Cecil Rhodes
Posted: October 28, 2025 Filed under: Africa Leave a comment
from Michael Ledger-Lomas’s review of The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey in LRB.
The Rhodeses were farmers turned developers who had grazed cows on what are now Bloomsbury squares before building terraces in Islington and Hackney. Rhodes’s father attended Harrow and Cambridge before taking orders. His maternal grandfather was a provincial banker who had built canals in the Midlands and got into Parliament. When ill health caused young Cecil to join his brother Herbert in growing cotton in Natal, he went with two thousand pounds from his aunt, which cushioned the brothers against their amateurism. While African labourers hoed rows for them, they wandered into the interior, looking for gold and diamonds. Herbert could not stick at anything for long. In 1879 he died when a barrel of spirits exploded at his campfire and burned him to death. Cecil had by then settled at Kimberley, a town which had sprung up around the ‘dry diggings’ for diamonds.
Picks and shovels -> amalgamation and capital.
Rhodes and his first employer, Charles Rudd, found it easier to make money on side ventures, such as buying a steam-powered ice machine to sell refreshments to miners (Rhodes scooped the ice cream). But when colonial officials grudgingly decreed that diggers and miners could buy one another out and so concentrate holdings, Rhodes and Rudd founded a company to buy up claims in what had come to be known as the De Beers mine. The colony’s policy change reflected the diminishing viability of small-scale mining. Though the diamonds appeared inexhaustible, at deeper levels they were embedded in rock – the ‘blue ground’ – that required costly processing. Tottering over every claim was ‘reef’, friable rocks that often collapsed and buried the diamonds for months. Rhodes’s occasional trips to Britain reassured him that the demand for diamonds was buoyant enough to make it worthwhile to tackle these difficulties, but only if companies could supply capital and machinery, such as steam-powered pumps, at scale.
Personal life:
In the 1970s, the Tory historian Robert Blake dismissed speculation on his sexuality with the testy claim that he was simply one of those men who find getting married too much hassle. Rhodes would probably not have declared himself a homosexual, if he had known the word: he did not need to, living on the macho frontier. No one found it odd when he set up house at Kimberley with Neville Pickering and cradled him in his arms as he grew sick and died. Rhodes filled the void at his loss by hiring dashing young men as secretaries (shorthand not required), who borrowed his clothes and took his cheques but were cast adrift when they got engaged. No women worked at Groote Schuur, which was decorated with stone phalluses from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (supposedly Phoenician relics that illustrated the ancient colonisation of Africa). He built up a coterie of unmarried thinkers and publicists, whose childlessness heightened their devotion to the Anglo-Saxon race.
More McConaughey: Want To Be Here
Posted: October 28, 2025 Filed under: advice, Hollywood Leave a comment
in WSJ.
in Singju Post
I always repeat this, but one of the coolest and simplest things I heard early on. I was onThe Jay Leno Show, my first talk show. He comes by the green room. He goes, “You nervous?” I go, “Yeah, a little bit.” He goes, “Look, I got simple advice, how to make this work.” I go what? He goes, “Just want to be here.” It’s always stuck with me: You just want to be there. All of a sudden the clock goes faster. You look back, you enjoy what you did more.
in Paper Magazine.
His Dallas Buyers Club diet:
That’s in Greenlights.
A striking aspect of Greenlights is how few of the stories take place on movie sets. For example, in this one paragraph he blows past the making of six different movies.
The actual making of movies may not be that interesting.
Greenlights is best received as an audiobook, as that’s how McConaughey composed it, talking into a microphone while driving:
Movieland by Jerome Charyn
Posted: October 25, 2025 Filed under: Hollywood Leave a comment
I remember something Charles Laughton told Tyrone Power once upon a time. Be careful. If Power, the movie star, wanted to act on stage, he would have to shed a particular demon. He might be an actor reading his lines, but he would “also be the monster, made up of all the characters [Power had played on the screen.” And Power would have to dispose of that monster by breathing and looking like a man. Perhaps. But the monster would still be behind every move. That mingling of time, roles half-remembered
About Louis B. Mayer and Fritz Lang’s M:
Where’s the love interest? Louis B. Mayer would have asked. What about the happy ending? Hollywood would hire Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre, the director and the star of M, a movie about a child murderer that turns in upon itself, like an amazing corkscrew, as Lorre, with an “M” marked on his back, tries to explain his own demons to the underworld of Berlin, who’ve captured Lorre and sentenced him to death, because his very existence has threatened their own profitable relationship with the police. M is a kind of Brechtian opera without song.
