Learning not to dislike Hemingway on the 50th anniversary of the literary giant’s death

I used to hate Hemingway too. His writing seemed like it was written by someone taking themselves too seriously. Direct. Spare. Prose with a chip on it's shoulder. Kind of blah actually. But lately I've been taking another look.

Here's an article by David L. Ulin  who rediscovered some of the same appeal (from the Maine Bangor Times on the anniversary of Hemingway's death) .

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For much of the 1980s, beginning when I was in college, I used to read a Hemingway book a year. The point was not self-improvement but rather a kind of exploration: What was it, exactly, about his writing that I’d missed? I had read “The Sun Also Rises” in high school and had admired its spare portrayal of 1920s expatriate life. But I’d also thought of it as more than a little stilted, even melodramatic in its way.

Of all the great American between-the-wars writers — “the three kings,” as Richard Ford referred to Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald in a 1983 essay, although I’d also include John Dos Passos in their company — the one who most spoke to me was Faulkner, with his flowing sea of language, his sense of the past, of history, as a living thing. Next to him, Hemingway seemed flat, two-dimensional. Where was his appeal? If only I kept reading, I might find out.

I worked through my share of the novels: “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” I was compelled, in places, yet still felt removed. Then, on a train from New York to Chicago, I discovered the 1925 collection “In Our Time,” Hemingway’s American debut. The 15 stories here include some of his most iconic: “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” These works helped rewire American short fiction with their bluntness, their lack of affect, their insistence that we read between the lines.

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about,” Hemingway observed in “Death in the Afternoon,” his 1932 study of bullfighting, “he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” That’s a revolutionary idea, with its implicit recognition that writing and reading are a collaboration. And yet, for all that “In Our Time” puts this into action, the book stands out for me by remaining — along with “The Old Man and the Sea” and some of the nonfiction — one of the few by Hemingway that I truly love.

Hemingway shot himself to death on July 2, 1961, 50 years ago last weekend, but questions about his legacy resonate. In part, this has to do with the contradictory nature of his character: innovator and reactionary, self-mythologizer and cliche, purveyor of both a new way of seeing and some of the most garish stereotypes of masculinity, with his fixations on big-game hunting, booze and war.

Although he wrote almost to the end (indeed, he’s published posthumously at a rate rivaled only by L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Kerouac), he had produced most of his important work by 1940, when “For Whom the Bell Tolls” appeared. He was a personality — along with Fitzgerald and some others, I’d suggest, an early example of the writer as celebrity, as famous for who he was as for what he wrote — and yet, half a century after his death, he is misunderstood, if we think of him at all.

The world has changed: How many readers, in the aftermath of Vietnam or the last slogging decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, still consider war a noble gesture, a crucible? How many, in an era when we blog or tweet with equal weight our deepest secrets and least significant interactions, have any use for Hemingway’s stylized reserve? Even back when I was actively reading him, he seemed a writer of another time. Twenty-five years later, that moment too feels archaic, like so much ancient history, leaving me to wonder what, if anything, Hemingway can still mean.

I raised this issue recently with a number of writer friends on Facebook, and what I got back was illuminating. Some made jokes, while others mentioned the experiences of their children. (Apparently, Hemingway is still assigned in high school, if less often than he used to be.) One referred to her own high school struggles with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” — after which, she noted, she never read Hemingway again. Most interesting, though, were the half-dozen or so responses that addressed the work directly, not as a matter of content so much as one of style. Even those who didn’t consider Hemingway a favorite cited his stripped-down approach, his intent to reinvent the language, his commitment not to tell.

I think of “Cat in the Rain,” perhaps my favorite of his stories, which in three concise pages portrays a marriage on the cusp of unraveling, without ever making that overt. The young American wife at the center of the narrative is dissatisfied but only aware of it as an undertone. As her husband reads, uninterested, she stares out the window of their Italian hotel room, then tries to rescue a cat caught in the rain. The story unfolds over the course of only a few minutes, but these minutes are intensely weighted, especially when the wife goes downstairs and runs into the hotel-keeper, an older man who is everything her husband is not. “The wife liked him,” Hemingway writes. “She liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a hotel-keeper. She liked his old, heavy face and big hands.”

