Posts Tagged ‘Ernest Hemingway’

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

October 29, 2009
Washington, DC

 stacksofbooksSeattlelibraryWeb

Stack of books, Seattle, Washington by Wonderlane (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/ / CC BY 2.0)

In a world saturated with self-help books, I still swear by the words of courage, inspiration, and even caution that I’ve found in works of fiction. Here are a few of my favorite words to live by from the pages of  The Big Read.

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” — Willa Cather, from My Antonia

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”— Harper Lee, from To Kill a Mockingbird

“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/ And departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time . . . “— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“What a curiosity it was to hold a pen . . . An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve!”— Cynthia Ozick, from The Shawl

“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.”— Marilynne Robinson, from Housekeeping

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”— Thornton Wilder, from The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“From today on, I’ll be whatever I choose to be at the moment . . . “— Rosario Castellanos, from “Cooking Lesson”

Visit The Big Read website to hear more from the authors in The Big Read library.

 

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Monday, October 5th, 2009

October 5, 2009
Washington, DC

 Hemingwaylibrarybooks

A view of Ernest Hemingway’s Key West library. Photo by David Kipen

Having majored in journalism at the University of Kentucky, Bobbie Ann Mason (a 1983 NEA Literature Fellow) knows a little something about transitioning from journalism to writing fiction. In this interview excerpt, Mason muses on how Ernest Hemingway’s training as a journalist influenced his inimitable style.

I think Hemingway’s style is very, very distinctive, and it may have influenced decades of writers. But even though he would seem to be easily imitated, it’s not easy to produce the kind of powerful original writing that he did. I think it’s because Hemingway’s style grew out of his own head, his own experiences, his own necessities for creating something in the way that he did so that he wasn’t starting with his style, he was starting with sensibility. If you’re imitating his style, you’re starting with those nice, clear, clean words on the page, and that may not be where you start.

Hemingway’s style was rooted in journalism, and when he was a reporter he gave a very hard accounting of details and facts. So when he began to write fiction he drew on very simple words, everyday ways of saying things, ordinary speech, [and] speech rhythms. [He used] . . . suggestion, repetition, rhythm, and the selection of descriptive details and incidents so that a scene might seem to be very repetitive, but the drama is building because we’re adding a detail here and there. He writes extensively and frequently about things outside—trees, weather, sky, mountains, snow, river, the roads—and that seems to be a very important part of the way he saw things and the way he was able to describe them.

He doesn’t give you anything extraneous. Every word counts, and all of this adds up to a tone. In A Farewell to Arms the tone is one of quietness and steadiness and a kind of control. What this does is send you along a tightrope between sorrow and joy, and these sentences that seem so simple are really loaded with emotion. . . .

Celebrate A Farewell to Arms with Wisconsin’s Waukesha Public Library throughout October. Visit The Big Read calendar to get the scoop on the library’s Big Read activites, including a roadtrip to visit Hemingway’s childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in A Farewell to Arms | 2 Comments »

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

 hemingwayfromahisgettatflickrweb

“La Bodeguita Ernest Hemingway” by ahisgett from Flick’r

A recurring theme on the blog is hearing from The Big Read authors about other writers and artists who have influenced their work. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Tobias Wolff  (author of Old School) on some of the writers whom he admires—and has cast as characters in his novels—and the tension between the public and private selves of these authors.

[T]he greatest pleasure in writing [Old School] was to try to bring [Robert] Frost and Ayn Rand and even [Ernest] Hemingway to life in this novel. I was very much affected by all these writers when I was young, and they were truly, all of them, legendary in different ways. And, for that reason, I felt justified in creating them as characters because all of them, quite consciously, made of themselves public characters that were a little different from their private selves. They did this no doubt for protection. You craft a kind of public persona and you can kind of hide behind that and add a bit of privacy behind it. But also that was the way they wanted to be seen for good or ill. In Hemingway’s case as we all know, that public persona kind of got the better of him and wrestled him to the ground. Because his early work is very tender and not at all concerned with trumpeting the virtues of stoicism and masculine strength and warrior values, all that kind of thing. But as that kind of bristling masculinity of his that was so much a part of his public persona leaked into his work, it damaged it, no question about it.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Old School | No Comments »