E Rack

So I've decided to go balls out and write my final paper on taking a trip as a freelance writer with a military regiment through Iraq. Psy-chooooo!

Hit

Eventually the face of the hulking Connecticut pot head will be smashed, flat to a gritty concrete wall on a sunny day. The skin may sizzle and bubble at the very moment of impact. That ugly face, a big ball, swollen and ashy from beer, bursting with greasy blond hair, sadly comes to my brain tonight. Oh, that pathetic, stupid fucking face. Delivering excited slurs, a boorish smiling expression and empty, beady, black eyes. Drunk on power, this face, surely, tottering back and forth, lips jabbering idiot signals. Or just drunk.

Are people listening to him, I think now? Do they hear what he says? Does it resonate? Does it really make sense? Tell me, is that stupid, drunk face making sense?

The Way Things Were

{[Just thought I'd bore you with this essay I wrote for a class. Lame but useful if you're looking for a definition of inaccrochable. Let me know if you find one.]}
UPDATE: Hunters for a definition of inaccrochable can find an attempt here. Otherwise, this is so bad it's not worth tagging.

A Moveable Feast is a romantic account of Ernest Hemingway’s jocular and hungry days in Paris as a budding writer in the early 1920s. In that age, Hemingway reports, he wrote, drank, betted on horses, gallivanted with fellow writers and expatriates, and observed all things. This was a wondrous time, indeed. But the book wraps these experiences in something dark and ominous. Hemingway’s flippant behavior echoes a collective desire to escape the horrific memories of the First World War. In the book, Hemingway comes across a generation of writers on their last legs. He wrote the book during the final years of his own life. Readers can treat this book as a collection of elegant and prophetic memories reported in the finest detail. But take inventory of these attributes, and the reader will find that A Moveable Feast is often more like a writer’s manual, expounding on characteristics that build writers and those that eventually kill them.

In 1917, as the United States deployed forces to fight the Great War, Hemingway tried to join the Army and settled with the Red Cross Ambulance Corps. In 1918, he quit his job as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and set off for Europe. After a short stop in Paris, the Red Cross dispatched Hemingway to Italy. During his first day on duty in Milan, an ammunition factory exploded, engulfing troops in the blast and sending their body parts flying. Hemingway helped collect their appendages. In July of 1918, an Austrian mortar put an end to Hemingway’s tenure in the war, shooting over 200 pieces of shrapnel into his leg. He healed and took a job in a Milan hospital.

After the war, Europeans had grown weary of the grinding death machine and disillusioned about life. It did not help that they were privy to an economic recession. Hemingway spent these years in Chicago, then France. In Paris, from 1921 to 1926, according to A Moveable Feast, he grew bored of journalism and devoted his time to writing fiction, haunting cheap Parisian cafes and running into his mentors, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald. Call those years early retirement—slow, repetitive, and carefree. But it was diligent retirement, a time to study the nuance of retirement. In Paris, Hemingway set out to write his first novel. By 1926, he produced The Sun Also Rises, which details the life of “The Lost Generation,” ex-pats who spend most of their time gallivanting and drinking.

Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the phrase, “The Lost Generation.” In A Moveable Feast, she has limited hope for Hemingway’s “inaccrochable” writing. “She told me that I was not a good enough writer to be published [in the Atlantic Monthly] or in the Saturday Evening Post but that I might be some new sort of writer in my own way but the first thing to remember was not to write stories that were inaccrochable,” (15). The Babel Fish online translator said this word is the same in English as in French, inaccrochable. Multiple dictionaries could not yield an English definition of the word. Judging by its use in online sources, Stein’s explanation—“like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either”—and Hemingway’s clarification that he used “words that people would actually use,” (15), inacccrochable is something so offensive, vulgar, up-front or crude that it cannot be published.

Though Stein was an influence on Hemingway, in the book he doesn’t seem to accept her advice or respect her outlook. He writes that Stein lives in a fine home and surrounds herself with a court of hagiographers. “I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald,” (27). Hemingway’s favor with her appears to depend on whether he shows an obvious and glowing interest in her writing. He took the opportunity of A Moveable Feast to make his feelings clear:

“She disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing intelligible, although she needed to have publication and official acceptance, especially for the unbelievably long book called The Making of Americans.

“The book began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket,” (17, 18).

It is prophetic if he arrived at this perceptive criticism at so young an age. The passage indicates that pride can be any writer’s greatest flaw. The passage also indicates that Hemingway is prideful.