You can read that passage in a variety of ways: as a deft character description or as an example of Hemingway’s aesthetic in action, with the repetition of “She liked” working to remind us of the story as a written artifact. Yet most important is how the spareness sets up the emotion, by forcing us to inhabit these sentences for ourselves.

What is Hemingway asking us to do, after all, if not to compare this man, in the wife’s eyes, to her husband, who does not and will never match up? He doesn’t need to say it; we can see it, and its implications for the future of their relationship. If, as he once wrote, “all stories, if continued far enough, end in death,” he is revealing to us here a way station, freighted with both past and future, a catalyst, an epiphany. Its simplicity is what makes it beautiful, although paradoxically this may explain why I remain conflicted about his longer works. In a novel it is harder to sustain this kind of focus, and for me, Hemingway can lose his sharpness when he has to deal with plot. Just look at “To Have and Have Not,” which is a mess of a book, or “Across the River and Into the Trees.”

So what does this mean for his relevance? That’s an obligatory question, given the anniversary of his death, but is also the wrong question to ask. Instead, let’s think about his influence, which remains an influence of style.

Without Hemingway, could we have Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Russell Banks or Tobias Wolff? Could we have Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” modeled (stylistically, anyway) on both him and James M. Cain? Could we have the work of Norman Mailer, his closest literary descendent, or, for that matter, Hunter S. Thompson, who admired his stance as l’homme engage? Perhaps his truest value lies in what he has passed down.

“I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you,” he wrote to Fitzgerald in 1925. It has been decades since I gave up trying to reconcile my own ambivalence about his writing, but if he has a legacy, this may be where it resides.

The Upside of the Reading Experience of eBooks and all those “Devices”

Reprinted from USA Today By Matt Frassica, The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — David J. Loehr, a playwright who lives in southern Indiana, was taking his car to the dealership when a story on the radio caught his attention. A short science piece about "an obscure subject" gave him an idea for a new play.

Ordinarily, Loehr would have had to make do with jotting down some notes or trying to remember his inspiration. But since he had his iPad with him, he bought a few books on the subject and downloaded them as soon as he got to the dealership. He started his research for the play right there, while his car was being serviced.

"I can have all that research on a single tablet instead of carrying around 40 books," Loehr said.

Welcome to the future of books, where your entire library is as portable as a cellphone.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project reported that ownership of e-reader devices — like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader and Kobo eReader Touch — doubled between November 2010 and May 2011. Now 12 percent of adults over age 18 own one, while 8 percent own a tablet computer like the iPad.

So what does the increasing popularity of these devices mean for the experience of reading? Do we read differently when we can get (almost) any book ever published, whenever we want?

Reading the future

For their devotees, ebooks have transformed the experience of reading.

Michelle Jones, who writes the Consuming Louisville blog, has a Kindle reader and also uses the Kindle app on her Android phone. "Even when I'm walking the dog, I'm always going to have my phone on me," she said. "I'm not always going to have my book bag. It makes it possible for me to read places I never would have before."

For Jones, the fact that her Kindle syncs with her phone -- so her book always knows where she left off -- makes reading the same book on different devices effortless.

Jones describes herself as an early adopter. But e-readers also have won over some book lovers who aren't ordinarily enticed by gadgetry, like Madelyn Anetrella, a nonprofit development manager for the American Lung Association.

"I don't know how to use my iPod," she said, by way of establishing her Luddite bona fides. But she does read on a Kindle and on the Kindle app on her phone.

"I'm always with a book of some sort, whether in hard copy on my Kindle or on the phone," she said. And although the gadgets haven't replaced her physical books, she does find that they come in handy. "Amazon has a lot of the classics for free, so I'll read a few pages when I'm in line."

Brian Leung, novelist and professor of English at the University of Louisville, said that having your entire library with you wherever you go was pretty extraordinary. "It's having all your books in your pocket, and having all your magazine subscriptions in your pocket."

Although Leung has a strong preference for physical books, he has started to think about buying ebook versions of things he's likely to only read once. He recently read Tina Fey's memoir, "Bossypants," and cited it as an example. "It's something that I wouldn't go back to," Leung said.

