Category: Writing

  • Would you please please please please please please please stop worshipping this jackass?

    Notes on the Ken Burns / Lynn Novick 6-hour documentary on Hemingway

    The documentary aired over three days from April 6 – April 8, 2021 on PBS.

    Moral of the story: don’t drink alcohol (straight or in any of its diluted forms), a tendency for ideation and alcohol don’t mix. It is—at the very least—a cautionary tale for male American writers and anybody who might wish to date or marry one.

    Papa was a war profiteer. He used war far too much as a way to generate fodder for his stories. He didn’t write strenuously against it as did O’Brien, Vonnegut, or Heller. Instead, his mannish example seduced J.D. Salinger to volunteer. In his tour of duty, J.D. permanently and severely scrambled his brains. It was no doubt part of the reason he was unkind and such a creep to so many women. That’s part of Papa’s heritage too.

    Papa created innumerable “echo” traumas like this.

    The persons (more particularly, male writers) who profit from Hemingway’s example—either as a man or as a writer—and come out of it unscathed are scant in number. Tim O’Brien could be one. Salinger, most definitely, not. Elmore Leonard, for sure. Elmore Leonard copped Hemingway’s telegraphic writing style but recognized and avoided the deadly humorlessness in Hemingway’s writing. The emphasis here goes on “deadly”.

    Hemingway did not die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound as has generally been reported; he died of conjunctivitis. (Ha-ha.)

    Elmore Leonard, as a writer, is a stunning omission from the Burns / Novick series as is the impact of his example on other writers who drew inspiration from him or attempted to emulate any aspect of his persona.  Mostly, he is a pathetic sot, boorish and abusive. It doesn’t look like he knew how to do anything with his hands other than work a fishing reel, fire a gun, clean a fish, lift a highball glass, or run his hand up a woman’s skirt. Could he cook, hang a painting, mow the lawn, change out a set of spark plugs, or unclog a sink? Naw.

    If the series seems too quick and too laden with adulation, sympathy, and praise, it is also—it seems— part of a profiteering enterprise: the Hemingway industry. I know. I live in its midst. My apartment is on the same street, just a few short blocks away from his childhood home. His birthplace and a museum in his name are equally close at hand. Last night, in the early evening, I went to Hemmingway’s [sic] Bistro with my mother, Carolyn, to sneak in a meal before the final episode in the three-part, six hour series aired. The owners, Chris and Lucia, old friends of the family, dropped by to say hello. It was our first time back since the pandemic scared us off over a year ago. The bistro is an oasis in Oak Park, one of its finest eateries. We had escargot and whitefish. For a long time it has served as my—to borrow one of Papa’s titles—”clean well-lighted place”. Chris (who is also Hemmingway’s chef) reminded me how he was forced to bung an extra “m” into his restaurant’s name to evade further lawsuits emanating from  “the estate” which owns the trademark for Papa’s surname. As the boxing promoter once said, “Only in America”.

    Tobias Wolff’s rearranged the furniture metaphor, evoked to emphasize just how extensive Ernest Hemingway’s influence is on American arts and letters, doesn’t get the job done. It is far too gentile. Hemingway re-arranged the furniture, sure. But he busted up a lot of it, left a lot of broken glass on the floor, and a fornicating brood of six-toed, Lucifer worshiping cats overrunning his little hacienda.

    Fighting, fishing, and fucking, the 3Fs, a couple of my college chums liked to call them. It’s too bad that “wallowing in self pity” doesn’t start with an “F”. Then we would have the 4Fs.

    So, in addition to rearranged furniture, there is the broken glass, the devil’s brood of six-toed cats, the compromised or destroyed lives of his many wives and children and generations of poor dumb male writers who were seduced into adopting his idea of self-destructive “manhood”. (Man-hoodwinked is more like it.)

