Saturday, July 3, 2010
6 AM. Okay. Why do I feel so bad? Too much coffee? It can’t be too much food. Too unbalanced diet? Or — what?
Not every illness is attributable to a lack-of, or a wrong choice, or a too-much-of. If that were so, the corollary would be — do it just right and you’ll never be sick.
That makes sense. All right, forget it. Who’s up? Papa, I forgot, in yesterday’s session, that it was your anniversary, even though I knew full well it was July 2.
Friday, July 2, 2010
5 AM, nearly. Yesterday’s session was wonderful material. Why did it knock me down so — for most of the day, in fact? Or was that unrelated?
You were particularly on the beam yesterday, and so paradoxically enough it came to look like it took more out of you in a shorter time — come to think of it, you might phrase it, “more came through you in a shorter time,” and your body paid a certain price. We’ll watch for you.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
6 AM. All right, I’m ready if you’re ready — or if you- all are ready. Papa, being that tomorrow is the anniversary of yourself-decided transition — and next year makes 50 years since then! — how about if you start?
There will be a time when 50 years as a space of time doesn’t impress you as it does now. Consider how your reaction is different now from even 20 years ago, and then try to see yourself over here for 50 years.
Friday, June 25, 2010
5:45 AM. Trees like islands in the milky white fog, layer after layer of them.
Okay, Papa. Let’s talk. I finished Gatsby again early yesterday, and got into Tender Is The Night — 50 pages or so. It certainly starts off slowly. I’m having to restrain my impatience. If I had just picked it up for no reason, I’d have put it down nearly at once. After your prose, clicking and moving, it’s hard to be patient with somebody describing the night sky hung like a bowl from a single star —
The Revolution titled A Farewell to Arms
Thursday, May 13, 2010
10 AM. All right, papa. As you will know from tuning into this station, I found A Farewell To Arms different this time. Perhaps because I had just come from your later works, I found this one disappointing in the love story, riveting in the war story, for a total effect that was much less than The Sun Also Rises, which had been written earlier, or, of course, Bell or The Old Man.
You are reading with the benefit and this advantage of hindsight. You can see how the work falls down, but it is much harder for you to see how revolutionary it is, how hard-edged, next to the novels that were being published at the same time.
Re-imagining yourself
Our internal life and external life don’t always coincide. How do we dance on the borderline without compromising our integrity?
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
6:05 a.m. Mr. Hemingway, you said you couldn’t stand phonies, and clearly you couldn’t. How do you reconcile this with so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on?[This referred to his early life as described in The Young Hemingway, a book that I bought and read in England.]
On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway, old and ill, shot himself to death – “took the family exit,” to put it his way, as he was neither the first nor the last Hemingway to kill himself. My column this month for The Meta Arts concerns some unfinished business of his. Not a retrieval – he himself told me when I contacted him first that it wasn’t necessary. Something else, instead. I wish we could find someone to finish it.
Continue reading Papa Hemingway’s unfinished business