But Lorre’s cry to the underworld screams in our ear, forces us to examine who the hell we are. It’s not designed to comfort us in the dark. Lorre’s chubby, childlike face seems to make monsters of us all. We partake of his death. We convict him, as we convict ourselves.
Mayer never read scripts. But the idea of such a movie would have enraged him. He’d have demanded that a pair of lovers be thrown into the pot. Some police inspector, played by Richard Dix (borrowed from RKO for such a minor vehicle), and a queen of the underworld who reforms herself and marries Dix, while the murderer is shoved into the background. But whatever the limits of MGM, all its sugared life on screen, only Mayer’s Hollywood could have conceived Casablanca and Gone With the Wind.
Its message was that no one in America need be exempt from love. The newsboy could marry the millionairess if only he was industrious enough, and looked a little like Gable. Nothing got in the way of romance. In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald has his film producer Monroe Stahr explain the basic melody of any motion picture. “We’ve got an hour and twenty-five minutes on the screen-you show a woman being unfaithful to a man for one-third of that time and you’ve given the impression that she’s one-third whore.”
Thalberg:
MGM was only a little giant, not to be compared with Paramount, which had De Mille and Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow, or United Artists, formed in 1919 by Chaplin, Mary and Doug, and D. W. Griffith, or that enormous acreage Irving left behind with Uncle Carl at Universal City. It was Hollywood, after all, and film companies could come and go, like those pirates who’d arrived in California, running from Edison’s people. Mayer wasn’t as even-tempered as Uncle Carl, and no one thought the Boy Wonder would survive very long with the junkman. But Irving had matured in movie-land. He was twenty-four. He’d given up woolen underwear and become a fixer. He could patch up any film. He was the producer-magician who could sense a structural flaw and locate the melody of a given scene. The Thalberg legend began to grow. “Of this slim, slight, nervous man it was said he lived in a motion picture theater all his waking hours and knew instincitively whether the shadows on screen would please the public.”
On Fitzgergald’s Love of the Last Tycoon:
Stahr was a popularist of the imagination, a tender of dream-scapes. He could assume only one condition, that he “take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar.”
But Fitzgerald himself understood the power of that dream-scape, the magic behind the hollow walls. “Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland-not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French châteaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire.”
The fire of Plato’s cave.
On Raymond Chandler:
He was a very formal man, bound by the strict codes of Dulwich College. Chandler wouldn’t walk into the street without a jacket and a tie, but he was also a Bedouin in his ways, often moving once or twice a year. He had over seventy different addresses in Southern California. And he was an alcoholic. He lost his job in the middle of the Depression because of the drinking he did. And the failed poet started writing fiction for the pulp magazines. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language.”
He saw himself as “a man without a country,” neither English nor American, but some kind of cultural half-breed caught in the crazy quilt of Southern California, where men and women had to reinvent their lives. And Chandler, a good Dulwich boy who longed for tradition, had come to a place without a past, where whole peoples had to define themselves against the deserts, mountains, valleys, seas, and citrus groves.
Chandler was one more anonymous soul who’d become “a plots. y writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about His apprenticeship wasn’t easy. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was fifty-one. And even after Philip Marlowe was world-famous, Chandler grumbled about his own status in the United States. English intellectuals idolized him, adored his work, and Chandler “tried to explain to them that I was just a He was a very formal man, bound by the strict codes of Dul-wich College. Chandler wouldn’t walk into the street without a jacket and a tie, but he was also a Bedouin in his ways, often moving once or twice a year. He had over seventy different addresses in Southern California. And he was an alcoholic. He lost his job in the middle of the Depression because of the drinking he did. And the failed poet started writing fiction for the pulp magazines. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language.”
He saw himself as “a man without a country,” neither English nor American, but some kind of cultural half-breed caught in the crazy quilt of Southern California, where men and women had to reinvent their lives. And Chandler, a good Dulwich boy who longed for tradition, had come to a place without a past, where whole peoples had to define themselves against the deserts, mountains, valleys, seas, and citrus groves.
Chandler was one more anonymous soul who’d become “a plots. y writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about His apprenticeship wasn’t easy. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was fifty-one. And even after Philip Marlowe was world-famous, Chandler grumbled about his own status in the United States.
…
He understood that film was “not al transplanted literary or dramatic art … it is much closer to music, in the sense that its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent than its high-lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements, which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can.”
Finish drafts
Posted: October 24, 2025 Filed under: advice, writing, writing advice from other people 1 Comment
Woody Allen: NOT in fashion.
I’m interested only in his productivity. Whatever else you say about him, my guy made a lot of movies. How?:
appears in an interview from 2015 with Richard Stayton in Written By magazine.
