The beginning of a NYT article titled "The Bicycle and the Ride to Modern America," which became instantly bloggable to me when it was the first thing I looked at after doing an update to the previous post that by chance included Mark Twain. Mark Twain is in the air for some reason. That means something.
In other Mark Twain news:
1. "Mark Twain had positive view of Pittsburgh — except from atop the mount":
“With the moon soft and mellow … we sauntered about the mount and looked down on the lake of fire and flame... It looked like a miniature hell with the lid off."2. "Mark Twain Gave Good Advice About The Dangers Of Good Advice":
He had reached old age, Twain said, in the usual way: "By sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.... My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you."3. "Big-walking small dog a perfect underdog":
Like Taran the Assistant Pig Keeper, Bingo is small in stature but super-sized in heart. Mark Twain probably said it best when he quipped, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”4. "Previously Unknown Mark Twain Descendant to Speak in Hannibal":
Mark Twain had one daughter who outlived him, Clara Clemens. Clara married concert pianist and symphony conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Clara and Ossip had one child, Nina Gabrilowitsch (Mark Twain’s granddaughter). When Nina died in 1966 it was accepted that the Mark Twain line had ceased with no living descendants....
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You know you're too old today when you have to put on reading glasses to read her cursive tattoo.
Mark Twain is in the news because the original draft of Huckleberry Finn was found that portrays Huck as a racist.
There is a huge amount of Irony in a New Yorker article about Hollister and San Fran.
See it's the people in San Fran who read the New Yorker that are turning Hollister into a ghost town because they love the Delta Smelt more than the Red Necks and Wetbacks who actually try to live in Hollister. Read a bit of Victor David Hanson about what the California Liberals and the Feds have done to places like Hollister (aka, the West Valley in VDH's writings) and Fresno...
Oh, BTW: the Liberals in SF don't have to ration their water because they have a private system from the flooded Hetch Hetchy Valley.
Rationing for thee, not me.
My favorite Twain quote arose from his having to write a review of a ponderous Henry James work.
"Once you put it down, you can't pick it up!"
Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
Leonard Cohen
Twain would look down on a very different Pittsburgh today.
A critique of Pittsburgh from a guy who eventually moved to Elmira.
Twain is supposed to have said that Wagner's music is better that it sounds.
Mark Caplan wrote:
"Mark Twain is in the news because the original draft of Huckleberry Finn was found that portrays Huck as a racist."
Nigger Jim was actually a white guy who identified as Black. No, really! His name was Jim Hartley, and he was from Rockford, Illinois. He had an MFA from the University of Iowa. Man, that guy could camp it up.
Ossip Gabrilowitsch?
Gesundheidt!
True re Hollister.
And not just about water.
The wealthy of the coast are crushing everyone else.
With the assistance of outfits like the New Yorker, who make sure that the destructive class does not learn what it's doing. As they won't listen to anyone not in their clique.
"Like Taran the Assistant Pig Keeper..." What a weird example, I am a big fan of Lloyd Alexander but I literally do not know another person who has so much as heard of him.
Clemens was born in November, 1835. In May of 1884, he would have been midway through his 49th year.
Mr. Zrimsek is correct.
(Rhymes?)
Well, I'd like to know what Nina's lover was doing in Europe? I assume it would be easy to track down his reason for being there. Ships records etc.
They could always dig up her mother (if she wasn't cremated) and get some DNA.
I assume the state makes allowances for that.
"Mark Twain had positive view of Pittsburgh -- except from atop the mount"
From H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "The Libido for the Ugly," published in the 1920s:
"On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth -- and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination -- and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
"I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight."
Link:
http://www.bizbag.com/mencken/menklibid.htm
Hal Holbook started "Mark Twain" performances at age twenty-nine.
He had done them for about sixty years.
Ride that bicycle.
I am Laslo.
I thought the 'Pittsburgh' quote was originally from Andrew Mellon' wife upon first visiting her new home.
I could be wrong.
OK, I was so excited an hour ago. I went out to let the rare clumber piss...shirtless. And the guy in the triple decker, shirtless, asked me to cum up for a beer....heaven. He parks in my building's lot and has Puerto Rico license plates.
