Book Notes: "Ernest Hemingway on Writing" by Larry W. Phillips

Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Phillips puts together a collection of quotes from Hemingway's work and also from a number of letters and interviews. I am not sure Hemingway would have been happy about this book, although Mr Hemingway's fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway gave the editor (Phillips) permission to use the various quotes from Hemingway's major works. Phillips' major contribution is putting together Hemingway's thoughts on writing in one convenient place. Other than that, it smacks of someone getting to publish a book simply because the subject is famous. It is a very quick read and I enjoyed reading it, but I was a little disappointed that it is just a series of quotes organised thematically. Worth a read, worth keeping to refer back to, but reading about Hemingway just isn't the same as reading Hemingway.



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Book Notes: "Hemingway on War" by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway on War by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Although I enjoyed this collection of works I have read many of the collection's stories and sections of Hemingway's books before. It was worth reading again and a few of the pieces of journalism were unfamiliar but the collected works released by Hemingway's family are more like homages to the great man than when reading a Hemingway work for the first time. As I have completed almost all of Hemingway's major published works I have little choice but to work through the themed collections of Hemingway on War, Fishing, Writing, etc. While previously unread works are few and far between it is still worth the effort but not as good as a Hemingway original.



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Book Notes: "Hemingway on Fishing" by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway on Fishing by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an enjoyable collection of Hemingway's many descriptions and depictions and also his knowledge of fishing. Although many of the passages are from Hemingway novels and novella I have already completed, the Nick Adams and various Esquire, Vogue and Holiday magazine articles dating from the 1930s through to the 1950s are well worth having in one collection. I was particular enthralled by the Esquire article where Hemingway outlines the story of the Old Man and the Sea, back in 1936. It makes sense of his theory that the best writing is based on truth but it is completely made-up. Regardless, this book has inspired me to go fishing more often, and I have decided to learn how to fly-fish at the next opportunity.



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To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Modernist Masterpiece

Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall, the inspiration for Woolf's lighthouse at the Hebrides, where the "unstory" takes place. Photo by Chris Combe, 17 February 2015 [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite two short introductions to the book, I was not prepared for the psychological - or ethereal - or cerebral - or emotional? - context of this modernist novel. Now I have read a few commentaries about the novel, my lack of preparation could have been overcome with a bit of investigation. But the backstory on Woolf's style of prose and her role as a modernist gatekeeper is fascinating.

Whenever I think of Virginia Woolf, I immediately think of Hemingway for two reasons. 

First, Woolf's prose is the exact opposite of Hemingway's. Hemingway's prose is brief and clear and fine. 

Whereas, if one were to turn one's thoughts into one's sentences, if one might have, one day when thinking about writing prose, an idea about how a thought could be put into a sentence, which is silly because thoughts are always put into sentences - especially in novels, even people's speech is spoken in sentences, usually - but if one could imagine what a sentence might look like if it were to resemble a string of thoughts, or at least our inner monologue while thinking, while simultaneously appearing as if it was dialogue by a character, yet it wasn't, it was the inner monologue practising or speaking without actually verbalising the words, then that is as close as one might get to Woolf's prose.

And that really is it. This is a story about the thoughts and feelings of a group of people who surround a family but with the gap of a decade (which includes the Great War), and the actual story is more like an "unstory". There is no real plot - there is a location, there is socialising and limited action and dialogue.

Most of the story is built upon the inner monologues of the characters. I was hooked. It was almost like reading a book about my own mind at a dinner party or with a party of people, especially where I am concerned with either being hospitable or polite or else socially acceptable. And that is what Woolf's characters do.

Second (if you had forgotten I had a first, then I am merely mirroring Woolf's style), I knew from my reading of some of Hemingway's work (and work about Hemingway) that he took issue with Woolf's review of his short story collection, Men Without Women.

In her review, entitled An Essay in Criticism, Woolf basically says, Hemingway, you are no modernist. So I thought Hemingway then went off to hate on her a bit, like he did with so many of his so-called friends from the Paris years.

But no, Hemingway was stung by Woolf's criticism. In my copy of the three-volume The Letters of  Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge), Hemingway tells his publisher Max Perkins and his friend and fellow author Scott Fitzgerald that he can't write because of the criticism, he just wants to be left alone but the criticism won't let him be. And here was me thinking that Hemingway was thinking, Get in the ring, Woolf! But no.

Why so much about Hemingway when writing about a novel by Woolf? Well, Woolf was in effect a modernist gatekeeper. And this novel, to me, represents Woolf at the height of her modernist powers, even more so than in Mrs Dalloway. 

Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of creatives and artists who lived elite lifestyles and often gave support to young artists. Hemingway notes this in his letters, but also notes that he is not one of them, and rather than give him a leg up, Woolf was standing on his neck.

To the Lighthouse was published in 1927; so was Men Without Women. Hemingway was on the rise (he was younger than Woolf), Woolf was at her peak. Both would die by suicide. Despite their differences in style of prose, the similarities outweigh the differences if one scratches the surface.

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf does what Hemingway doesn't do, except in his letters. That is, to give life to the life of the mind, without the need for heroics or even a substantial plot. I find her work sits well with T.S. Eliot's modernist poetry. 

I regard this novel as Woolf's masterpiece. It captures the life of the mind and the inner monologue that we rarely share with others (unless we wish to be snubbed, It's called an inner monologue for a reason). But I daresay others will identify with the thoughts that fly through our minds when in company, and Woolf gives us insight into the life of the various minds of her characters.

That she is able to create a story out of her characters' private thoughts is marvellous, and, for me, certainly captures the spirit of modernism as far as I understand the concept.

Book Notes: "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As Hemingway's first novel, it is certainly beyond my comprehension how he could ever understand so much at the age of 27. I am reluctant to disclose too much for fear of spoilers, but the conclusion to the story is very real. The bullfighting is described in ways that make me want to see one, yet simultaneously I am appalled at the thought. Hemingway seems to have felt the same way. He also describes concussion in a way that can only be described by someone who has suffered several concussions. There are no lies in this work. I am becoming accustomed to the meandering first three-quarters of the typical Hemingway plot. It isn't hard work but it isn't gripping either. He seems to lull you into a comfortable sense of normalcy which doesn't end but the last quarter builds and builds to a climax in the last sentence that unfolds the final emotion. With the conclusion to "A Farewell to Arms" I burst into tears. With this novel I exclaimed, "That fucking sucks!" Hemingway's work is seriously brilliant while incredibly timeless. I am not sure whether it is simply cultural alignment or not, but the connection between the pedestrian and the nostalgic intertwined with the exotic European setting connects one's past to Hemingway's past to the power of two. He takes you to the place he has been and then where he is in the story. I am convinced this is the result of his technique of writing as the protagonist in the first person while excising, completely, the presence of the narrator. Brilliant stuff!



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Book Notes: "A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't help thinking that "A Moveable Feast" is a kind of Facebook into Hemingway's Parisian past. Hemingway writes of himself and in particular, Scott Fitzgerald, as if he were posting on social media private details about a recent event. I don't mean to cheapen the work by comparing prosaic Facebook with Hemingway's genius but the raw public openness is analogous. I felt Hemingway's poor and happy nostalgia marks the end of his innocence and the very ending made me tingle all over - at once identifying with him while hoping it is all in the past. In short, a masterpiece.



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Book Notes: "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I must admit that while I have been mesmerised by anything Hemingway for some time now, it was a bit of an effort to get through the first half of this book. While my attitude towards the book changed each time I got back into it, I think the source of the problem for me was the emptiness that can only be expressed by those who have first-hand experience of large-scale conventional war. Nonetheless, and despite the historical background to the story, I found it to be written clearly in the present tense. Yet I couldn’t help but sense the emptiness I had once felt when I was about seven years old. I remember visiting, for no particular reason, an old war widow, who gave me two shillings (five cent pieces - one for me and the other for my sister) but then she cried and pointed to the faded photographs of her husband and her brothers who were all killed in the Second World War. The empty feeling of the interior of her dark house with its art deco furniture and the smell of stale tobacco smoke accompanied me throughout “A Farewell to Arms” and I think I avoided it until I decided that I would finish it off in one go. As the climax emerged suddenly towards the end of the book, I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. By this stage of the plot the war was almost an afterthought for the main characters and bits of classic Hemingway emerge (beards, boxing, and booze). But by the end, I needed some quiet time to emotionally recover. I’ve never cried from reading a book before. I still don’t like this book. Nevertheless, it is truly magnificent and how somebody in their mid-twenties could comprehend so much beggars belief. It can only be genius.