In a later chapter of “A Moveable Feast,” Stein chastises Ernest Hemingway and the young people like him who served in the war. “You are a lost generation,” she says, quoting a garage owner from earlier that day. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death,” (29). Hemingway finds the comment pompous and inaccurate. “I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation?” (30). If the reader considers the current reputation of brilliantly inaccrochable modern writers like William Faulkner, they will probably feel the same way about Gertrude Stein’s comments.

Hemingway ends A Moveable Feast with a long profile of Scott Fitzgerald. In the book, Hemingway first meets Fitzgerald—who he refers to simply as Scott—in the Dingo bar in the rue Delambre, “where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters,” (149). Scott is not much older than Hemingway. He has money, some success, a wife, a child, fine features and “a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty,” (149). Shortly after this meeting, Fitzgerald will publish his stylized and pointedly tragic novel The Great Gatsby, which will eventually make it onto reading-lists for high school English classes across the country. Still, as they meet, Hemingway is more inclined to flatter himself. “Scott did not stop talking and since I was embarrassed by what he said—it was all about my writing and how great it was—I kept on looking at him closely,” (150). He observes and describes Scott at length, ignoring Scott’s long monologue, then later returns to the topic of his own writing. “Until then I had felt that what a great writer I was had been carefully kept secret between myself and my wife,” (150). As we can see, Hemingway can be quite the egotist.

Hemingway does not concern himself with praising Scott Fitzgerald at length. Rather, he offers a sad image of his friend: the great writer is entering the beginning stages of alcoholism and his life is spiraling out of control. This truth shows through in their frustrating trip to Lyon. Hemingway misses Scott at the train station and embarks on the mission alone. When he reaches Lyon, Scott is nowhere to be found. Finally they meet in the lobby of Hemingway’s hotel. The trip has been disastrous for Fitzgerald and, in a typically disruptive fashion, his wife Zelda never told him where Hemingway was.

After breakfast, Ernest and Scott head to the hotel bar for whiskey and Perrier as they wait to collect picnic lunches for their drive. “Scott had obviously been drinking before I met him,” (161), Hemingway notes. It starts raining and the car is a convertible. During their drive, they stop to eat and drink some wine. At Mâcon, Hemingway buys four more bottles for the rest of their trip. Scott begins to worry that he is suffering from “congestion of the lungs.” It is an old-fashioned term for pneumonia, Hemingway says. Scott disagrees. This sparks a long, meandering argument about the disease and the term’s international origins. When the two arrive in a small town, Scott climbs into bed and belligerently demands that Hemingway seek out a thermometer. Ernest assures Scott that a whiskey and lemonade will set him straight. He sees Scott’s point. “Most drunkards in those days died of pneumonia, a disease which has now been almost eliminated. But it was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of alcohol,” (166). Nevertheless, he orders two double whiskies and two citron presses in addition to the thermometer.

This drawn out journey earns Scott the mockingly formal moniker Fitzgerald. Later in the book, Hemingway’s picture of Fitzgerald grows darker. The Great Gatsby is a literary success but a commercial failure. Fitzgerald has been writing formulaic stories to make money. But it gets harder and harder for him to stay productive. Zelda is jealous of his writing, so she flirts with other men and drags him to parties. Eventually, “he was drunk now in the day time as well as the nights. […] He had begun to be very rude to his inferiors or anyone he considered his inferior,” (183). Scholars can debate the extent to which Zelda, or just a recurring affliction with tuberculosis, led to Scott Fitzgerald’s undoing. Ultimately, a heart attack killed him in December of 1940. But alcohol was his dearest vice, haunting him throughout life and preparing him for an early death.

Hemingway began writing A Moveable Feast in 1957 in Cuba and continued at it in Idaho in the winter of 1958-59. He finished it in the spring of 1960 in Cuba, after writing The Dangerous Summer, the final book he would see published before his death. At this time, Hemingway’s health was failing, in part because of two tragic accidents during an East African safari and in part because he consumed a quart of liquor a day. He struggled with his work. He suffered from intense depression and paranoia. He tested the resolve of his loved ones. In the fall of 1960, he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to treat his depression. A doctor there subjected him to electro-shock therapy, wiping out his memory and certainly exacerbating his terrible condition. On July 2, 1961, he took his own life with a shotgun blast to the head.

It is clear from A Moveable Feast that in 1920s Paris, consuming wine was Hemingway’s most cherished activity, next to writing. There are perhaps no other tasks he describes more frequently throughout the book than choosing a café, concocting some logical conclusion that permits him to drink, choosing a wine, diluting it with varying amounts of water and then drinking it. Considering the final years of Hemingway’s life, the reader will see that these passages clearly recount both a great pastime and a great burden.

