I know it was awful, and I know it will never seem like it was that long ago. But you fought to make the world a safer place. And you won. And now it is.
Joan Harris, Mad Men
As I’m learning, over and over through reading The Sun Also Rises, the war doesn’t end just because you sign a treaty.
Teaching The Sun Also Rises (Taken with instagram)
‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.’
‘Do you think so?’ her eyes looked flat again.
‘I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think it’s hell on earth.’
‘It’s good to see each other.’
‘No. I don’t think it is.’
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘I have to.’
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Sometimes I think Lady Brett Ashley’s got the right idea. Love seems like it might be hell on earth.
‘Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?’
Robert Cohn to Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
Jake’s response? “‘What the hell, Robert,’ I said. ‘What the hell.’” What the hell indeed.
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
And so begins the opening of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which I am re-reading and beginning to teach in class tomorrow. I love you, Lost Generation.
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. This is why you write and for no other reason that you know of.
Ernest Hemingway, interview in The Paris Review issue 18, 1958 (collected in The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I)
(via stupidlittletuftybeard:silentpunk:yoursecretary)
When they’re young, it’s Hemingway and Bukowski, yes, but also Ginsberg and Kerouac. When they’re older, if they never grow out of this douchebaggery, it’s Jean Baudrillard and David Foster Wallace and Michel Foucault, among others. I don’t hate any of them (and in fact I’m quite fond of DFW), but I’m tired of those names being thrown around. Pick a new writing god. Make her female.
Chicago - Sufjan Stevens
I am now in Chicago! Land of Saul Bellow! And Carl Sandburg! Home of Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright! Okay, enough exclamations. I’m staying with becool-sodapop (and Poki!) for two days and I’m pretty damn excited.
Mlle Hazelwood
Reader & Writer, Master of Fine Arts, Collaborator on Structure and Style, a new poetry blog.