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Book Notes: "On Paris" by Ernest Hemingway

On Paris by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This collection of journalistic pieces was written for the Toronto Star in the early 1920s and focus on Paris. Hemingway's early work here is part travel writer and part gossip columnist. The style would seem out of place today and, from personal experience, editors are only to ready to "correct" such work written in the "your correspondent" third person. It is a shame, in that Hemingway's style is very readable and rather witty. I doubt articles written about a foreign city would be of interest today, but at the time, many North Americans were keen on the exchange rate with France and Paris, of course, was a major destination. Moreover, I doubt that the "Orientalist" approach to reporting on foreign countries would be so readily apply to today's France, although destinations that still remain "foreign" to most Westerners may receive this treatment as a matter of course. This is a short but fruitful read and I was particularly impressed by the format and the cover, which makes for a robust yet accessible paperback style. I rarely comment on this aspect of a book but the cover style is remarkable.



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Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Virginia Woolf novel I have read, but I have read her work before, specifically A Room of One's Own, where Ms Woolf writes about writing and feminism, and I found this interesting, even though Ernest Hemingway, my favourite author, didn't like Ms Woolf, and I wasn't sure whether this was because she was a rival or because she was a woman, and given her feminism and her love of women, more generally, I was not surprised that Hemingway, in his obvious then-contemporary male chauvinism, might not like Ms Woolf's views, but of course this was before I had read Mrs. Dalloway, which really is an interesting work, and rivals Hemingway's themes, at least in terms of the psychological impact of war, but Ms Woolf also covers the "war and society" aspects that Hemingway tends to ignore, outside of his protagonists' meanderings through society, so in this regard, at least, Ms Woolf's work differs, yet tends to be gender-focused in its own way, and that is not to say that it is bad, for it isn't, or that I found it difficult to read, for it wasn't, but there was something about it that made it difficult to read in bits and pieces, and it would be much better suited to a long sitting, if one could find the time, because it tends to read a little like James Joyce, even though Ms Woolf and her husband (notice I use Ms as I am sure 'Mrs' Woolf would have done, even though the New York Times referred to her as 'Mrs Woolf' in her obituary, which was, interestingly, only a 'believed dead' obituary because of a suicide note and her missing body, which is also interesting given that Hemingway, who really didn't like her so much, also took his own life), Leonard, were unable to print Ulysses because it was too big for their printing establishment, known as Hogarth Press, and all this from reading what is, comparatively, a rather short book, almost a novella, but if I were to record what I gleaned most importantly from this book is not so much that Woolf was a good or bad writer, for surely her work is very good, but that the reason Hemingway didn't like her had nothing to do with their polar opposites in terms of gender and so on, for surely even in death they were alike, but the thing that is most striking is the difference in their prose, and it is for this reason, I believe, that Hemingway didn't like Woolf, not for the aforementioned issues, but mostly because her writing leaves one feeling rather frantic and out of breath, which may well be a deliberate technique, and it surely works, as in leaving one breathless, but what I am not sure about is whether this has anything to do with the content or the simple fact that Ms Woolf's sentences are just so bloody long.

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Book Notes: "Men Without Women" by Ernest Hemingway

Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've never been a fan of short stories, but Hemingway is surely the master. "Fifty Grand" is my favourite. I was reading it while walking around. I couldn't put it down.



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Book Notes: "A Clean Well Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway

A Clean Well Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've always had a nagging thought that short stories were a cop-out for an author of novels - a bit like a media article compared to a journal article or a monograph for an academic. This particular short story seems to have been popular for its treatment of the Lord's Prayer, but I am spellbound by Hemingway's ability to shake loose a raft of emotions in such a short space. Maybe it is his self-centredness I identify with - I am not sure - but I seem to be able to identify with all of the characters, torn from the feeling of working with the public in a dull job,to being grateful for a job, to being old and not wanting to be in a popular place but to drink one's poison in a "clean well lighted place", then to hopelessness with a sense of resignation, then dignity and contentment all in one. Doing all of that in a short story is nothing short of remarkable, and consequently, I have changed my mind about short stories generally.



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Book Notes: "Death in the Afternoon" by Ernest Hemingway

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This work has challenged a number of my views about life and death and culture and globalisation. Regardless of one's thoughts on the topic of the book, Hemingway's ability to weave dialogue and stories into a polemic while creating a historical document is almost classical. This book is rather like reading a history of the ancient events of The Colosseum written first-hand. The only difference with this book is the photographs.



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The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

Mount Kilimanjaro (1938) via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is drawn from other works and I have read all of the stories several times before either online or in other collected works. Rather than read in awe of the master, this reading had me feeling sorry for the depressing note to all things. While this makes the short stories art, it also hints at a fragility, but not of manhood, as Hemingway's critics often suggest, but of the absurd. And yet Hemingway had no time for the absurd, or at least, Malcolm Cowley with:

...a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement...