Like Leung, some readers who would never give up physical books have started to opt for ebook versions of one-time reads. James Bickers, the morning host for WFPK, is one. "It's largely a clutter thing," Bickers said. "I don't let a book into my house if I don't think I'm going to read it more than once."

Being able to purchase an ebook and start reading it right away without leaving the house — or the doctor's waiting room — also increases the convenience of the impulse buy.

Jen Woods, founder and president of the local small press Typecast Publishing, said she often buys books she's not sure about in the ebook version for her Nook. "For those books, I find that I purchase a lot more of them because I don't have to store them anywhere. If it is only a peripheral interest and I don't read the whole book, it's OK."

Just being able to carry around lots of books, however, doesn't mean you're going to read them. Bickers said that one of the things that attracted him to e-readers was the ability to download public-domain classics for free.

"It's all stuff that you were meaning to read anyway. Now I have these electronic versions of Dickens that I cannot read electronically," he said. "It makes me feel good to know I have Dickens even though I know I'm probably never going to get through it."

What's on your bookshelf?

But beyond the gadgets, how has technology improved the reading experience?

One of the best things about our digital lives is the ease with which we can share ideas with others. There are a number of websites and apps that allow readers to share recommendations with their social networks and to find new things to read.

Kiki Petrosino, a poet and assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville, wrote for the Poetry Foundation's Twitter feed last summer. She said the experience connected her to readers in a way that readings at bookstores or in universities didn't.

"I would post a simple question like, 'What are you reading today? What is the best live reading you ever attended?' " Petrosino said. "It was a great way to create a sense of community, in a rather intangible atmosphere."

Twitter and Facebook are the largest networks for creating online communities, but neither is specifically designed for readers. Other social networks are structured like giant, international reading groups.

Goodreads (goodreads.com) users can tell their friends about books they've read, or that they intend to read. It's been around for about five years.

Otis Chandler, the founder and CEO of Goodreads, said he was inspired by the way he could browse his friends' bookshelves and ask about what they were reading. "There was no way to do that online," he said.

Now Goodreads has 5.2 million members who have cataloged more than 160 million books.

But Chandler demurred when asked if Goodreads changed the way we read. "I don't think Goodreads is about changing the actual experience of reading," he said. "I think that what's changed is how people discover books and share books."

Short articles like blog posts dominate the free content available on the Internet, and it's easy to spend the whole morning grazing on bite-sized chunks of information. But there's a huge amount of long-form writing online, too -- the only trick is deciding what to commit your time to reading. A few new websites offer ways to pick up recommendations for these longer nonfiction articles.

Longreads (longreads.com) is designed to help people find journalism that's worth taking the time to read -- all suggested by other readers. You can browse or search its database of articles by subject, author or publication.

Anyone on Twitter can add a piece to Longreads by tweeting a link with the hashtag #longreads. Once you do that, Longreads automatically creates a user page with all the stories you've suggested. You can invite people to look at your recommendations, or browse the lists compiled by people you follow on Twitter.

Another new service for finding good, lengthy nonfiction is called Byliner (byliner.com). The site has amassed a database of more than 29,000 articles over the past year of development, although it just went online recently. As the name suggests, Byliner wants to focus attention on writers. It compiles lists of all the articles by a writer, regardless of where they were published.

John Tayman, the CEO of Byliner, gave the example of a reader who likes David Grann, the New Yorker writer and author of the best-seller "The Lost City of Z."

"There's no way to do really deep discovery around David's stuff," Tayman said. "You could do some of it at The New Yorker, but then you'd miss the stuff that he did for the Atlantic and The New York Times and everything else."

A search for David Grann on Byliner turns up articles not only from The New Yorker, the Atlantic and The New York Times, but also the New Republic and the Weekly Standard. Clicking on an article gives you the first few hundred words and then a link to the original source — Byliner doesn't aggregate the full text of articles. That means the original publisher can also benefit from the new readers.

Once you've found your favorite writers at Byliner, the site's algorithms will try to suggest other journalists you might like — something like movie recommendations on Netflix.