A Moveable Feast would not be worth reading if it were written by anyone other than Ernest Hemingway, because few writers could have made something meaningful out of a book so prosaic and repetitive. As rife as this book is with beautiful minute details and odd scenes, it is also sprawling, layered story of paradigms shifting—an empire collapsing, a culture rebuilding itself, writers aging—told by a writer at the end of his days. But this book is also useful for any writer. In his honest, contradictory and sometimes inaccrochable way, Ernest Hemingway simply describes what surrounds him, what it takes to be a great writer, and what great writers can become.






WORKS CITED


Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964.

Wilson, M. Ed. Wilson, M. Hemingway Resource Center.

http://www.lostgeneration.com. Last updated Dec. 21, 2005.

Iraq, What Do We Owe You?

Two weeks ago, the Iraqi government reported that around 2,300 Iraqi families have returned to their homes. Evidently, the war-torn country’s new joint security plan has brought newfound peace and stability.

Still, the experience of one family, a 67-year-old widow, her daughter and two teenage granddaughters, tells a dark story. A few weeks ago, when they arrived at their house in the deserted Amil community in Baghdad, their car packed with their belongings, they could not stay long.

Someone had spray-painted a note in red on one wall. “Residents of this house, your blood is wanted,” they read. “Leave.”

Over the past few weeks, Congress has jockeyed over an emergency-spending bill that would allot a hundred billion dollars for the war and institute benchmarks ensuring service members are adequately prepared before they are deployed to the country. Both the House and the Senate voted to include an amendment that calls for a troop withdrawal to begin in 120 days, and for troops to be out of the country by March 2008. Some lawmakers voted against the amendment. They demanded an even more immediate withdrawal.

There is no end in sight to violence in Iraq, but the American forces are pursuing a security plan that has shown some success. It is a wonder why democrats in Congress are demanding a speedy pull out so soon. As it is, this bill neglects these families, who have escaped their own homes and now fear for their lives.

Between March 16th and March 25th, 560 civilians lost their lives in Iraq, according to the tracking project Iraq Body Count. The majority were kidnapped, tortured and executed, or killed in bomb attacks. As the family in Amil escaped their old neighborhood a second time, four family members in the village of al-Buajeel, including a baby, met a grisly fate. Insurgents met them in their house and shot them dead.

Congress needs to keep these families in mind when it plans how long the American forces should stay in Iraq. At this point in the war, the American forces can finally offer some security. But if our troops leave Iraq in less than a year, America should consider what else we owe Iraq. This nation has a complicated history and we have laid groundwork for a chaotic future.

The nation of Iraq gained independence from the British in 1932, and Iraqis persevered through decades of monarchical rule and military coups. With a diverse body of Shia and Sunni Muslims, Christians and Kurds, the country retained a rich artistic and political culture.

Then, in 1968, the Baath Party took control of the country and they subjected Iraqis to terrifying panoptic controls. The Baaths led “Fifth Column” raids. Saddam Hussein rose to the presidency in 1979, and escalated a ruthless torture program dubbed “The Instrument of Yearning.” The party liquefied real and imaginary dissidents alike, running them through kangaroo courts, torture chambers and prisons. In 1980, Hussein attacked Iran, and scores of Iraqis were sent to die in a war that lasted eight years.

When the United States finally ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraqis were no doubt relieved of this catastrophic burden. We could have brought stability, but instead we ensured for these people a great instability.

The top U.S. administrator in the country, Paul Bremer, dissolved the Iraqi Army. The U.S. government helped form a parliament that subjugated former Baath members and offered advantages to the country’s majority Shia population and the Kurdish minority, further sowing sectarian resentment. Donald Rumsfeld, then the U.S. secretary of defense, deluded by grand ambitions, cut troop levels. Looters overwhelmed Baghdad’s museums and troops could not effectively contain Baghdad’s streets, put down militants and prevent suicide and roadside bombings.

The government also alienated Iraqis sympathetic to the American occupation. Inside the U.S. Embassy, George Packer wrote recently in The New Yorker, American officials—typically ones who knew little about Iraq—ignored Iraqi employees who had a special knowledge of the nation’s people, politics and culture.

Iraqi translators, drivers and office workers kept at their jobs, but had to hide their identities, sleep in cars and live in fear of the militants who killed more and more of their coworkers. Meanwhile, many U.S. diplomats treated them with great suspicion and purged them from their offices, preferring Jordanian employees instead.

Now, over four years after invading Iraq, we have adopted a new security plan that probably would have been effective at the war's inception. There have been some signs of hope: Families have been able to return to their homes and the Iraqi government is beginning diplomatic talks with insurgents.

