From Fresh Air. Maureen Corrigan reviews a new edition of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
Interesting radio article about a new revision of Hemingway’s classic take on Paris in the 1920s. Fits well with my ongoing study of sacred texts. Not that I consider his book sacred. It just makes me think yet again about how survivors and “winners” may rewrite what is left to them to rewrite, with no one there to defend it. History is shaped by the winners and the survivors, often to suit their own agenda, ambitions, sense of mission, honor, etc. Sacred texts the world over have been revised over the centuries to suit new political and economic realities, new power centers, new leaders and their vanities. For that reason, and for many others, it’s always struck me as a mistake to view any work as inerrant.…
I always find it interesting to discover mergings, connections, and cross-fertilization across the arts. Fusions, juxtaposition, new combinations. And one of the most interesting of these, for me, is when Rock stars are influenced heavily by great novelists, poets and philosophers. Especially if the range is wide, and influence is not just on the surface. One such case was Jim Morrison ofThe Doors.
Morrison lived the life of a nomad, growing up with a father in the military who eventually became an admiral. They moved frequently. Perhaps that nomadic existence pushed Morrison into the philosophy of Nietzsche, another wanderer, and into the poetry of Rimbaud, who may have set records along those lines.
Morrison was an alumnus of UCLA, completing his degree in Film.…
It’s quite possible I couldn’t pick two writers further apart from one another to deal with back to back. Temperamentally, artistically, biographically. Rilke and Hemingway. Yet both men were profoundly influenced by their days in Paris, and both men learned much about their art at the knee of an older woman. Perhaps it’s less than dime-store psychology to also suggest that both men had “issues” with their relationship to female sexuality. Issues that led to very different attempts to resolve that conflict – internally and externally. But, issues nonetheless. People really are complex.
Finished Humphrey Carpenter’s book about Americans in Paris, and was reminded that the core material for The Sun Also Rises was a rather banal little trip taken by Hemingway and a few friends to see the bulls in Pamplona.…