(For the love of Buddha if you are easily triggered don’t look at the WGA’s list of 101 funniest screenplays)
Henry Adams on Harvard in 1800
Posted: October 23, 2025 Filed under: New England Leave a comment
from Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America, a must for Adams-heads.
The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport
Posted: October 20, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, New England Leave a comment
Revisited this one after seeing some footage from The Testament of Ann Lee.
Hoedown
Posted: October 18, 2025 Filed under: music Leave a commentIn October 1937, in the town of Saylersville in Magoffin County, Kentucky, Alan Lomax recorded William Hamilton Stepp playing a fiddle tune called “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” or as he identifies it in the recording, “the Bonaparte.”
Some years later, Aaron Copland found a transcript of the recording in a book:
Composer Aaron Copland, who was commissioned by choreographer Agnes De Mille to score the ballet in 1942, probably did not hear the original field recording before adapting it. Instead, he likely learned the tune from the book Our Singing Country (1941), which presented transcriptions of John and Alan Lomax’s field recordings prepared by the composer and musicologist Ruth Crawford Seeger. According to Jabbour, “when Aaron Copland was looking for a suitable musical theme for the ‘Hoedown’ section of his ballet Rodeo (first produced in 1942), his eye was caught by the version in the Lomax book, and he adopted it almost [note] for note as the principal theme.”
(source)
In 1972, Emerson Lake & Palmer recorded an electronic version:
Some years after that, in 1993, I heard the tune on TV in a “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” commercial. They play “Hoedown” from Copland’s Rodeo all the time on KUSC.
I note all this because I’m interested in transmissions from the past to the present. Fiddle tune -> recording -> transcription -> orchestral score -> recording -> TV commercial is an cool lineage.
Columbus Day
Posted: October 13, 2025 Filed under: America Leave a comment
Many people are unaware that Columbus made not just one voyage but four; others are surprised to learn that he was brought back in chains after the third voyage. Even fewer know that his ultimate goal, the purpose behind the enterprise, was Jerusalem! The 26 December 1492 entry in his journal of the first voyage, hereafter referred to as the Diario, 3 written in the Caribbean, leaves little doubt. He says he wanted to find enough gold and the almost equally valuable spices “in such quantity that the sovereigns… will undertake and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulchre; for thus I urged Your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem” (Diario 1492[1988: 291, my emphasis]).4 This statement implies that it was not the first time Columbus had mentioned the motivation for his undertaking, nor was it to be the last.5 Columbus wanted to launch a new Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the infidels (the Muslims). This desire was not merely to reclaim the land of the Bible and the place where Jesus had walked; it was part of the much larger and widespread, apocalyptic scenario in which Columbus and many of his contemporaries believed.
That from an article by Carol Delaney of Stanford, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem.”
Columbus knew from Marco Polo that there was a Great Khan somewhere to the west/east, and that this Khan had requested emissaries from the Pope. So possibly the Khan could be an ally against the Muslims.
In case he should encounter the Great Khan or other emperors, kings, or princes, it was deemed appropriate for Columbus to carry letters of greeting from the sovereigns (with space left blank for the addressee) and to take along as an interpreter Luis de Torres, a converso who knew Hebrew, Chaldean, and some Arabic. It was highly unlikely that anyone in Spain knew Mongolian or Chinese, but since ‘it was supposed that Arabic was the mother of all languages’ (Morison 1942, vol. I: 187), it was assumed that Arabic would suffice.”
Columbus and the other conquistador types commissioned by the King and Queen of Spain must be seen in the conquest of the Reconquista, the 700 year effort to drive Islam from Iberia. Cortes, for example, was a religious fanatic, who used the Spanish word “moscas” or mosques to describe the temples he found in the land of the Aztecs.
(Ridley Scott gets at some of this in 1492: Year of Discovery. My mom at least wanted to walk out of this movie once it gets to the torturing. Sigourney Weaver plays Queen Isabella.)
