Posts Tagged ‘Hemingway’
“The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen”*…
… and used. Consider, for example, this affecting example of literary collage from Jez Burrows…
The valley was enclosed by rugged peaks, security fencing and annihilative firepower—a state secret. Nothing for miles around. They sat opposite one another they sat in the shade of a tree.
“Repeat the words after me: A fish is an animal.”
“A fish is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“A cow is an animal.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.”
“We go to the zoo to see the animals.” She nodded in affirmation.
“Very good.”
“Very good.” She looked up with an absent smile and burst out laughing. Its mouth snapped into a tight, straight line and there was a fraught silence. Her body tensed up.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to insult you!” She leaned forward to take its hand and a cross-current of electricity seemed to flow between them. She felt guilty now, and a little uneasy. She looked at it warily, this naive, simple creature, with its straightforward and friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances—a shimmering evanescent bubble of cycloid scales and yellow fur agleam in the sun. Circuitry that Karen could not begin to comprehend. Since Parker’s research did not pan out too well, now she was the linchpin of the experiment. Her voice wobbled dangerously, but she brought it under control.
“I’m really sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
To her astonishment, it smiled and emitted a sound like laughter. She felt an inward sense of relief.
“I want an apple.”
“When you ask for something you should say, ‘Please.’”
“Please give me an apple.” It rolled the word around its mouth. She smiled distantly.
“I’ll think about it, amigo.”
Collins COBUILD Primary Learner’s Dictionary
Collins English Dictionary
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary
My First Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
More very short stories composed of example sentences from dictionaries: “Dictionary Stories” from @jezburrows.
Apposite: Austin Kleon‘s newspaper blackout poetry. For example…
(Image at top: source)
* Charles Simic
###
As we juxtapose, we might send carefully constructed birthday greetings to Gertrude Stein; she was born on this date in 1874. An American ex-pat in Paris, Stein was an author, poet, and memoirist (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). But she is probably best remembered as the host of a Paris salon where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art– including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse– regularly met.
Hemingway described her role as both a host and a mentor to a generation of artists in in A Moveable Feast. The Mother of Us All was the title of a Virgil Thomson opera for which Stein wrote the libretto. While the subject of the opera, Susan B. Anthony, certainly deserves the epithet, so, many have observed, did its author.
“They get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing”*…
From the 1817 handbook The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary (available on the Internet Archive, via the U.S. National Library of Medicine)…
This book was edited by John Redman Coxe, a Philadelphia physician, sometime professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and pharmacist. Coxe published several other medical references, including one on smallpox vaccination. (He was a proponent of the practice and vaccinated himself and his infant son in 1801, write the editors of Penn Biographies, “as encouragement for others to do the same.”)
The book, Coxe wrote in a preface, was meant to be a quick reference for both the novice and the practiced physician, who might need a dictionary “to recal [sic] to his memory the explanation of some medical word.” The reference aimed for complete comprehensiveness, and the advertising copy used to sell the book in England boasted: “We have endeavored to include every Latin and technical term that has ever occurred in the PRACTICE of MEDICINE, SURGERY, PHARMACY, BOTANY, and CHEMISTRY.”…
More on this proto-DSM at “Lists of Types of Mania and Melancholy, Compiled for Early–19th-Century Doctors.”
* Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
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As we reach for the Xanax, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Ezra Pound was turned over to the American Army by surrendering Italian forces; Pound, who’d been branded a traitor, was transferred back to the U.S., and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C., where he was imprisoned for 13 years.
A poet who was a major figure of the early modernist movement, Pound was the developer of the “Imagist” school, and the “godfather” of a number of now-well-known contemporaries– among them, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Deeply troubled by the carnage of World War I, Pound moved to Paris, then to Italy in the 1920s, and embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini, whose policies he vocally supported.
While in Army custody, he began work on sections of The Cantos– that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948)– for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress… igniting an enormous controversy.
His release in 1958 was the result of a campaign by writers including Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, and Hemingway. Pound, who was believed to be suffering dementia, returned to Italy.
The best of Pound’s writing – and it is in the Cantos – will last as long as there is any literature.
-Ernest Hemingway
“I have had UFO experiences, and yet, at the same time, I can easily be convinced that none of it is true”*…
In 1995, as part of the Walt Disney Company Presents series (that was hosted by Michael Eisner, doing his not-very-successful best to channel Walt), Disney aired “Alien Encounters.” A documentary that opens with footage of “an actual spacecraft from another world, piloted by alien intelligence,” and the pronouncement that “intelligent life from distant galaxies is now attempting to make open contact with the human race,” it only aired once.
* Frank Black (AKA Black Francis, of the Pixies)
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As we look to the skies, we might spare a thought for Gertrude Stein; she died on this date in 1946. An American ex-pat, Stein was an author, poet, and memoirist (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). But she was probably most impactful and is best remembered as a hostess and mentor to a generation of writers (e.g., Hemingway,described her salon in A Moveable Feast) and artists (e.g., Picasso) in Paris, where– “the mother of us all”**– she held court for forty years.
