Hemingway bollocks: the end if in sight

I'm glad to report that I'm slowly getting to the end of the Hemingway bollocks. This last essay (last, I think and hope) is in some ways crucial and took a while to get started. I've so far written over 10,000 but there's not much more to say.

It's all about how academia is eternally in danger of disappearing up its own bum, yet 99 per cent of us are rather in awe to 'academics' and if they were to contradict us and declare that on occasion black really is white, few of us would feel confident disagreeing. Here are two prime pieces of apparent gobbledgook (or maybe I'm the dumbo). But once from 1950 they decided Hemingway 'was an artist', there was no going back. Here they are:

There was much more to [The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms], of course, than an act of personal exorcism, however complicated. For to destroy by embodying is also to create by arranging. The artist’s special blessing exists in an impu. lse to destroy an aspect of the thing he creates, and to render permanent what for him, in another and internal dimension, must be permanently destroyed.

That is from Carlos Baker in his book Hemingway: The Writer As Artist. This is from a woman called Hollis Robbins, written while she was teaching at Princeton. It is her commentary on a commentary be Jackques Derrida commenting on Sigmund Freud's comments about Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes:

[It is a] critique of criticism [and a] tale, teller, interpreter, and critical case study all in one . . . Yet if it is true that the tale’s very transparency is a critique of the desire to critique — or rather, the exhibitionistic desire to unveil publicly — Derrida’s privileging of the themes of analysis, truth, and unveiling in his (albeit brief) reading of The Emperor’s New Clothes provides evidence that the awareness of this desire does not reduce its influence. The desire to read The Emperor’s New Clothes as either a fantasy of critique or a new literary history critique of the fantasy of critique is symptomatic of our assumptions about what it means to be a reader-analyst.

If anyone can tell me what either piece means, or even might mean, get in touch.

A blog entry of songs I like (by others) is resurrected after I realised several had visited it but the songs could not be played, and now a few more songs, notably three versions of the same, great song (but not a version by the late Mr L Cohen of Quebec who co-wrote it)

I happened to be looking through the stats for the ‘ere blog and which posts had been recently viewed and came across one, post on August 23, 2017, which was a collection of notable singles. Then I noticed that the could no longer be played, so I decided to rectify that.

I realised that the method I had used — inserting a certain ‘audio’ code in the blog entry which referenced a file stored on the web – had broken down because the site where I had stored the files, a ‘Google site’, had been overhauled and retired by Google.

After a lot of faffing around trying to place the files elsewhere and getting nowhere, I decided simply to make brief ‘videos’ with the relevant songs as the soundtrack. In fact, there’s no video footage involved.

So I’ve resurrected that site and you can hear those tracks here (if you’ve got nothing better to do).

Given how, in the event, straightforward and simple that task turned out to be, I’ve added a few more songs. You might like them. They might not do much for you.

The first is an early Pink song I heard while in the gym at work. It’s Family Portrait and when I first heard it, it almost made me cry? My oldest child, now 25, had just been born and it immediately made me think of her and, more to the point, imagine it was she who was unhappy. Couldn’t take it. To this day the thought of any child — white, black, brown, green — who is unhappy, neglected abused can almost bring me to tears. Don’t know why (and the interesting thing is when does ‘the child’ become ‘the man/the woman’? Discuss. I’m buggered if I know.

Family Portrait by Pink

. . .

The next song is one of my favourite songs with some of the best lyrics I’ve heard in a song. It’s Everybody Knows, and this first version is by some guy called Peter Mulvey.

Everybody Knows by Peter Mulvey

The song is usually billed as ‘a Leonard Cohen’ song, but in fact he co-wrote it with the pianist and singer/songwriter Sharon Robinson. Here version comes after Mulvey’s and is a very different take, but very good.

I don’t like Leonard Cohen at all, and I don’t like his version of this song. Like pretty much everyone else I had and listened to his first album (called an ‘LP’ in those days) but finally got sick of him, the reverence with which he is treated, his voice and pretty much everything else about him.

Everybody Knows by Sharon Robinson

Finally, there is a version of the song by a Holly Figueora O’Reilly, of whom I also know nothing else. It, too, is different and it, too, is great. Give them all a whirl.

Everybody knows by Holly Figueora O’Reilly.

. . .

I’ve always liked ‘good’ lyrics, though quite obviously I must admit what one bod thinks are ‘good’ might not much appeal to another bod. But this song scores in every line. It also manages to be and ‘true’ (another dodgy word, of course) and pulls off that trick of at once being very serious but not in the slightest bit ponderous, weighty, pretentious. In fact, many lives are laugh-out-loud funny. No bugger every bothers to comment on my blog post (well, once in a month of Sundays), but I really would be interested in what others make of the lyrics.

. . .

Off to Germany tomorrow for a month, though not flying out till Tuesdays. Staying with my brother in London who is also going. Wonder what all the covid restrictions will make of the journey.

Two more short stories if you are interested (and a word from my probation officer who otherwise so rarely gets a mention here . . . )

Two more stories if you are interested, as usual ones submitted to Deadlines For Writers. You can read those stories here:

Fathers And Sons and A Noble American Family, Or The Law Of Success. 

The Hemingway bollocks (now almost it's official title) is coming on, though slowly, and I'm in sight of the completion. I'm still enjoying it (oddly enough) and I'm looking forward to the final job once everything is written to turn it onto a book and publish it on Amazon.

NB If you want you can read more short stories in two slim volumes I’ve already published, imaginatively entitled Volume One and Volume Two. It’s best not to run the risk of confusing folk with fancy-schmancy ‘literary’ titles.

Keep it simple, best advice my probation officer ever gave, although he wasn’t too chuffed when I followed his advice and tried to rob a Bond Street jewellers by lobbing a brick through the window and intended to rely on a push-bike to get away. I didn’t of course (get away, that is).

Now that I’ve inserted an image, I notice the copy if falling a little short and as I don’t much like leaving it like that, I feel obliged to add more to fill the space. So this is it, me filling the space, writing of nothing of any consequence at all (so what’s new? Ed) and simply hoping that I can drool on aimlessly for a few more lines without most of you becoming exasperated (‘What the fuck’s he on about now!) closing this page and heading off to the blog written by Marylou from Savannah, who wants to tell you all about her collection of dolls and teddy bears and a story about them which made it into the pages of The Savannah Tribune a month or two ago when she turned 70. Well done, Marylou!

Well, I think that should be enough garbage to fill the rest of the space.

Pip, pip.

Here's a song you might like . . .

Completed track this afternoon (which makes it sounds it’s been weeks in the making — it hasn’t, just an hour or two here and there over three days) and I rather like it (well, I would, wouldn’t I?) I do a lot of recording, but although I get many ideas for songs, it’s the singing which defeats me.

Quite apart from being self-conscious (even when I am sitting in my ‘shed’ alone with no one to hear me) I can never get it as I want. It’s a question of finding the right key into which your voice will fit. Well, I reckon I’ve found it here. Give it a listen and (thought some bloody hope) leave a comment with your thoughts.

It’s not particularly original — well, not at all original — but as the saying goes ‘it’s not the joke but the way you tell it’. (There are plenty of great songs which have been ruined by totally shite versions, for example Leon Russell’s Song For You.) Anyway, here it is. It's called Six In The Morning . . .