But Congress is not satisfied: they are saying we should leave this country as soon as possible. The Iraqis should head up the parliament that we helped build, contain the violence that we helped foment and control an uncertain future that we helped define.

Indeed, the Iraqis should have control over their own fate. Nevertheless, the United States must offer more to Iraq than a speedy pull out, because the problems are complicated: Today, terrorists impersonate security forces, the Bush Administration refuses negotiations with Iran and innocent families in Iraq cower in fear. Iraqis will not simply forget what we have done to their country, so when our troops no longer patrol their streets, we must still consider what we can do for Iraq.

Spring Break in Georgetown, South Carolina

I just spent a few days in Georgetown, South Carolina. I took copious notes but, well, I didn't really feel like writing it all up. If anything this place was too imbued with meaning, too rife with history, for me to write about it. So here are some pictures.


Jamie Constance, owner of Chicora Wood Plantation, points to an old schoolhouse while floating down the Pee Dee River


Front door to house at Chicora Wood Plantation


On Highway 17, south of Myrtle Beach

Notes from earlier today

An overwritten little vignette of this morning:

At 11:08 in the morning at SUNY Purchase, or rather their yellow on-campus apartment buildings. Everything that surrounds them are stuck in time. The area is covered with snow, dead trees line the pathways, and everyone seems to be asleep.

Everyone sleeps in this room, at least. To my left, a young guy with plugs and short, brown-black hair lies on an old maroon sofa, covered with a blanket. My cohort Gabe is lanky, has a bushy, short hairdo, and he rests face-first on his narrow twin. He twisted his arm back, awkwardly, to conceal his head.

The last time I visited Purchase, most students didn’t arise and make a showing until 2 pm. It felt like 8 in the morning when I woke up, popped in “Arrested Development,” and waited as the college’s early-morning, ghostly haze wore off and things got moving again. It was around 11 in the morning. I couldn’t tell the difference, the blinds sheilding the windows from light and hearing the emptiness of the atmosphere. No walking, talking, yelling humans.

I’m guessing many here are content to go about this lolling. I am hyperactive. That or I am content to witness all this serenity, having cast off my own responsibility and accountability for the moment, it being spring break and all.

Today we plan to nourish ourselves at a diner in White Plains, explore Purchase’s forests and sail down packed hills of icy snow. Everyone just has to get up, first.

Excuses, Excuses

Photo: Here is a boy selling cotton candy at a bazaar in Kerman, Iran. By Lorraine Adams

Maybe it's because someone steals my Times from the stoop every morning (if you are reading this right now, thief, please suck my balls), or that I feel like I've heard it all before, or that it's all just so fucking depressing, but I notice that I haven't been as interested the newspaper over the past few weeks.

I still read it, yeah, but I'm growing weary. I think it's a combo of the three: I do not have a place in the apartment where I can enjoy reading a laptop screen, and these articles are so revealing, but then again, so were the last ten-thousand articles on the same topics printed since 9/11. The FBI mishandles sensetive, private information about thousands of Americans. Oops. 8 U.S. attourneys are canned at the Justice Dept. apparently for political reasons. But evidently Alberto Gonzales and the Bush Administration were either way too busy to notice, or just, like, forgot they did that, or something. Ding ding, sound the fuckin' alarm again.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed admits to orchestrating 9/11, and a long string of other high-profile attacks which he most likely did not do. Apparently they also put him in the "dog box." That's why he talked. And Holy Shit! We're probably going to war with Iran if the Bush Administration keep up their parade of circumstantial evidence. Not to sound nihilist, but is this seriously that surprising, considering the way things have been going? Unfortunately I did not read too in depth into the national conference about the war, hosted in Baghdad. Or the country's recent agreement to sign contracts with multinational corporations and sell off the country's nationally-owned oil reserves. Damn.

Last night, it was great to hang out with pals, and especially Inprint's new friend Luke, a guy from Fordham I met at the conference in Portland. (Incidentally, I notice I never gave a report on that, except to say that San Francisco's airport sucks dick. It's been a long week and if you're interested I can go over it later, but only if you're interested, whoever you are.) Luke is the music editor for the Observer at Fordham, and it goes without saying that we see eye to eye on a lot of things, but also have unique tastes in music. This is a way of saying that it's late and I don't really want to go into it all that further at the moment, but am indeed happy about it.

This article in the Times today was quite interesting. Hats off to any reporter who could get an interview like this. Even if it means crawling over a pile of dead bodies, risk sacrificing life and limb only to gaze down the dark, serpentine pathway that is our future, call this making a step in the right direction, at least by journalistic standards:
"New Face of Jihad Vows Attacks"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/world/middleeast/16jihad.html?ref=middleeast