Delaney expands from Columbus’s religiosity to some bigtime thoughts on how we, today, may not be able to grasp what “religion” meant to someone like Columbus:
The modern understanding of religion did not fully emerge until the late nineteenth century when scholars began to attach “-ism” to make substantives out of adjectives—Buddhism rather than Buddhist, Hinduism rather than Hindu—thus making a ‘religion’ by separating out the spiritual elements from a whole way of life or culture that included ethnicity, language, food, dress, and other practices (see Smith 1962; Rawlings 2002). In reality, however, science, technology, and religion can be and are easily and seamlessly combined. For example, I found Turkish villagers, while mostly illiterate and uneducated, could discuss, understand, make, use, and fix a variety of modern machines and equipment including automobiles, telephones, and television sets; they could talk about international and national politics with more sophistication than most Americans, and they understood the economic networks with which their lives were entangled. They would appear to have a thoroughly modern consciousness. But staying long, getting to know them, and “pushing the envelope,” revealed to me how, at a much deeper level, they lived within a completely Islamic cosmology or worldview. That worldview encompassed their lives, it was the context within which they lived, and it provided answers to the perennial questions: who are we, why are we here, where are we going? It also affected the way they dressed, the food they ate, their practices of personal hygiene, the way they moved, and their spatial and temporal orientations (see Delaney 1991). It was inseparable from the rest of their lives, not something they practiced only on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, or by keeping the fast of Ramadan. Though they evinced varying degrees of devoutness, secularism was not an option. They believed their views were self-evident to any thinking person and they could not understand why I could not accept Islam and, in their terms, submit and become Muslim. Islam, to them, is not one religion among others; it is “Religion.” It is the one true religion given in the beginning to Abraham, and Muhammad was merely a prophet recalling people to that original faith. They had heard of Christianity, of course, and questioned me about it. But to them it was not a separate, equally valid religion, but rather a distortion of the one true word, the one true faith.
Just so did Columbus and his contemporaries view the sectas of the Jews and Muslims. His statement about freeing the Indians from error shows that religion was not a matter of choice but of right or wrong—there was only one right way. Indeed, they really had no conception of alternatives. The Reformation had not yet begun, and Judaism and Islam were seen not as different religions but as erroneous, heretical sects
Like a good anthropologist she quotes Clifford Geertz:
The anthropological critique of this position has been insistent: “[T]he image of a constant human nature independent of time, place, and circumstance, of studies and professions, transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, that what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them” (Geertz 1973: 35). In other words, there is no backstage where we can go to find the generic human; humans are formed within specific cultures. This does not mean that cultures are totally closed or that there is no overlap; one can learn another culture—that is, indeed, what anthropologists do during fieldwork. But if we are to understand Columbus (or anyone else), we must attempt insofar as is possible to reconstruct the world in which he lived. While some historians writing about Columbus appear to do this, they still, in my reading, project a modern consciousness onto him, leaving the impression that the time and place are merely “transient fashions.”
Delaney includes a great map, which I steal:
Since I was a kid the tone around Columbus has been a lot less “In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and more he was a genocidal colonialist. But applying our concepts in moral judgment of these figures of the past seems not that far from Columbus applying his concepts to the native people he discovered. Then again, evolving our conceptions and adjusting our heroes as we go seems healthy, right?
Photograph of a Marine Giving Water to a Kitten on Tarawa
Posted: October 11, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945 1 Comment
perusing the National Archives Record Group 38 as one does and found this.
Also:
This looks like a boring job
Posted: October 11, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
although who knows, maybe it was hypnotic. from Lewis Hine’s photographs for the WPA
Macadamia, macadam, tarmac, MacAdam, and McAdam
Posted: September 23, 2025 Filed under: Australia Leave a comment
The macadamia nut was named after John Macadam, Scotch-Australian academic. The nut is native to northeastern Australia, but famously cultivated in Hawaii, for example by Roseanne Barr, whose farm is for sale.
Macadam, a road surface of layers of crushed stones, was named after John Loudon McAdam, a Scottish engineer.
When you add tar to macadam, you get “tarmac.”
While the specific tarmac pavement is not common in some countries today, many people use the word to refer to generic paved areas at airports, especially the apron near airport terminals, although these areas are often made of concrete.
Idle bit of history/etymology I picked up after eating a macadamia nut.
Redondo Beach Submarine Canyon
Posted: September 10, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
I noticed this deep canyon on my Raven map of southern California. You can see it on Google maps.
Here’s what to expect when you dive the canyon:
After a short swim you drop down to a 25-30 foot sand bottom and move west. As you reach a depth of about 35 feet, you’ll start down a rather steep slope to about 75-80 feet, which quickly drops to below 100 feet and then to the abyss. This is the Redondo Submarine Canyon.
While the sand leading out to the canyon edge has a lot of marine life, most divers like the deep mud flats. Long before “muck diving” became popular with photographers at some fancy tropical resorts, southern California divers were visiting sand and mud flats at local submarine canyons. Just as with these resort destinations, our muck has much to offer in the critter department.
Look for small creatures like a camouflaged octopus or brightly colored nudibranchs, which can be spotted year-round. In late fall through winter months, lucky night divers can witness market squid mating in massive numbers. It’s been described as a blizzard of frantic activity. After the mating the seafloor will be carpeted in large clusters of white egg cases — and dead or dying adult squid, who kick the bucket shortly after they do the deed.
