.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

On his best, Buddy Emmons.

I put Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies into one of those Free library bins but not the one I’d intended to that will contain a lot of serious reading. (I’ve seen Mann, Nietzsche, Borges. I’ve taken from it a Willie Nelson biography.) When I went there, it was around school let-out time, and this was very near a school, and there was a big crowd around the free library, so I found another spot.

Though Auster doesn’t go much into specifics about it, it was nice to read a book about Brooklyn from the time that I was there, and when the worst thing we had to worry about was that Bush might beat Gore. (I have an image I associate with the result of that election but can’t recall if it was the day after it or what: a newspaper sheet strewn over a small stool or table in the kitchen of our squalid flat with the windows open on a rainy day.) That was calamity enough, yet it proved only to be the leading edge.

Funny that Hemingway didn’t like A Fable. As I recall, Faulkner struggled to write it, too, taking, like, seven years with it, while As I Lay Dying took six weeks. I Imagine receiving the Nobel Prize is probably somewhat rattling to one’s creative propensities. 

“[Hemingway] had a sour grapes theory that ‘no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards.’ The case seemed to be proved by Faulkner’s A Fable, published in August. It struck Ernest as false and contrived: all a man needed, in order to do 5,000 words a day of that kind of stuff, was a quart of whiskey, the loft of a barn, and a total disregard of syntax.” Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story.

Interesting. Looks like the ham in place names (Birmingham, Knottingham) is related to the word hem, as in a dress hem. The sense is of a place hemmed in, or boundaried.

‘Dandle’ is an interesting word, etymology uncertain.

In Palo Alto and Cambridge, computer scientists suggest that Americans stop thinking about A.I. as a mere tool, but akin to an alternative species, one the world will have to live with, for better or worse…. NYT

… the invasion of the fools.

She returned home and wrote:

Dear Abe,
I’ve felt awful all day about this morning’s note, in which I fear I spoke with too great a casualness about your work. I hope you think little enough of me to disregard that note entirely or else to chalk it up to a fit of presumption on my part, which was only a fit, and not how I truly feel. I’m very sincerely sorry for any unintended disrespect I might have shown to you or your work, — Robin

Robin was standing; these days she always stood when she wrote letters. The paper she had positioned on the slightly curving cover of her closed record player (which was how she would generally listen to music) and the pen was of the bic brand, which she had seen directly on entering her home, around 9 PM, by a leg of the sofa. She tended to stand when she wrote because she felt it imparted to her writing a greater sense of urgency than it otherwise would, and indeed this letter seemed to express her thought more clearly than those she had made earlier at her desk. She felt confident in her response at last, and, with a sense of relief, she now typed it up, striking out only the word ‘unintended’.

Fictile, capable of being molded.

So it looks like it was Furthman and not Faulkner who wrote the “was you ever stung by a dead bee” theme in To Have and Have not. Not what I’d have guessed.

Gen, a word Hemingway uses in his correspondence — “information.” In bird watching, it is specifically info about the location of a bird.

vor die Hunde gehen, to go to the dogs

… She pats soddenly, with the flat of her hand, a patty of sand.

… An inner tube overturned in the wave: it knows what’s happened sooner than the rider does.

… The girl extends her thumb far to the right and her pinky far to the left to indicate the length of the biggest fish she’s seen.

… Inner tubes: the first one rises, the second one rises, the first one falls, the third one rises.

… The wave, rising, gathers sun in its concavity.

… The cave, the cave in, the miners diving in and out of it.

… The swagger of mom, the stagger of mom’s sister.

… The wave breaks first to its right, then to its left, and finally down the center — well, what about it? It’s just one of those things that happens with waves.

… Woman’s shoulders snapping back, her chest jutting forward, as her butt is slapped hard by a wave.

… You can’t make out what the boy screams in a thrilled tone above the sound of the surf, but it’s a statement of the obvious, you’re sure, or of what seems to him to be obvious.

… I had never seen quite that smile on my relative’s face before: he is remembering having been a young parent.

… A roll of wave as knotted and complex as the trunk of an old oak tree, its whole life passing in a few seconds. The ocean is nothing but one vast logging camp depositing many such as these onto the flatbed.

… And we are as a crowded shoreline of waves; we bunch up, we outstrip and trip each other up, we collide and form things, ducking and weaving, and disappearing.

Old Corndrinking Mellifluous Hemingway called Faulkner.

Came across Busan today, which I’d have called Pusan — which was changed a couple decades ago at least.

I’m not sure how much of this to attribute to Baker and how much to attribute to Hemingway, or to some other cause, but the former’s biography of the latter is among the liveliest literary biographies I have read, full of adventure, accident, misfortune, comic locutions, fame, and bad behavior.

In the end, it’s only the writer’s writing that matters, but it does seem like Hemingway was also quite physically courageous, I’ve learnt from Baker, which makes an impression on me.

Note that this biography was written in the 1960’s and has probably been superseded in some respects by later scholars. I just happened to see it at a used book store and it looked good.

Promenoir: a covered walk.

Ngrams viewer: dispositive. Been seeing this word a lot without really knowing what it means. Determining, conclusive, deciding, are synonyms.

of course yes

I’d never come across this, The Platonic Blow, Auden. Mentioned in this wildly glowing review of The Disappearers, Marlon James.