    It is astounding—watching this series—how infrequently the word “pathetic” is used. Astounding how little misogyny—as a profound piece of his legacy—is dug into. Astonishing that the question is not even raised why, if we want an equanimous cancel culture (and I’m not saying that we do), his books aren’t getting chucked out of public libraries at a rate that does not equal or exceed the rate we are pitching out copies of The Cat in the Hat. Theodore Geisel mostly trafficked in unseemly imagery. The Hemster trafficked in, as the series reveals, liberal unironic use of the “N” word. Hell, we have trouble keeping copies of Papa’s beloved Huckleberry Finn in libraries, in which Mark Twain solely used the “N” word in an essential, historic context and in the interest of illuminating racial injustice and social hypocrisy. Why Hemingway should get off so lightly, the documentary never explains.

    My father went to Oak Park River Forest High School where he took classes with the same teacher who taught English to Ernest. Dad liked to repeat the story of the day when his teacher pointed to the desk where Ernest Hemingway had sat, it was in a room called “the English room”, and boast that Hemingway “didn’t get any of those words from him”. After watching the documentary, I realize Dad’s old teacher could have been referring to Hemingway’s use of the “N” word.

    It’s astonishing to see an image of Ernest Hemingway unfold over three days and six hours as a war profiteer, a person whose personal gain is so grossly tied to pain, suffering and death. The documentary makes it clear how much he reveled in the image of a hero but how little he lived up to the mark. It is difficult to associate his courage with sacrifice, the essential stuff that makes heroes.

    “Isn’t it pretty to think so” is still a great line. “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” is still a brilliant line of dialogue. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is still my favorite Ernest Hemingway short story.

  • A Case for Authenticity in the Fake News Pandemic

    Justin Townes Earle

    Authenticity is the absence of any difference between persona, the way we project ourselves, and our internal state of mind. It has to do with not just how we project ourselves but in how much our projections are reflected back to us from others. When that is achieved, you have a perfect example of success.

    On the surface, authenticity seems to place a person at a far distance from the ten personality disorders identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

    In any event, authenticityKernis, Michael H., and Brian M. Goldman. “A Multicomponent Conceptualization of Authenticity: Theory and Research.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38:283–357. Elsevier, 2006. seems like a worthy pursuit):

    In his work Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasized the importance of actions. Aristotle viewed ethics in terms of people’s pursuit of the ‘‘higher good.’’ Specifically, he proposed that the highest good is ‘‘activity of the soul in accordance with the best and most complete virtue in a complete life’’. Such pursuits are intimately tied with people’s well‐being (eudaemonia) which is attained by performing activities that reflect one’s true calling (self-realization).

    Artists and writers eagerly strive for authenticity as an essential and unavoidable part of their craft. It is probably true—to riff on the bard—that if you were not born with authenticity, you have to achieve authenticity, and, if you cannot achieve authenticity you had better hope it is thrust upon you.

    Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

    William Shakespeare

    In the case of any kind of artist, a writer, a poet, a potter, or a a glass blower, you want all of them: to be born authentic, to achieve more of it, and to have it thrust upon you (to riff on Joseph Heller). Yet, teachers, lawyers and mothers are artists too. All of us are artists in our own way. Authenticity is always in short supply.

    In the case of avowed artists, we find many fine examples having to do with “putting yourself out there”.

    Lou ReedDeCurtis, Anthony, and Hachette Book Group. Lou Reed: A Life. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2017. is an artist I admire for pursuing authenticity with extreme angst, costs be damned. He kept on remaking himself with almost every album he produced, paranoid that popularity was death to his art. To be a “sell-out” is the rock star’s favorite damnation.

    If you are a country music aficionado, you know there is an evergreen sub-genre dedicated to the defense of “real” country. It is legitimately an industry obsession. Country My Ass is Dale Watson Jr.’s lament with a not-too-subtle dig reserved for Taylor Swift. In Dark Bar and Juke Box, J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters, protests that “you won’t find no country on country radio”. This time the digs on Toby Keith:

    Give me a dark bar and a jukebox over that radio.
    Yeah, Toby just don't cut it, give me Haggard, give me Coe.
    And i'm tired of watching Nashville and it's washed up fashion show
    Cause you won't find no country on country radio

    I muse a lot lately about Justin Townes EarleJustin Townes Earle – Silencing Heckler – Slippin’ and Slidin’, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXD-Qwt11PQ. and his utterly professional demeanor on stage for a performance, handling two hecklers while continuing to tune his guitar and preparing for his next number. It is a master class in authenticity for a guy who is stoned out of his mind. He was utterly and completely “putting himself out there”, spilling his guts on his checkered history with drug addiction. Check it out on Youtube and the comments that follow, speculating whether there are two guitars playing on stage or just one. It is just one, Justin’s. It is his technique that makes it sound like two.