Whether it is squid season or not, this place is an excellent night dive with a lot of small animals to be seen.
One creature that can be found on nearly every dive, day or night, is the massive sheep crab. Its clumsy motions are comical to observe but watch out for the claws! Their pinch is insanely strong. The sheep crabs here are the biggest you’ll find anywhere along our coast. Some of them measure three feet across!
The city of Redondo Beach has two webcams to soothe in troubled times:
https://www.youtube.com/live/Ni7v-aIa3bw
https://www.youtube.com/live/2kbj3LqB_20
Tender memories of Mom
Posted: September 6, 2025 Filed under: family Leave a commentAround age eight or nine, romping in the woods beyond the end of our street, and by the brook, around the pond and the abandoned Girl Scout camp was a big part of my time.
I would collect sticks in the woods, sticks that resembled guns or swords or sticks that were good for poking in the mud of the pond. I kept my collection of sticks behind a rhododendron bush that was just to the left as you approached our front porch.
Some of the sticks were falling apart, abandoned sticks had accumulated as newer, fresher sticks were gained. The pile of sticks, if you thought about the appearance and presentation of the house, was an issue.
One day Mom came to me in a calm, gentle moment and said, “Stephen,” (she was the only person who called me Stephen) “can we have a conversation about your sticks?”
The way she put it. We made a compromise where I kept the most important sticks. Every time we saw each other I felt fairly dealt with on the matter of sticks.
Many times around age nine (dropping off and picking up my sister at a class?) Mom and I walked in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I was drawn to the giant statue of Mycerinus (who wouldn’t be?) Forever after, whenever the MFA came up, sometimes for no reason at all, my mom would invoke the magical name of Mycerinus.
(Kind of resentful they’ve made his name Menkaure, less melodious. How did a guy who died 4500 years ago get renamed in the last 30?)
Sometimes in adulthood I’d tell my mom about sending something off, to a publisher or a studio or something. Several times Mom said something like, “it must be so hard to let something go.”
Only later did it occur to me she might’ve been trying to share something about herself.
(source)
not for all the cars in China
Posted: August 17, 2025 Filed under: China 1 Commentwild stat:
For example, in 1990 there were just half a million cars in China. By 2024 there were 435mn, many of them electric.
from FT on Dan Wang’s new book.
Transmitter
Posted: August 5, 2025 Filed under: New York Leave a comment
(source)
I lived two and a half years in New York City but I didn’t know much about Greenpoint. A brief visit for a special occasion brought me to this corner of Brooklyn.
Stayed at Franklin Guest House where my first floor room was surprisingly spacious, a narrow mini apartment with a kitchenette. Would recommend although I couldn’t call it charming. ($269 a night or so).
Lunch at Acre:
(this photo I borrow from Kelvin Shum)
Visited Tula House where they gave me some good advice on arid plants
Trip to High Valley Books (appointment only, message them on Instagram)
Chopped cheese at Deli Point.
(this photo from Kristiana Noel, obviously not my bracelet, but that approximates my sandwich)
Best was visiting WYNC Transmitter Park, where you get a view of Manhattan I wasn’t used to.
Cheers to Schofield for identifying this clock tower building:
which Perplexity AI failed to do even with coaching.
It’s the Consolidated Edison Building.
The ornamentation at the tower’s peak included urns and obelisks, which were normally associated with funereal aspects, and was modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. These decorations memorialize Con Ed workers killed in World War I. The tower section was topped by a “Tower of Light” designed to look like a miniature temple.
If I’d had the time would’ve liked to see the Monitor monument in McGolrick Park
The USS Monitor was built at Continental Iron Works.
I thought of Greenpoint as being a fairly inexpensive part of north Brooklyn but an apartment’s gonna run you from $885,000 (zero bedroom one bath) to four million dollars or so.
Bill Burr on mid
Posted: July 31, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentI like sitting in the crowd. Like when I go to a sporting event, I want to get good seats, but the closer you sit, the quieter it gets and the less fun it gets. It’s the most fucked-up thing. Unless it’s like an NBA game where before they had a DJ play the whole time. I remember I saw the Lakers play the Knicks, and Comedy Central had courtside seats; I sat there, and you could hear the shit they were talking to each other. That was fucking amazing. But everything else, the closer you get, the more money people have, the less fun it gets. So I was always, like, mezzanine level. I don’t want to be up there with binoculars and super-fucking-shit-faced people, but I like the mid — when the alcohol intake, the view, everything looks like mid. Whatever the second-color-row seats are, that’s what I like.
from this Vulture interview.