Yet here, in this collection, I couldn't help but think of the meaninglessness of life and Hemingway's enunciation of the absurd, building over and over in a collection put together, not by Hemingway, but by others. I suspect this is worth looking into further and a few re-reads of Hemingway's major works might benefit from a view through this lens.

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Book Notes: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber & Other Stories" by Ernest Hemingway

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber & Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The thought of safari is horrible, but in the context of the times, Hemingway writes of courage and cowardice in the way that appears to all of us in the midnight hour. The ability to move the reader in such a short story is remarkable.



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Book Notes: "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was so good I couldn't get the circulation flowing in my hand for ages and the over-stretching of my back was killing me. By the time I got back to shore - hey, hang on, I was only reading this! For a moment there my imagination was so vividly fired up I was in the story. This now-classic is nothing less than brilliant.



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Lessons from my cat Desi, or: On not doing what we ought and continuing not to do it

Desi the Disaster is living up to his name.

My cat Desi has not been well. He suffers from a rare skin condition called skin fragility syndrome. It is a result of very little collagen production. His skin is so fragile he can rip himself open just by scratching.

There was a chance he would be put down recently (while I was teaching in Hong Kong). When my wife told me "Today was not a good day to die", I burst into tears.

Desi was a rescue from the Crookwell Veterinary Hospital. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him and he came home with me that day. I was never a cat person; now I always will be. As I sat in my hotel room in Hong Kong, all I could think about was Desi and what I could do if I was at home.

Ernest Hemingway loved cats. The words of Chapter 8 of In Our Time were burning in my brain as I thought about how I would feel if I went through all the anguish of being away, only to return and keep doing the same old same old.

Ernest Hemingway (1924) In Our Time, chapter 8, p. 12.

We have been researching ways to manage Desi's condition and help him heal. Our vet is on board. One journal article mentions that vitamin C can work, and so far it seems to be working. We will be adding yoghurt and hemp oil to his diet. I have learnt how to use VetBond (super glue) for first aid. But it is far from over.

As the Stoics would say, external events beyond our control provide us with opportunities to practise our virtues.

As James Allen would say, "Faith and the living of faith".

I didn't want to be one who "never told anybody". I can't go back to how I was. Desi taught me that.

My Favourite Apps: TasteKid, Hemingway, and Vocabify

I would prefer this to an app any day, but I admit the apps reviewed here are good! (Flickr: Paul Townsend/CC BY-ND 2.0)

I don't normally like apps of any kind. I'd much rather use a browser and a website. But that is an attitude rather than a fact, and when it comes to apps that solve life's petty dramas, then I must change my tune. Here I give a quick review of TasteKid, Hemingway, and my latest app, Vocabify.

TasteKid (now TasteDive - WTF?)

By a random trial and error method, I have found various books, movies, and music by making connections between various media. For example, one of my pianola rolls is a foxtrot entitled The Flapper Wife, and this led me to the book, and then on to a series of movies and music of the period, by following the trail of authors, publishers, composers, and musicians. For several years now, I have been using TasteKid to do the same thing, but with considerably less effort. Is it just me or did TasteKid change its name to TasteDive while I was writing this? Now it makes me think of nasty tasting things from "down there". Oh, I am so annoyed! Semantics aside, the recommendation engine is good, and has helped me to discover lots of new music, books, and movies, based on the recommendations of others. For example, today I searched for a composer like Richard Wagner, and discovered the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Whether the similarities would pass scrutiny is not the point. The recommendations provide opportunities to look beyond our own bounded rationality, and for that, this is my favourite app. Oh, wait, it is a website. Oh well. But why oh why did they rename it TasteDive?

Hemingway

When writing for news media websites, there are a variety of text editors and readability measures that help authors to cut down superfluous, flowery, or woolly (I love that word) sentences to help focus on plain language. It is not my ideal way to write, but it does tend to force one into the journalistic style of writing, which is indeed a skill unto its own. My favourite author, Ernest Hemingway, was known for his iceberg principle, where he strips down his sentences to the bare minimum. This enables the reader to use their imagination to fill in the blanks. The app requires payment of a fee, but I do not mind paying for something that is useful. Think of it in terms of design (see Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars):

