Posted on 04/05/2021 12:01:41 PM PDT by Borges
The idea of a Ken Burns documentary on Ernest Hemingway seems both obvious and a bit absurd. Burns’ long project of celebrating the most dad-friendly pillars of American culture and history—the Civil War, baseball, jazz—makes Hemingway (after Mark Twain, covered by Burns in 2002) almost inevitable. Hemingway’s life was full of exciting adventures, and, not incidentally, he is surely the most photographed writer of the 20th century, so there’s lots of visual material to draw from. Yet after decades of dominating ideas about how a writer should live and work, Hemingway feels increasingly irrelevant today, his influence diminished to a vanishing point, his reputation corroded by a dated personal mythos. According to the Chicago Tribune, even in Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby alone outsells all of Hemingway’s work combined, and the Hemingway Foundation had to launch a GoFundMe campaign to keep the museum at his birthplace open.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
never cared for hemandhaws pointless stories,,, seemed like the ultimate cynic to me,
“Dead white guy. Let’s write a column to declare him irrelevant!”
I’ve got this set to record. I think he led an interesting, colorful life.
I keep sending him a check, but he just keeps reinvoicing me all over again.
When I first started out writing, my dad who was a yuuuuge Hemingway fan criticized me because his hero Hemingway wrote standing up while I sat down. I told him that Hemingway also wrote while drunk so should I also follow suit?
If Ken Burns is involved, I assume there is a strong race angle. Was Hemingway part of the KKK or otherwise politically incorrect? Will the documentary give special credit to Langston Hughes or somebody? Burns never tells a straight-forward story about whites.
His Mark Twain bio was really good as I recall. As was the Roosevelts series.
We were tortured to read The Sun Also Rises in HS...................
I admire Hemingway’s no-frills writing style. He lived an interesting life but he certainly was NOT a good role model in his personal life.
I am guessing that this will not bring up his communist sympathies ...
Burns is a skilled film maker. But I think he is a prime example of a historian with a Progressive agenda. I don’t trust the guy at all and I don’t watch his stuff.
Never write a sentence with less than 35 words.
Never stay on a miniscule subject longer than 35 pages.
Never write a paragraph with less than 35 thoughts...............
I wouldn’t say we really “owe him” and I don’t see much of a legacy. He wrote a few decent things, but was fairly pretentious and skewed left way too easily.
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/192696
I think your dad may have been jealous because Hemingway got to hang out with Lauren Bacall in Spain.
Owe him?
He still owes me fifty bucks.
“Can you spot me fifty? I’ve got a new book coming up that’s sure to be a hit. It’s a sequel. I call it The Old Man And The Sea Part 2. The old guy goes fishing again only this time a big white whale comes by looking for a bus stop. It can’t miss!”
Hemingway wrote standing up because he had a serious case of hemorrhoids. Sitting was painful for him. I don’t know how much this influenced his writing. His prose is beautiful but I don’t think he had much to say that’s still significanlty relevant.
My dad actually knew Hemingway and how he knew him is so unbelievable I won't say in public because I would be accused as being as big a liar as Hunter Biden. But buy me a beer in private and I just might open up about that. BTW, anytime the subject of writing came up my dad would go on and on and on and on about Hemingway. He got really mad at me when I quoted what James Jones (my favorite novelist) said about Hemingway.
Hemingway played a writer in life. WIn his time what he did when he wasn’t writing was more important to the image than his writing. When we no longer have the guy playing the two fisted, hard drinking super macho writer, WHAT he actually wrote can’t support a literary legacy.
I, an ardent reader, couldnt stand his “stories”.They forced me to read The Old Man and the Sea, and I tried For Whom the Bell Tolls when I was 10 or 11 and I came away with the very strong impression that the author very much doubted his manhood.
As Howard Stern said, proper wiping prevents hemorrhoids so what does that say about Hemingway?
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