Carl Van Vechten’s 1935 portrait of Stein
** The Mother of Us All was the title of a Virgil Thomson opera for which Stein wrote the libretto. And while the subject of the opera, Susan B. Anthony, certainly deserves the epithet, so, many have observed, did its author.
“Wear these bright jewels, belovèd Beowulf; Enjoy them”*…
The first page of the Beowulf manuscript
Beowulf, the oldest surviving epic in British literature, exists in only one manuscript– a copy that survived both the wholesale destruction of religious artifacts during the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII and a disastrous fire which destroyed the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631). The 3182-line poem, now housed in the British Library, still bears the scars of the fire, visible at the upper left corner of the photograph above.
Beowulf was written in Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) between 650 and 1000 in what we now know as England. It recalls a golden age of valor and martial prowess via the adventures of a great Swedish warrior of the sixth century- Beowulf– who comes to the aid of the beleaguered Danes, saving them from the ravages of the monster Grendel and his mother. In old age, and after many years of rule in his own country, Beowulf dies in the processof heroically slaying a dragon.
A great many translations are available, in both poetry and prose. In his A Critical Companion to Beowulf, Andy Orchard lists 33 “representative” translations in his bibliography; it has been translated into at least 23 other languages. Probably the best-known (and best-loved) current version is Seamus Heaney’s verse translation. But surely the most-anticipated version is the translation completed in 1926– but never published– by J.R.R. Tolkein.
Tolkien’s academic work on the epic was second to none in its day; his 1936 paper “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is still well worth reading, not only as an introduction to the poem, but also because it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf scholarship.
Up to that point it had been used as a quarry of linguistic, historical and archaeological detail, as it is thought to preserve the oral traditions passed down through generations by the Anglo-Saxon bards who sang in halls such as the one at Rendlesham in Suffolk, now argued to be the home of the king buried at Sutton Hoo.Beowulf gives a rich picture of life as lived by the warrior and royal classes in the Anglo-Saxon era in England and, because it is set in Sweden and Denmark, also in the period before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived on these shores. And, on top of the story of Beowulf and his battles, it carries fragments of even older stories, now lost. But in order to study all these details, academics dismissed as childish nonsense the fantastical elements such as Grendel the monster of the fens, his even more monstrous mother and the dragon that fatally wounds him at the end.
Likening the poem to a tower that watched the sea, and comparing its previous critics to demolition workers interested only in the raw stone, Tolkien pushed the monsters to the forefront. He argued that they represent the impermanence of human life, the mortal enemy that can strike at the heart of everything we hold dear, the force against which we need to muster all our strength – even if ultimately we may lose the fight. Without the monsters, the peculiarly northern courage of Beowulf and his men is meaningless. Tolkien, veteran of the Somme, knew that it was not. “Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them,” he wrote in his lecture in the middle of the disenchanted 1930s…
Read more of John Garth’s appreciation– and explore the influence of Beowulf on Middle Earth– in “JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf: bring on the monsters.”
And pre-order the translation (with a bonus story by Tolkein), available late next month, here.
* Beowulf
###
As we grapple with our Grendels, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that Ezra Pound should no longer be held at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C. Pound has been imprisoned for 13 years, following his arrest in Italy during World War II on charges of treason.
Pound, a poet who was a major figure of the early modernist movement, was the developer of the “Imagist” school, and the “godfather” of a number of now-well-known contemporaries– among them, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Deeply troubled by the carnage of World War I, Pound moved to Paris, then to Italy, and embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini, whose policies he vocally supported; he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945. While in custody in Italy, he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress… setting off an enormous controversy.
His release in 1958 was the result of a campaign by writers including Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, and Hemingway. Pound, who was believed to be suffering dementia, returned to Italy.
The best of Pound’s writing – and it is in the Cantos – will last as long as there is any literature.
-Ernest Hemingway
“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first”*…
A bringing together of beloved belles lettres, this chart diagrams 25 famous opening lines from revered works of fiction according to the dictates of the classic Reed-Kellogg system. From Cervantes to Faulkner to Pynchon, each sentence has been painstakingly curated and diagrammed by PCL’s research team, parsing classical prose by parts of speech and offering a partitioned, color-coded picto-grammatical representation of some of the most famous first words in literary history. Whether you’re a book buff, an English teacher, or a hard-line grammarian, this diagrammatical dissertation has something for the aesthete in all of us…
Explore “A Diagrammatical Dissertation on Opening Lines of Notable Novels” at Pop Chart Lab.
* Blaise Pascal
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As we analyze our way to an appreciation of the classics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that Ernest Hemingway completed his short novel The Old Man and the Sea. He believed it to be the best writing he had ever done. The critics agreed: the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and became one of his bestselling works.
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