20th Century Man
Posted: July 21, 2025 Filed under: Hemingway Leave a comment
from Archibald MacLeish’s tribute poem after he died:
Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty:
Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master –
Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick
In a carpenter’s loft in a street of that April city.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. Thus it’s easy to match his life against the century. Whatever year it is, he’s roughly that age.
At 17 he’s a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star, covering police stuff, murders, the morgue:
The clichés in Hemingway’s news stories-under “the glare of the surgeon’s light, he dangles on a little thread of life, while the physicians struggle grimly”-were redeemed by a passage on the forms of violence in a big city: “It’s razor wounds in the African belt and slugging in the wet block. In Little Italy they prefer the sawed-off shotgun. We can almost tell what part of the city a man is from just by seeing how they did him up”
At 18 he’s close up to the Great War:
Hemingway’s experience at Fossalta led him to divide men into those who had been wounded and those who had not. … Though he was never a soldier (Proust spent more time in the army than Hemingway), he had the combatant’s hatred of the safe staff officer and believed you could not judge a man until you had seen him in action
(didn’t Proust spend infinitely more time in the army? Hemingway wasn’t in the army, he was a volunteer with the American Red Cross)
Giovanni Cecchin speculates that despite Gamble’s favorable report of 1918, Hemingway’s heroism was not mentioned in Charles Bakewell’s Story of the American Red Cross in Italy (1920) because the authorities felt he had unnecessarily exposed himself to danger.
He grew up fast:
As Charles Fenton has pointed out, Hemingway was exceptionally precocious in his personal and professional life. He was a reporter and a wounded war hero at nineteen; had an unhappy love affair at twenty; married at twenty-two; became a European correspondent at twentythree; was a father at twenty-four. His first, thin book, Three Stories and Ten Poems-which included the “unprintable” “Up in Michigan,” “My Old Man” and “Out of Season” (all of which had been sent out to editors when Hadley lost the manuscripts)-was dedicated to Hadley and published in August 1923, when he was twenty-four. When he left.Toronto his apprenticeship was over, and he was now a professional if not a widely recognized author.
At 25, a nightmare group trip:
But when Duff told Hemingway that his sexual magnetism tested her self-control, he could scarcely control himself in the wild atmosphere of Pamplona. Hadley stopped talking to Duff, and wept with jealousy and humiliation when Hemingway courted her rival. But Duff, despite her notorious promiscuity and her strong attraction to Hemingway, had her own standards of morality. “We can’t do it,” she told him. “You can’t hurt people.” She would not run off with him, even if she wanted to, because of Hadley and the baby
Here’s Edmund Wilson in The Wound and The Bow:
At 26-27 he set the style in New York and Paris. Around then he became a father and got a divorce.
Hemingway’s adult life was characterized by emotional turmoil, constant travel, frequent illness and accidents. The timid and nearsighted Dos Passos, who often accompanied Hemingway on skiing and fishing trips, observed: “I never knew an athletic vigorous man who spent so much time in bed as Ernest did.” There were both physical and psychological reasons for Hemingway’s numerous accidents. He was a huge, clumsy man with defective vision in one eye and very slow reflexes. He had a bad temper, behaved recklessly and irrationally, drank heavily and was frequently out of control. He deliberately placed himself in risky situations in driving, boxing, skiing, fishing, hunting and war.
By his early 30s he’s moving to Key West, where he could write half the day and fish and hang out the other half. The money from his first hit book went to his ex, but his new wife was very rich. The $8,000 house a wedding gift from her Uncle Gus:
His exaggerations, lies and heroic image were related to the traditions and myths of frontier humor that had inspired his youthful works. But he not only helped to create myths about himself, he also seemed to believe them.
He felt he could write only about what he had actually experienced and his literary credo was to tell it as it was. But he combined scrupulous honesty in his fiction with a tendency to distort and rewrite the story of his life
At 34:
after Hemingway completed Winner Take Nothing he fulfilled his ambition, expressed in The Sun Also Rises, of “going to British East Africa to shoot.” In 1933 Uncle Gus gave him $25,000 to pay for the African safari, and Hemingway asked MacLeish and Strater to be his guests. Both refused the invitation, fearing that Hemingway’s fierce competitiveness would turn the holiday into a daily struggle for superiority. They agreed with Damon Runyon’s remark about Hemingway:
“Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.”
During the Depression, Jeffrey Meyers tells us, 80% of the people in Key West were on relief and the county itself went bankrupt.
At 35 Hemingway boated a bunch of supplies up to help after the Labor Day Hurricane, which killed maybe 400 plus people, many of them laborers. The dead bodies were a health hazard.
