(no subject)

I read Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." The last I read of Hemingway was A Farewell to Arms in high school. I think. Maybe I just heard the title somewhere. If I read it, I don't remember any of it.

I'd heard "Big Two-Hearted River" characterized as an acme of efficient prose. It is very spare, but not as much as one would gather from Hemingway's reputation. I guess that's to be expected. But I anticipated more sterile prose than was in the story. One gets the impression from characterizations of Hemingway that his writing is arid and emotionless, but I think there really is something to this Iceberg Theory. There's a great depth of feeling in the writing, without that emotion being explicitly highlighted. Overtly, the writing concerns itself with what is happening in the present. It has a documentary character. The abstract, simile and metaphor, has little place here. I'm not sure I'd characterize it as efficient, exactly. It depends on what you mean by that. The story goes on in detail about the minutae of fishing, cooking, setting up camp. As description it is exhaustive. But the lengthy examination of these tasks is meditative, just as the tasks are themselves meditative for Nick Adams, the protagonist.

I wondered if I'd have seen it as a long, boring story about fishing, if I weren't forewarned that it has a deeper meaning. I don't know that I'm a terribly perceptive reader, and quite often what I get from a story isn't what the experts say I should get. For example, the grasshoppers. Discussions of the story's symbolism point to the grasshoppers living in the burned-over patch of land, but not the ones which Nick casually uses for fishing bait. I likened them to soldiers from the Great War, from which Nick had recently returned; uprooted from their normal lives, put to a purpose whose object they cannot comprehend, and which they will almost certainly not survive. The protagonist expends insignificant lives in order to accomplish his goal; does this say something about the universality of the impulses which lead us to war? The smart people are silent on this point. Are they missing this angle, or am I reading the story incorrectly? Or is it too obvious for comment?

I've got a couple of Hemingway's books lined up at the library. I think I can learn something from his work. There's always something to learn. But mostly I'm just interested in reading more of his writing, since I enjoyed this. :)

(no subject)

I should also note that I read Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats. I wish I had more to say about it.

Nominally, the book concerns itself with US government programs researching psychic warfare, but Ronson is more interested in the rationale for these programs and the personalities of the people involved in them. Some of the material was familiar to me from the film; some of it I'd turned up in my own research.

I found it a little less personal (or 'gonzo') than The Psychopath Test, and I suppose that's why it didn't interest me as much as the latter book. (Plus I'd already seen the movie.) The idea that the military entertained a countercultural approach to warfare during the 1970s didn't surprise me as much as it was supposed to. Not when Nancy Reagan was consulting astrologers on her husband's behalf while they were in the White House. But I was intrigued by the idea that research programs as weird as these can be carried out (and, according to Ronson's research, are still being carried out) without becoming common knowledge. That's useful to know. :)