More reading, finishing off one and starting a promising new one (Kierkegaard, Hollywood And How He Married An Alien From Mars or something - I’ll check and get back to you)

I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.

Finished off Hemingway vs Fitzgerald today, then start on an intriguing book I only came across last week called - provocatively it has to be said and I think you get a fair idea of what angle it will take from this title - Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and the Making of American Celebrity Culture. It’s by some guy call Leonard J Leff.

I trust myself after reading a few pages on sussing out whether it can be taken reasonably seriously or not (e.g. I Married and Alien From Outer Space), but even if everything has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, if it’s entertaining, it’s entertaining.

Along the lines of ‘loaded titles’, in my last year at university, after having done fuck all pretty much for two years in my English and Philosophy joint honours course, I was desperate to come up with a book, any book, a pamphlet, even, any pamphlet which might (as Hemingway would say, the old phoney) give me the inside dope on aspects of my Existentialism course.

One of the guys it covered as Soren Kierkegaard, who was well-known for his scepticism in most matters and a satirical bent. Scouring the library for ‘commentaries’, most of which by that late stage in the game had been borrowed anyway, I came across the following. You can guess just what an objective commentary it might be from its title: Kierkegaard the Cripple.

I’ve started another, more private, blog which is more in the way of an ordinary diary (and thus probably quite boring), and this is the latest entry there, but I thought I might as well post it here as there is nothing contentious in it.I’ve just looked it up and it by a Theodore Haecker. I seem to remember - this isn’t borne

out by my just recent googling - that it was published by some protestant seminary in the Mid-West. I didn’t read it, however, I didn’t bother. Maybe I should have done.

Nominally, ‘the cripple’ was based on the fact that Kierkegaard had a rather strange shape, or seemed to, and after injuring his leg walked with a limp.

So it remains to be seen how good my latest acquisition which arrived yesterday is or whether it is just a throwaway piece of fluff. By the way, I recently came up with a, for me, useful description of The Sun Also Rises which I shall use: a sad, sour, sardonic, romantic potboiler. Even after reading the bloody novel three times, the most recent last week, I still can’t see how the ‘lost generation’ angle is in it rather than grafted on by Scribners’ marketing department. And, friends, Hemingway might have started a new style of writing - though as far as I am concerned a pretty limited one - but a writing ‘genius’ he wasn’t.

PS Looked up Theodore Haecker (or Theodor) and he was a German, not a Yank and a RC convert to boot. Lord knows what that colony of Mid-West puritan godwhackers were doing publishing his book.