Book Review: A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote simply and beautifully and was an asshole.

In his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes about his time as a struggling artist in Paris in the 1920s. In his stark, almost childish style he offers up a rather detailed series of vignettes of his life and times there and they were wonderful. Some are poignantly sad, some are quite funny, and some are downright bitchy. All are staggeringly self-aggrandizing.

It is clear to me that as much as the world has loved Hem, no one could love Hem as much as Hem did. His best times were when he was alone, walking the deserted streets of the city. Or fishing, smoking. Or at the track, betting. Or skiing, and climbing. Hem was no team player. His worst times were when someone interrupted him. In many a scene he proudly recounts how he berated some idiot for even sitting at the same café where he worked. And there were plenty of idiots.

And so it was with great ambivalence that I motored through this little book because truly, he writes beautifully. There is complete clarity of message. No room for nuance, whatsoever. Which, if you think about it, only contributes to the arrogance: not a single word is hedged; without adjectives, nothing is modified. It was as I say it was. It is as I say it is. I do what I say I do.

In addition to the anecdotes of his friends and lifestyle (oysters, bookstores, cafes, banging models, skiing with the rich, talking about art with Gloria Steinem, and bopping around in a topless convertible with an effete and desperately drunk F. Scott Fitzgerald) he talks a great deal about writing. How he feels about it, how he did it, where he did it, why he did it. And it is in these passages that pretense and romanticism are finally shed. It makes them less sensational, but there is a palpable sense that he’s finally telling the truth.

The truth is a theme that comes up a great deal when he talks about writing. He feels that the truer you write, the better you write. So if truth is the essence of writing, and the truth is always accessible to you if you really look hard enough, then good writing will always be there.

Vaguely addressing writers block and why it’s simply never been a problem for him, he says: Whenever I am not sure where the next story will come from, I simply sit down and force myself to write one true sentence. Once that sentence is there, the rest will follow.

So I tried it. See above. He was right.


(To be fair to the man, I do understand from subsequent reading that his fourth wife, Mary, had a heavy hand in editing his nearly finished work going as far as to outright cut a lengthy apology to his first wife, Hadley. Perhaps Mary trimmed some of the humility too, but somehow I doubt it.)

Trouble Brewing

“This town stinks,” said the one with the beginnings of a mustache.

“Yeah, it fucking stinks, dude” said the tall one. He had the same haircut as his friend. In fact, they all combed their hair over their eyes like Wayne did.

No had yet figured out how to grow a mustache like him yet. This was damned shame because as Remy had once said, over a cigarette, “Wayne’s mustache fucking rocks!”

“Yeah,” Jean Marc had agreed at the time, after spitting, “It fucking rocks.” Jean Marc was smaller than the other two, but he knew how to fight. His dad taught him.

The three of them shuffled down the pier in their sneakers, laces undone like they just don’ care. They looked around but couldn’t find anything awesome to burn.

“This town stinks,” Remy said again, repeating Wayne.
“We should get some booze and rip shit up.”

Which, eventually they did.

A Gift to You, Lousy as It May Be, You'll Thank Me Anyways. Because We Are Friends. Or Family.

I have been working on this piece for some time. And it has gotten pretty long. But no matter how long it gets, it's just not any good.

So I'm going to spare you, friendly reader. It was a great idea, but it just didn't work out as well as I had thought it would. And actually, now that I think about it, rye in hand, even if it had been perfectly wrought, it would have been of interest to maybe two people that I know. So perhaps it wasn't such a great idea afterall.

Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite authors and those who have read him will attest that his style is unmistakable. I figured I would write a little piece echoing his peculiar voice, but use elements of my own life instead: Zihua instead of a cat with a bent tail; Daniela having with small and beautiful ears; Jeff Buckley instead of dated jazz.

But to be honest, even those three that would have figured out what I was up to wouldn't have found it all that funny. So I figured I'd just tell you all the punch line and move on.

And now, I expect you have that empty, mildly dissatisfied feeling that comes with not being sure if you missed something or if that something wasn't there and what you read merely sucked. But at least you didn't have to read 2,500 words to get it.

Merry Christmas reader!

Book Review: What is the What – Dave Eggers

It will come as no surprise to any of those who know me or (or those few who read what I write) that I have a very soft spot in my heart for Dave and his McSweeney family. I won’t get into why. I will agree, though, that he hasn’t written a good novel yet. Even his short fiction has never even come close to his debut memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But even as it seemed that he was possibly fading into the late 90’s and becoming simply an aging crack-pot celebrity philanthropist, it turns out he was up to much, much more.

