Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side by Robert Martin Adams (HC, 1977)

Bad Mouth is about the current exhaustion of our vocabulary of abuse, of horror, disgust, and negation. Because the modern imagination has relied so heavily on these themes, their increasing depletion and vulgarization pose serious consequences for literary and plastic arts, of which Mr. Adams tries to suggest a few. From insults and invective, the author moves to a discussion of the ugly, and from there to meditations on the new art of political lying. He concludes with some thoughts on the modern obscene, as a set of effects so deadened by now as to be hard to achieve authentically, and on rags and garbage as prevailing metaphors of the modern condition. Ugly images and hateful expressions represent a last frontier for the imagination. Mr. Adams contemplates, not without gaiety, some of the consequences of reducing this frontier to a smudged and exhausted slum.