I said in the section on Architecture , what I find irresistible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.
I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.
Neat trick in writing a book.
If I knew how to do that, hey, I would.