Over the four years (2002-2006) he worked with Valentino Achak Deng to bring his story to our attention. With the same deft touch that he exhibited in AHWOSG, What is the What is touching, funny, and startlingly easy to identify with. There is virtually no hit of Eggers smarmy earnestness, the narration is given with a complete purity of voice. It is very difficult to tell where the writer leaves off and the narrator begins, but you quickly warm to Valentino, becoming engrossed in his complete melodrama of a life.

There are structural issues and a few low bits where a history lesson obtusely interrupts the action, but I wish to leave my issues aside. I have not been touched by a book (or maybe a person) in the way that I was by What is the What.

I encourage anyone who wants to know more about the Sudan and the Lost Boys who fled the country during its prolonged civil war to read it. I encourage anyone who wishes they could make the lives of others better to read it. I encourage anyone who thinks they didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas to read it.

In You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Eggers muses about the urge to give. If you were shipwrecked on an island and discovered another person there, you would give him half of whatever you have. This would be obvious; no decision to be made. If a week or so later another person washed up, you would share with him too. But somehow, even with this natural urge to keep each other alive, there is some number at which people become not like us and we no longer feel the compulsion to share. Valentino has suffered a great deal and needs our help. It is no accident that Eggers has distilled the problems of a people into this one smiling man.

Please give to him anyways.

Entities The Famously Adventurous Poly-Sexual Artist Currently Known as Prince Has Been Sighted Taking Into His Minnesota Boudoir

A tall man with a side part.

A tall woman of unnatural beauty.

A tall pair of possibly Scandinavian twins.

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders

The Dallas Cowboys mascot, Rowdy.

The Dallas Cowboys offensive line.

A Septuagenarian couple who had recently confessed to the artist by the salad bar at Friendly's that the might have lost that loving feeling.

Three Lamas and their handler.

A Bowling ball.

Thirty thousand silk worms.

A wet-nurse.

A rough-handed dairy farmer.

A princess.

Elements from the Periodic Table That Would Serve Well as Names for My New Baby (or a Character in a Shakespearean Comedy).

Boys

Beryllium
Boron
Argon
Gallium
Krypton
Cadmium
Erbium
Radon
Thorium
Seaborgium


Girls

Fluorine
Bromine
Bismuth
Iodine
Mercury
Astatine
Iron

More Margarita Ruminations

Equatorial sunsets don’t offer much in the way of twilight. The mustachioed bartender flicked on a string of little illuminated plastic sombreros. In your apartment, this kind of decoration would be depressing, but here, they imbued the bar with warmth that made the patrons lean in a little closer.

“You ever see ‘Braveheart’?”

His tongue was getting a little fatter, this being the margarita that would inspire his girlfriend to ask, “don’t you think you should slow down?”

“Or ‘300’?”

At least the little bar didn’t play Mexican music. It was hard to find a drinking spot in small towns that didn’t constantly have mariachi’s belting out “Cielo Lindo” from a tinny mono.

“‘Gladiator’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Rome’? I mean, they’re all pretty much the same: epic tales about very tough men persevering in the face of enormous physical resistance. Middle ages, Rome, Greece: it doesn’t really matter when it takes place, it’s unrecognizably different from now, and so are the impossibly hard heroes. Sitting there, watching them swing their swords, rally their loyal followers on horseback, and make the tough decisions that shape histories both personal and global, you’d like to think to yourself, ‘Man, I’d fucking lay down and spill my innards on that wheat field for the safety of my people too. I’d be epic too. I’d be hard if I had too.’ ”

The sound of a blender too can be grating in your home, but somehow it too had a reassuring, comforting sound here at the Cantina Fresco.

“Invariably in these films there is a foil for the hero. A lizard-like senator or court sycophant who skulks in the halls of power, bending to the fascist will of whichever power is oppressing our hero. Preening his long hair with soft, slender hands, he sides with the establishment for no other reason than it will afford him the greatest personal luxury. Sometimes he is a traitor, which I’ll admit is bad. But mostly he’s just a man who has been faced with overwhelming odds, and decided not to resist. He saw the paradigm changing, and positioned himself for the new reality.”

No one at the bar liked the direction this was taking. A crew-cut teenager paid his tab with wrinkled notes from his bathing suit.

“How come his story is never told? He behaves like just about every single man in the audience would, if faced with similar a similar reality. I, for one, know that I wouldn’t cauterize my own wounds with a firebrand just to bound back into muddy battle. No sir. I’d be in the Senate, planning; or in the palace, counting the King’s money. And I’d be thanking my fucking stars that I was clean and dry.”

Not even the cicidas argued.