Late 30s, early 40s:
Leicester said that during the late 1930s in Key West, his brother was drinking about seventeen Scotch and sodas a day. Hemingway always made the adolescent association between heavy drinking and masculinity, and boasted in February 1940: “Started out on absinthe, drank a bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town before the pelota game and then battened it down with whiskeys and sodas until 3 a.m.” While fishing in Cuba, he would take a bottle of champagne to bed and empty it by morning. During World War Two, according to Buck Lanham, he was a “massive drinker. Bottle at bedside, drank all day.
In his late 30s he’s a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, having an affair with the woman that would become wife #3. From his Spanish experience by age 40 he wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, a book that sold like gangbusters. Before this time, I don’t think he could’ve afforded his lifestyle on his writing alone. Hadley (wife #1) had a trust fund and Pauline (wife #2) was very rich.
He seemed to mature in reverse. Early 40s:
Yet even Durán could not tolerate the boorish behavior that tested the limits of their friendship. … At Durán’s birthday party in Havana, he behaved as Fitzgerald had done at the Murphys’ party in 1926. He got drunk, pushed salad down the back of an embassy nonentity and threw steak across the table (which inspired friends to follow his example).
At 42 he’s avoiding going to the war in Europe, instead he has this plan for his fishing boat:
Hemingway’s idea was that the Pilar, fully manned and heavily armed, but disguised as a fishing boat, would attract the attention of a German submarine. The sub would signal the Pilar to come alongside (as they frequently did in 1942) in order to requisition supplies of fresh water and food. As the sub approached, Hemingway’s men would machine-gun the crew on deck while a jai alai player threw a small bomb into the conning tower. The Marine colonel John Thomason, who had advised Hemingway on his Men at War anthology and was Chief of Naval Intelligence for Central America, realistically objected: “‘Suppose he stands off and blows you and the Pilar out of the water?’
… ‘If he does that,’ replied Ernest, ‘then we’ve had it. But there’s a good chance he won’t shoot. Why should a submarine risk attracting attention when the skipper can send sailors aboard and scuttle us by opening the seacocks? He’ll be curious about fishermen in wartime. He’ll want to know what kind of profiteers are trying to tag a marlin in the Gulf Stream with a war on.”
Hemingway managed to convince Thomason and Braden that this was a serious project and they gave him what he wanted: a radio, a collapsible rubber boat, machine guns, grenades, bombs and Don Saxon, a volunteer Marine master sergeant
finally he did get over to Europe, possibly because wife #3 Martha Gellhorn was outshining him. There the war was like a frolic to him:
Hemingway claimed to have killed a great many Germans and certainly killed a few of them. On August 3, 1944, at Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy, he threw grenades down a cellar where Nazi troops were supposed to be hiding, but did not check to see if they were actually there. He may have wanted to take credit for this doubtful enterprise without confronting the fragmented remains of his victims. On November 22, armed with a machine gun, he definitely killed some Germans who attacked Lanham’s headquarters in the Hürtgenwald.
In 1950 he’s bragging to Lillian Ross:
He mentioned a war writer who, he said, was apparently thinking of himself as Tolstoy, but who’d be able to play Tolstoy only on the Bryn Mawr field-hockey team. “He never hears a shot fired in anger, and he sets out to beat who? Tolstoy, an artillery officer who fought at Sevastopol, who knew his stuff, who was a hell of a man anywhere you put him—bed, bar, in an empty room where he had to think. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
Reviewers did not agree:
Across the River was condemned by all serious critics when it first appeared, in September 1950, and is still considered Hemingway’s worst novel. A few writers, like John O’Hara, praised the book out of loyalty to Hemingway or his past reputation; but Cyril Connolly, Morton Dauwen Zabel, Northrop Frye, Joseph Warren Beach, Alfred Kazin, Evelyn Waugh and Isaac Rosenfeld all agreed with Maxwell Geismar’s critique of Hemingway’s ideas and his negative evaluation in the Saturday Review of Literature:
This is an unfortunate novel and unpleasant to review for anyone who respects Hemingway’s talent and achievement. It is not only Hemingway’s worst novel; it is a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work and throws a doubtful light on the future
At 52 he has another success, but is it even good?:
In the highly acclaimed Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway either deceived himself about the profundity of his art or expressed his contempt for Life, Scribner’s, the reading public, the critics and religion by writing an ironic and mock-serious fable that gave them exactly what they wanted and expected. The story offered moral uplift, provided a pretense of culture, was admired by everyone-and earned him a fortune. In May 1952
The last really good thing he wrote was a memoir of his youth in Paris that would only be published after his death. It’s full of lies, brags, and gossip about famous writers and artists of the time. This is where he claims Scott Fitzgerald had him check his penis for size. The best parts of it are so good.