[P]erfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

Vocabify

Scattered throughout my travel and writing diaries are words that I am familiar with, but do not really know. I write these down, with definitions, but time and again I see the same words, and I ask myself, what is the definition of this word? Typically, I cannot answer, even though I might be able to use the word in a sentence. Then along comes Vocabify. There are a couple of words that it is unable to provide definitions for, and I provided feedback to the creator. I wanted to be able to add words. But this seems to defeat the purpose of the app, in that it attaches to databases with decent definitions, and one can only add words from these databases. Most of the words that I cannot find in Vocabify are technical jargon in either political science or philosophy. But the creator told me this in a quick response to my feedback, and it is only in beta form at present. The app operates via an add-in to my browser, and I can add words as I discover them (I have already combed my diaries for my lists of words and added these). The app then sends me an email each day with one of my words and its definition. The app works on the basis of rote learning, and frankly, for learning definitions or the spelling of words, much like tables of multiplication, there is no better way to learn.

So there you have it. Three "apps" that I use and enjoy on a regular basis.

Lessons from Boy's Own Macabre: How not to be a twerp

Boy's Own Paper masthead, circa 1890s [Public Domain] via Flickr.

The Most Dangerous Game and Other Stories of Menace and Adventure by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes I fear reading short story collections like this are little more than entertainment. Masculine, turn of the century Boy's Own macabre entertainment in this case. But writing about one's reading has its own kind of spiral effect, where learning about the authors leads from one thing to another. 

I purchased this book online because it listed Hemingway as the author and I had never heard of "The Most Dangerous Game". This title piece is actually by Richard Connell, and reminds me of Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". Hemingway's work was "The Killers" (with the racism appropriately edited out), which seemed somewhat out of place with the other authors' work. 

Five of the eight authors were all new to me, but I am pleased to own a copy of Jack London's "To Build a Fire" which I had only heard previously in a YouTube video narration.

Each of the stories has some form of inevitability as its theme, especially Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", the residue of which is still clinging to my thoughts. Kurt Vonnegut (another author I am yet to get around to) wrote in his 2005 work, Man Without a Country (p. 17):

Do you know what a twerp is? ...I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read the greatest American short story, which is ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Ambrose Bierce.

In the same book, Vonnegut (p. 18) writes:

‘Socialism’ is no more an evil word than ‘Christianity.’ Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition.

He sounds like my kind of author.

H.G. Wells' "The Country of the Blind" was also new to me, but of course I have read his work previously. The others, which include H.H. Munroe (Saki), W.W. Jacobs, and Carl Stephenson are all freshly discovered and open up for me an entirely unexplored area of turn of the century literature.

Sometimes, taking a break from the classics and the odd tome is necessary to give me the feeling that I am getting somewhere with my reading. On writing about my reading, I find many lessons that I would have missed had I just consumed, rather than digested, the work.

The sense of inevitability that permeates this collection is not of the hopeless sense: sometimes we are just lucky. But the themes mirror a key Stoic lesson about luck. When someone else is unlucky, remember - Fortune was aiming at me.

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Mad Men: Poem Unlimited!

Learning to enjoy poetry with Don Draper

Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of poems made an appearance in Season 2, Episode 1 of Mad Men, and concludes with the eponymous title for the final episode of the season. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sees a guy reading this book in a bar, and asks, "Is it good?". The guy says, “I don’t think you’d like it". Later, Don is reading the book.

I enjoy "discovering" literature through other books and media. One of my favourite discoveries was Lady Rose's Daughter by Mrs Humphry Ward, where a journalist visiting my home town in Gunning in 1905 tells of reading the book while waiting for a delayed train. I have since read numerous references to Mrs Humphry Ward, including in Downton Abbey. Both Downton Abbey and Mad Men include numerous cultural references that are worth pursuing.

Indeed, my fascination with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald began with Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which I first watched while finalising the submission of my PhD thesis. Since casting that monkey off my back, I have been reading great literature as often as I can in an effort to "catch up" (as Harold Bloom said, we often end up reading "against the clock").

It has taken me some time to come to enjoy reading poetry; my earlier hard work in reading Homer and Virgil stood me in good stead. Yet I recall a quote from The Big Short:

Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.

At the time, I might have agreed. But after reading O'Hara's work, I had to think why, as someone who randomly writes poetry, that I would shy away from reading it. And then it all flooded back.