Anyway, I walk up three flight of stairs and onto his balcony and his roommate is there. He gave me a corona and we talked about girls and True Detective . I knew nothing was going to happen and I was totally bummer. We were both shirtless passing a soccer ball to each other; a perfect opportunity for jerky jerky.
I don't always get it.
tits.
D.E., Would Mencken have loved Silicon Valley? Not a smokestack in sight and, from a proper distance, a collection of peaceful villages.
Every era has its own form of ugliness.
As for Menchen's ugliness, here is the man speaking, in all of his elitist racist glory:
I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.
Run that up a Confederate flagpole and see who salutes.
As a Native Pittsburgher, I prefer the industrial ugliness. And I far prefer Andrew Carnegie to H.L. Mencken.
In the late Nineties Jenna Jameson did her own tour portraying Mark Twain. From her show:
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Try not to gag.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Unless you open it to suck cock, which then should shut them the fuck up.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company, Vegas for the strippers.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. As are blow-jobs. So they are now bilingual.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. But you still have to swallow one or the other.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. If it paid more than porn.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. Comparatively, semen is not that acidic.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. And stay at eighteen. With an eighteen-year-old's ass. And breasts. And snug vagina.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the doggy-style.
If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first. And if you have to eat three frogs I hope they bathed, because French women don't do that alot.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn about pussy in no other way.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times. It makes the number of times I've sucked cock look small, really.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics. Then statutory rape. Daddy.
The man who does not view good porn has no advantage over the man who cannot see it.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. And sucking. I would also include tickling the balls.
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
I am Laslo.
Laslo, that was effin brilliant.
I've been reading lot of Twain lately as research for some short stories, and it still holds up a lot better than a lot of the popular dreck from that time. He's a lot more admirable than Mencken (although he had newspaper reporters pegged as know-nothing idiots), and he certainly had his faults (horrible business sense, which led him to be happily bailed out by a Standard Oil exec and through his own hard work).
David: "As for Menchen's ugliness, here is the man speaking, in all of his elitist racist glory."
I know the quote. Mencken was product of his time. You don't have to look further than Woodrow Wilson to find another racist.
An attack on outdated, incorrect opinions about race doesn't make the Pittsburgh area of yesteryear any prettier.
Andrew Carnegie loved Pittsburgh so much he built a mansion in Manhattan in 1903. He lived in the place until his death in 1919.
Some of my ancestors (mother's side) were among the first settlers in Pennsylvania. I lived in the Keystone State for 16 years. Personally, I liked the Pittsburgh in the 1983 movie "Flashdance." Nick Hurley (Michael Nouri) was a lot like me in my younger days. But I always preferred Pennsylvania's mountain forests over its ugly cities.
That quote is way beyond the product of the time.
David: "That quote is way beyond the product of the time."
The racist quote is not my problem, David. I didn't write it or say it.
I do remember the sooty, dirty Pittsburgh of the early 1950s. In those days, it was a place few people wanted to brag about.
dpb "I literall do not know of another person who's heard of him." We're out there.
David said...
That quote is way beyond the product of the time.
Sadly, that isn't true. You can find similar writing from many well known people of the era who favored eugenics of the "inferior races", such as Margaret Sanger.
dbp: Now you do. I loved the Prydain Chronicles growing up. Incidentally, I read the linked article, and they don't back up the mention of Taran in any way. If you didn't already know who he was, the article doesn't tell you!
Mencken said: "He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him."
David bleated...
Run that up a Confederate flagpole and see who salutes.
Considering the lack of knowledge of genetics in his time, Mencken was surprisingly accurate; although it took about 2,000 to 3,000 generations for the 25-30 point IQ difference between Europeans and Africans (excluding the Igbo and Pygmies) to evolve, it only took about 50 generations - perhaps fewer - for Ashkenazi Jews to obtain a 10 to 15 point IQ advantage over other Europeans. The time difference is partly due to persecution, some inbreeding and the fact that evolution is considerably faster (up to 100 times faster) in modern societies (including those of hundreds of years ago), than it is in hunter-gatherer or pastoral societies.
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