"The recommendations system that we're building (will) allow us to use that one David Grann article to become a deep David Grann fan to then be able to discover Nick Paumgarten, who has some similarities."

Some things never change

As we spend more time online, and increasingly turn to social networks for reading recommendations, writers and publishers are adjusting to fit the expectations of new media.

Woods of Typecast Publishing said she's a fan of the way electronic media allow her authors to connect with readers — even though her books are mostly printed on letterpress, an old-fashioned and time-consuming physical process.

"I really feel like the digital revolution in reading is only one more tool in our belt that we can use to put content out to readers," she said. "We do most of our work very much in the world of printed object, but one reason why we succeed in that is because of the digital revolution."

Writers, too, have been modifying their work to suit the online marketplace. Rick Moody and John Wray are two novelists who have experimented with Twitter fiction. Paul Griner, a novelist and professor of English at the University of Louisville, said that he tends to write more flash fiction — very short short stories — because they're easier for grazing online readers to digest.

"The available technology often dictates what form writing takes, rather than the other way around," Griner said, citing the examples of Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant, who wrote their short stories to fit the specifications of the newspapers that published them.

Online-only literary journals like elimae (elimae.com), Five Chapters (fivechapters.com), Fifty-Two Stories (fiftytwostories.com) and Guernica (guernicamag.com) cater to the audience of readers at their desks with short blasts of fiction.

At the same time, some things won't change. Reading is still a quiet, solitary engagement between you and the text, whether that text is printed on dead trees or in e-ink on a screen. The experience of getting sucked into a great story doesn't differ, according to e-reader owners.

If anything, the growing popularity of ebooks shows that readers are still willing to pay for good writing, despite the profusion of free content available online. In that sense, it's a reaffirmation of the old publishing business model.

Petrosino doesn't think the prevalence of electronic media would affect the way she writes poetry, either. "Poetry is one of the forms that defies the short attention span. Poetry is a way of paying attention."

And although ebooks continue to increase their share of the market, readers will still buy physical books.

"I think I'm 50-50 with reading actual books and reading on my Kindle," said Anetrella of the American Lung Association. "If I'm at a bookstore and I see a book that I want, I'll buy it."

"State of Wonder" by Ann Patchett is a suspenseful jungle adventure with an unexpected ending and other assorted surprises

Partial review is reprinted from the Chicago Tribune article by Laura Ciolkowski

Prize-winning author Ann Patchett ("Bel Canto," "Truth and Beauty," "The Magician's Assistant") once confessed that the single most important artistic influence on her work is "The Poseidon Adventure," the 1933 Paul Gallico potboiler that was made into a classic 1970s action-adventure-disaster movie featuring Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine fighting their way out of a luxury liner capsized by a 100-foot tidal wave. Patchett explained, "['The Poseidon Adventure'] was the first time I saw something that made me think, Oh, that's what plot is: you're going along, it's fine, then everything turns upside down; people band together, sacrifices are made, there's passion, there's loss, there's a journey and at the end you cut a hole in the boat and you come into the light."

"State of Wonder," Patchett's sixth novel, is a riveting variation on that tightly plotted journey from darkness to light. The novel traces the steps of 42-year-old Marina Singh, pharmacologist at the Vogel Pharmaceutical Company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Marina makes her way to a place deep in the bowels of the jungle, "somewhere on a tributary off the Rio Negro" in Brazil, and then must fight her way back home to the bright, frozen landscape of Eden Prairie.

"State of Wonder" is Marina's interior, psychological journey back in time to confront her past, in the shape of her former medical school professor Dr. Swenson; and a vivid account of her travels through snake-infested rivers, malarial swamps and "thick walls of breathing vegetation".

In "State of Wonder" Patchett writes with the confidence and authority of an author-explorer endowed with the power to imagine a universe divided into ill-mannered natives and the modern men and women from Minnesota who teach them table manners, instruct them in the art of wiping their feet before they get into bed, and train them to be docile subjects, "submitting themselves to constant weighing and measurement, allowing their menstrual cycles to be charted and their children to be pricked for blood samples".

Part scientific thriller, part engaging personal odyssey, "State of Wonder" is a suspenseful jungle adventure with an unexpected ending and other assorted surprises.