It was in 1981. There was a monsoonal storm outside the old Queenslander classroom in Cairns, Far North Queensland. I was sitting next to the window on the verandah and it was our Year 6 English exam. We had to write a poem. I looked out the window and I wrote a poem about the storm, as if it were a group of demons "playing their game of bedlam" and then moving on. (Bedlam was a rough game all the boys in the school used to play. It was invariably banned as we cycled through new variants of rough games that often ended in bloodied noses.) Debussy would have been proud (the memory makes me think of one of my favourite pieces - the "symphonic poem" Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune).

I was quite happy about the poem, went home, and thought nothing of it. The next day, Mum was called to the school, and I was accused of plagiarism. No child could write such a poem. After what I remember as the longest time, it was decided that my poem was indeed original, and I was awarded 100% for the exam.

But then it got worse. They made me read it out to the entire class - a combined class of about 60 eleven-year-old children. My reference to the game of "Bedlam" wasn't a hit. Kids today would have said that this reference was "lame". What I didn't know then was that the other kids were jealous. But after the whole experience, my thoughts were simple. Fuck poetry. Until I read O'Hara.

I hope the reader will forgive my indulgence in my pitiful primary school memories (channelling Turgenev here), but O'Hara's work brought all this back to me. But not just childhood memories. O'Hara refers to Greek mythology, botany, music, composers, artists (many I had to look up), but I could recognise O'Hara channelling Walt Whitman when I read a line in "Mayakovsky", the final poem in the book:

I leap into the leaves, green like the sea.

So now I find myself wanting to read poetry again. The first thing I did today was to renew my subscription to The Paris Review. (Today I received the last edition of my subscription.) I don't want to miss out on any more new poems, and I will go back and read my old editions. I might even start writing poetry again. All this from buying a book based on a cultural reference in Mad Men.

But one thing that struck me while reading Meditations was what voice would the author use if he were to read his own poems? Would it be lyrical and sweet? How would he pause, where would he place his emphasis? I was shocked to watch a few of Frank O'Hara's readings on YouTube. It was a bit like listening to Ernest Hemingway's voice in his Nobel Prize speech after listening to Corey Stoll speak the way we wished Hemingway spoke (in Midnight in Paris). Yet it gives me confidence that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Magazine and movie people might provide us with perfect images of the literary greats, but great literature is written by real people who live real lives and have foibles like the rest of us.

Why read poetry? I will need to buy Harold Bloom's book to find out in more detail. But for me, at least, reading O'Hara has opened up a whole new world of inner experience, sentiment, and beauty. His work makes me feel exactly as I do when listening to the work of Claude Debussy or my favourite American composer John Adams. It isn't sublime, it's magical. It makes sense of the term that up until now has vexed me: Poem Unlimited.

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Blixen on Living the Colonial Life

Jurij Moskvitin (middle) acompaning Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen (right) meeting composer Igor Stravinskij (left) at the City Hall of Copenhagen, 25 May 1959. By Jan Adelfeldt/Scanpix [Copyrighted free use], via Wikimedia Commons.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was surprised to discover that the book is nothing at all like the move starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. 

Written in English (Blixen was multi-lingual), there is no real hint of the marriage to Baron Bror Fredrik von Blixen-Fineck and their separation in 1920-21 and subsequent divorce in 1925. Nor is there anything more than a subtle hint of the affection for Denys George Finch Hatton (as portrayed by Robert Redford in the movie). 

And who could have known that Blixen suffered from syphilis, courtesy of her philandering husband?

This is an interesting work and reads in part like a diary. Various scholars consider the style and arrangement of the book into certain themes and chronological devices, but this didn't strike me as anything special. It was Blixen's obvious feeling and emotion and love for life in British East Africa (Kenya) that drives the stories. 

One cannot help but be sad when she leaves the farm. One can only imagine, too, what it would be like to live in that timeless place. 

Having said that, the attitude toward the original inhabitants of Kenya reads like any other historically-inspired work of the 1930s, with frequent literary comparisons - as opposed to overtly racist vilification - of some of the characters to monkeys and other animals of the area. Indeed, it is hard to escape the imperialist attitudes of the times and how, given the people had lived on the land for generations, Colonialism suddenly relegates them to the status of squatters (six months of labour in exchange for living on and utilising the uncultivated land of the white farmers). 

There is a much admiration for "the noble savage" that permeates the work, despite Blixen's obvious love for Africa. 

More interesting are the stories of Blixen herself - partly captured in the movie - and that she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature several times, losing out to John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. 

Blixen was quite the character, and her other works might be worth investigating. But it is difficult to identify with her in her Colonial context. To be sure, the work captures the place and times, but living in the post-Colonial era, one can only wonder at the past.

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