The Libido for the Ugly
H. L. Mencken
EXERCISES 7
Ⅰ .Write a short note on H. L. Mencken.
无忧岛 [SRB]
1. The Author’s and Writer’s Who’s Who
2. The Oxford Companion to American Literature
Ⅱ .Questions on content:
1. What activity is the writer referring to in his phrase ‘its most lucrative and characteristic activity’? (para 1)
2. What ‘aspiration’ of man is reduced to a depressing joke by the ugliness the writer sees
in this region?
3. What kind of houses cover the hillsides? What kind of houses does the writer suggest for this region?
4. What does Mencken say about the color of these houses?
5. Was the valley full of foreigners? (para 6)
6. Does Mencken believe that these people built such ugly houses because they were just ignorant? What is his explanation for the ugliness in America?
7. Is the writer serious in his suggestions for research in psychology and pathological sociology in his final paragraph?
Ⅲ. Questions on appreciation:
1. Why does Mencken use the uncommon word libido in his title?
2. How is para 1 developed? What effect does the powerful contrast in the last two sentences of para 1 have on the reader?
you raise me up歌词 3. Why does Mencken refer to other towns and villages in America (para 5), to the villages of Europe (para 6) and to the Parthenon (para 8)?
4. Besides attacking the ugliness of Westmoreland, what else does Mencken attack in this essay?
粉红女郎翻拍 5. Is the satirical power of Mencken’s attack simply a result of his choice of words, of his diction? Is his scathing tone also achieved through structure and image? Cite examples.
6. Are all the similes, metaphors and hyperboles used appropriately and effectively in this essay?
7. Does Mencken achieve or defeat his own purpose by using so many striking metaphors and hyperboles?
mac miller去世IV. Paraphrase:
1. boy and man, I had been through it often before (para 1)
2. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation.(para 1)
3. it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke (para 1 )
4. The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. (para 3)
5. They have taken as their model a brick set on end. (para 3)
6. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. (para 3)
7. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring. (para 4)
8. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity. ( para 4)
9. I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. (para 5)
10. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. (para5)
11. It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror. (para 6)
12. On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly (para 7)
13. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. (para 7)
14. they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible penthouse, painted a staring yellow, on top of it (para 8)
15. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. (para 9)
Ⅴ. Translate paras 1 and 2 into Chinese.
Ⅵ. Look up the dictionary and explain the meaning of the italicized words:
1. coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad (para 1 )
2. I rolled eastward for an hour (para 1)
3. the sheer revolting monstrousness (para 2)
4. somewhere further down the line (para 2)
5. from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards (para 2)
7. and it is still sightly (para 4)
8. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, Godforsaken villages (para 5)
李琳前夫 9. save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England (para 6)
10. it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion (para 6)
11. the pull is always toward ugliness (para 6)
12. On certain levels of the American race (para 7)
13. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper . .. to mere inadvertence (para 7)
14. by putting a completely impossible penthouse (para 8)
Ⅶ. Discriminate the following groups of synonyms:
1. dirt, filth, soot, grime
2. libido, passion, love, lust
Ⅷ. Give ten synonymous and/or related words of the word hideous (meaning ‘ ugly’ ). Give words of the same part of speech.
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