Burmurdouscak

 Ernest Hemingway was a great big phony 

Who went to war expecting it to be absurd and found, or claimed to find, that indeed it was

Then wrote a book full of danger and near-escapes with death and explosions that everyone assumed was based on his own experience and that he must have had such close brushes himself even though it wasn't and he didn't

And unlike someone like say John Dos Passos who also went to war expecting to find it absurd and found it in fact to be absurd but who at least had the decency to regret going for that reason and wish he had just been a creator instead and foreswear ever after that fact to ever again march with the intolerable pack and sink himself down into the swamp of common indignity just to get more material for purposes of calligraphy 

Hemingway wanted to have his cake and eat it too; he wanted 

To find war absurd and then to dine out on that fact for fifty years and also to look down his nose at everyone 

Who didn't do this thing that he did and that he claimed to find absurd and to sneer at women writers saying "what could they know about war anyways, that's only for manly men" I guess he didn't find it so absurd after all since he clearly seemed to think it made him awesome 

You don't get to have it both ways; either war is absurd or it isn't but there's no such thing as an absurd thing that makes you peerless and glistening, nor is there any thing that is absurd but the absurdity of which can only be pronounced upon by those who have experienced it; if it is truly absurd then anyone has as much right as anyone else to call it such and if it were actually such a perfectly ineffable inexpressible glorious experience to finally realize how absurd it is then it wouldn't be absurd now would it? 

And all of this even though as we stated the book referred to above was not based on his own experiences but only on those he might have liked to have had and even though he wasn't even a soldier but an ambulance driver for an army and even though as one of his own characters observed it wasn't even a proper army but merely an Italian army. 

Steve Katz was a writer who actually found war absurd

And who imagines himself in the infantry taking bullets to the chest

That are blocked only by the fact that he happened to possess

Tucked into his pocket, a copy of the Partisan Review

Which stopped the bullet from penetrating into his breast

Then he tells us he was wounded, and meets a mixed-up set

Of Hemingway women, both farewell's nurse, and Rise's Brett

But he didn't actually fight and didn't need to to give us

The only image we need of a war for which God may never forgive us

That of a great American buttocks squatting over a supine country

And carpet bombing it into the stone age just for having the effront'ry

To be small enough for the taking, but I guess Hemingway would say

"You had to be there" before you can object to blowing innocent children away

Just like you have to go to Spain to sit in the back of one of the available Cathedrals

And have as phony a conversion as in the next book you'll have a bogus wartime upheaval

And come away saying "my new novel, it's got Icebergs a-plenty!

 That's why my prose and characters are so superficial and empty" 

But the thing with icebergs is there's s'posed to be something beneath them

If there ain't then it ain't worth your time to read them

If a so-called writer can't manage to convey

His thoughts, one of two things must have got in the way:

Either his thoughts were too deep for his pen to relay

Or he never in the first place had anything to say.