    A dear friend turned me on to Steve Hely’s novel, How I Became a Famous NovelistHely, Steve. How I Became a Famous Novelist. 1st ed. New York: [Berkeley, Calf.]: Black Cat; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2009., a case of “imagining the future you want for yourself” if ever there was. Every line in it will make you bust a stitch until you’re in an ambulance on a gurney on your way to the ER where you will get new stitches just so you can go home and keep reading. It is that hilarious.

    The other funny thing about How I Became a Famous Novelist is its relentless skewering of the million-and-one ways authors go about being not wantonly inauthentic but rather ever… so… slyly… inauthentic.

    The protagonist, Pete Tarslow, is more of the wanton kind. He is trying to make the jump from one fraudulent career, penning college admission essays for foreign students as a meretricious ghost writer, to a tonier and ideally more lucrative form of fraudulence: writing novels for fame. His motives are pure; among them, he wants to humiliate the gal who jilted him at her wedding.

    So the author, Hely, in his bid for novelistic fame, invents a protagonist, Tarslow, who in his bid for novelistic fame, goes about it by filching tricks of the trade from already famous novelists. Meta enough for you?

    Tarslow studies with keen desire the whole pantheon of published authors in search for clues to their success, every time turning up fraud. He zeroes in on “Preston Brooks”, a John Irving doppelgänger, novelist, director of a creative writing program, and author of Kindness to Birds (don’t you love it?). Of the novel Kindness, Tarslow observes:

    One could spend hours parsing that intricate latticework of literary sewage: the cartoon bayou dialect, the touches of “realist” detail, the labored folksy imagery, the vague notes of spirituality and transcendence muddled together to make it palatable to anyone.

    Tarslow excerpts Kindness which I repeat here so you can see what he’s talking about:

    “Is they chickory in that coffee?” she bellowed, in a tired voice that still shook like a thunderclap, a calling-hounds voice.

    Need I go on? Okay, I will:

    “No, ma’am,” Gabriel hollered back, steadying himself against the buckboard of the Tidecraft Firebird, swaying in the swamp water that swelled and fell like the breast of a mother asleep. “No chickory, but you sure a Cajun woman asking for chickory coffee when you stuck on a patch-tar roof and more water coming up, they sayin. Now reach out your hand Mez Deveroux.”

    It would be wrong were Hely not to acknowledge the self-mythological prowess of some successful authors (Hemingway and Kerouac come to mind). He doesn’t disappoint. Again the understudy, Tarslow provides an example from his mentor Preston, who has his obligatory “birth of a writer story” in the can:

    Then one morning I woke up in an alley in Minot, North Dakota in the snow. I rooted around in a trash can, hoping to find an old jacket. And I found a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men. Maybe from an angel’s hand. Maybe just a lazy schoolboy. But I read it. And John Steinbeck showed me there was stronger stuff than whiskey.

    Once you start to read How I Became a Successful Novelist as satire or as a lightly veiled critique of the United States Creative Writing Industry[mfn]The Chronicle of Higher Education. “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” February 10, 2014. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/[/mfn]., Hely’s book reveals how—even if you look like an author, swim like an author, walk like an author, and quack like an author—underneath it all, you’re still very probably just a duck. His book freaks you out by showing you the very subtle ways we can undermine an otherwise genuine mission to achieve authenticity.

    If I taught writing, I would start my class with Steve Hely’s book. I would encourage the class to write parody, heaps and heaps of it, so my students could learn what it feels like to be even every so slightly inauthentic.

    For Hemingway, they might write:

    A goose, separated from the flock, damn-near skimming the flat mirror surface of the lake, flew low and straight and true, in a line so straight it might make an arrow quiver.

    The hope would be that, if they did enough of these, they would learn to avoid inauthenticity like COVID-19.

    Footnotes

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