Hemingway again...

Having completed Green Hills of Africa, I now feel I have well earned another hiatus from Hemingway. At it couldn't come too soon. I am officially at a surfeit. Hemingway's safari book is objectionable, it turns out, in all the ways one might anticipate -- and in some unexpected ones too. There is the anti-Black racism typical of the would-be gentlemen hunter in Africa; the off-hand demeaning of the humanity of the African trackers who make his visit possible and who seem to be the only ones showcasing any real skill (skinning, carving, tanning, etc., while Papa just points and shoots); the mad rage every time a servant mildly inconveniences him in his pursuit (with much -- thankfully un-enacted -- fantasizing about shooting "bastards" who "run their mouths" and corporal punishment).

The Sun Also Rises

These past few weeks -- prodded by that aforementioned and all-too-true warning I found in Florence King (about would-be clever people who only ever read obscure books and thereby end up as ignorant of cultural touchstones as the unlettered) -- I have been making somewhat of an effort (probably a short-lived one) to finally "get around" to some indisputably famous novels that never in the past aroused much interest in me. The works of Hemingway have long been in this category.

And while I thought I might make an approach to this immovable mountain of literary boredom by starting with The Torrents of Spring -- Papa's 90-page parody of Sherwood Anderson that is not really as droll as it ought to be (though it's funny in places) -- I realized afterward that this is just another version of the Florence King syndrome -- simply a means of sucking the nectar of obscurity from even such an overgrown husk as Hemingway. I had to face my fears head-on, I decided. Like a matador. I opened The Sun Also Rises. 

Errata and Marginalia 004: Fitzgerald

Using the following edition: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2005). Yes that greatest of all dropped article books. For you see, the title is not in fact "The Beautiful and the Damned," as I had assumed all through my youth -- perhaps on analogy to The Naked and the Dead, or, less creditably, The Young and the Restless -- but rather the Beautiful and Damned, since we are not contrasting two different populations here, as in the sheep and the goats, but rather naming two qualities possessed by our protagonists and their milieu.

In any case, it is an astonishingly cruel, funny, moving, compelling, and evil sort of book, with perhaps the most ice-cold finish I've ever encountered in literature. It is the perfect novel to read while in the twilight of one's twenties (as is yours truly) -- during that brief window of life when it seems a tragedy of romantic proportions to be a "man of thirty-three," still more so to be one who looks like he might be "a man of forty" (horrors!), like our protagonist, and when one seems -- despite all one's half-hearted and quickly abandoned efforts, to always be living just about at the limit of one's income.

Sessions & Richard III

In Shakespeare's Richard III, he has given us a kind of universal syntax of tyranny -- a hidden grammar of villainy, as it assumes its merely superficially different forms in various places and climes. As such, it seems only reasonable that some modern director ought hastily to stage that drama with 21st century costuming, if they haven't done so already, and cast our current governing regime in its chief roles.

Rumination and Avoidance

Amidst this season of heavy losses, I hope I will be forgiven for pausing to mourn one rather more trivial one. At the end of this month, the subscription service Filmstruck will be shutting down forever. Have you heard of it? A kind of golden pass to cinematic pretension, it was a streaming service that exclusively specialized in art house, international, documentary, and classic films -- plus the entirety of the Criterion Collection for good measure.... It had all the makings, in short, of an idea too beautiful for this world.

Apart from the invaluable service this service did in giving me occasional fresh infusions of intellectual vanity of an evening -- as well as a plenteous supply of however many old noirs and Japanese ghost movies -- it was also quite possibly the only reason I was ever exposed to the work of some of the most interesting of contemporary directors. For this I am eternally grateful.

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915)

A justly famous novel can slumber on one's shelves for an astonishingly long time without arousing the slightest interest. Indeed, it can arouse all the less interest for being so famous. There is a wonderfully accurate passage I encountered recently in Florence King, in which she describes a self-defeating trap in which precocious literary youngsters tend to ensnare themselves. Intent upon proving themselves possessed of knowledge undreamt-of by their surroundings -- whatever those may be -- young people desperate to develop a reputation for book learning will avoid all the novels anyone has ever heard of, heading straight for the lesser known works in the canons of the great, or the best-known in the oeuvre of the minor. They "skip Jane Eyre and read The Professor," as King puts it.

And in the very effort to evade knowledge possessed by everyone else, they deprive themselves of the knowledge that would have impressed upon others the idea that they were book-smart. The poison chalice of ignorance, which they were so desperate should pass from them, ends up being the very one from which they drink.