Golly

So, deep, deep in Mencken this past fortnight, I can only say, "What he said!"  The only thing I think I might just a tiny bit differ with is Mencken's underestimation of the potential for simple-minded toxic Nazification in the philosophy of Nietzsche.  To be fair, nobody could have foreseen, before the end of World War I, the cowardly, vicious, gratuitous victimization of the innocent German people--the blockade of the northern ports--by the insufferably "victorious" Allies:  Which, when you look at it down the long wrong end of the telescope, does lead directly to a sour Nietzschism gone horribly, insanely literal, without a shred left in it of playful, Gallic hyperbole...and to the Death Camps.  But that aside, there is not a particle of difference between my beliefs and opinions and those of H.L. Mencken.  We are unanimous in our bad opinion of (monstrous evil tyrant) Woodrow Wilson, Prohibition, Puritanism, the Evangelical South, American participation in World War I, and modern classical music; and united in our love (I think we must call it love) of San Francisco (for the same cultural, esthetic and geographical reasons) and of real classical music, from Bach to Brahms.

And there is this, which I might have written, and did our lives not overlap, I might actually suppose to have written in a previous incarnation:

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.