Some Random Thoughts on Hemingway

[caitri]

(This comes about from having just finished A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition.)

I'm one of the very few people who actually likes Hemingway. Sure, he was a mysoginist asshole who kept rewriting the same book over, and over, and over (Man is impotent, has issues, has sex, the woman dies), but goddammit if he didn't get to have an interesting, messy life: four wives, friends with pretty much every literary figure from 1920-1960, went on multiple African safaris for the hell of it, hung out with matadors, gunrunners, and gods know what else, and perhaps best of all, he got to live in Paris.

Now I've always got a soft spot for Paris. It's hard not to, really. And my Paris was always the Paris of Highlander reruns (grey, grey, grey, misty and sometimes raining and grey) with dark little churches, warm cafes where you could buy a sausage and a soda for dinner and hot chocolate and croissants for breakfast, and really cute grad students studying history....

I'm digressing.

Anyhow, if you've never read the book, go read it. Take it into a coffeeshop with a notebook and a pen and do some dreaming. It's fun that way.