He might’ve lived to 1968, seen the moon landing, hippies, LSD. He could’ve made further, into the 70s, even the 80s, he might’ve heard disco music. Seen Ronald Reagan get inaugurated. But that’s not what happened.
Meyers has an appendix that’s a list of Hemingway’s injuries that’s almost comic?
The most chilling part of the excellent Ken Burns documentary might be this clip of Hemingway giving an interview for NBC after he won the Nobel Prize. This is after he used his head to batter open the stuck door of a burning plane in Butiaba in 1954. The second of his two plane crashes that week.
What an artist. After Meyers I read Mary Dearborn’s which is also great.
C’mon this is cool
Posted: July 18, 2025 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Zane makes The New York Times.
I don’t care for the word “snub.” from Etymology Online:
If you’re a Television Academy member, please consider voting for COMMON SIDE EFFECTS in the category Outstanding Animated Program.
If you’re not a Television Academy member, consider becoming one! The TV Academy is not like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. You don’t have to be asked to join. You can join if you have a couple TV credits and $225. That’s who votes on the Emmys.
Bless you.
Hang Yourself Brave Crillon
Posted: July 14, 2025 Filed under: France, Hemingway Leave a comment
From Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography:
Like most people who were drawn by Hemingway’s magnetic personality and valued him more as a companion than as a writer, Lanham found it amusing and exciting to be with him and to be known to have been with him. (The general is remembered today not for his military career but for his friendship with Hem-ingway.) While Hemingway was at the Ritz during the first week of September with Mary, Lanham, echoing Henry IV’s taunt to the Duke of Crillon after a victory at Arques, sent him a provocative message. “Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein. We have fought at Landrecies and you were not there.”
This was (as Lanham knew) an irresistible challenge, and Hemingway immediately hastened northeast from Paris to Landrecies and Le Cateau (where Dorman-Smith and the British army had retreated after the bad show at Mons in the Great War). “The countryside through which Hemingway travelled in order to reach my command post,” wrote Lanham, who had summoned him there, “was alive with Germans who had been by-passed. All of these people were trying frantically to get back to Germany proper and the Siegfried Line. He was very lucky indeed to have made this trip without being killed.”
Boys will be boys (Hemingway was 44).
Had to look up Henry IV’s taunt to Crillon:
Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we fought at Arques and you were not there
According to Oxford Essential Quotations (4th Ed.) that’s the “traditional form given by Voltaire to [the original] in a letter from Henri to Crillon, 20 September 1597; Henri’s actual words, as given in Lettres missives de Henri IV, Collection des documents inédits de l’histoire de Francevol. 4 (1847) were
My good man, Crillon, hang yourself for not having been at my side last Monday at the greatest event that’s ever been seen and perhaps ever will be seen’
Boldface mine. You can feel the bro-ness, it’s giving Ben Affleck and Adam Driver in The Last Duel.
How did Hemingway and Lanham both know this?
(source). Maybe it was in the boys’ books of the day.
(Frequent readers of this site will recall that Pendu/Pender/PennDu language games&names in French reveal the origin of Cezanne’s House of the Hanged Man.)
All four of Henry IV’s Oxford quotes bang, his most famous might be
Paris is worth a mass
The origin story in that:
On 25 July 1593, with the encouragement of his mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henry permanently renounced Protestantism and converted to Catholicism to secure his hold on the French crown, thereby earning the resentment of the Huguenots and his ally Elizabeth I of England. He was said to have declared that Paris vaut bien une messe (“Paris is well worth a Mass”), although the attribution is doubtful.
That’s apparently Gabrielle on the left, some interpretation.
Here’s Henri IV at Arques:
Some pretty pictures and intriguing backstory of Arques-la-Bataille on the “Normandy Then and Now” website:
John Henry Twachtman painted the river there in 1885:
That’s in the Met.
Henri’s greatest event that had ever been wasn’t the only battle in the are
Just outside the town is the World War I Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery, designed by J R Truelove, the final resting place of 377 men of the Chinese, West Indies, and South African Native Labour Corps.
As for Landrecies, it’s Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention the Second World War, but notes:
It was the site of a skirmish between the British I Corps under Douglas Haig and the German First Army on 25 August 1914, that resulted in the death of Archer Windsor-Clive, the first first-class cricketer to fall in World War I.
Some day I’d like to do a little road trip through here:
Almost every town here has a famous siege or battle. Finish in Bruges. Or maybe Brussels, see The Royal Museum for Central Africa (they don’t know what to do with that inheritance). Or maybe Ghent. I’d like to see the altarpiece:
At St. Bavo’s Cathedral:
(Source)
Helytimes 
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