Writer’s Quotes Wednesday: Where Do You Want to Travel?

• Travel has been severely curtailed over the past two years. Maybe travel is nothing but a dream. Today let’s DREAM together. There have probably been some places you have seen on blogs, travel magazines, or heard your friend’s stories. — Marsha Ingrao, Writer’s Quotes Wednesday # 7

Cornwall. Always dreaming about Cornwall.

In 2019 I traveled to Fowey to attend their annual Festival of Art and Literature. While having lunch at a restaurant in town I noticed, on the wall to my left, a framed print of this Ernest Hemingway quote:

We ate well and
cheaply and drank
well and cheaply
and slept well and
warm together and
loved each other.

WORDS TO LIVE BY.

Stay tuned.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: ANYTHING IN FLIGHT

This week our topic is Anything that Flight. Your photo can show anything in flight or is capable of flyings through the air.

Be creative if you feel like it, and fun with this challenge this week. Remember your photos needs to be black and white, desaturated, sepia (brown tones) or selective color.  I’m looking forward to seeing what you all come up.

— Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge (CBWC)

Here are self’s B & W Anything in Flight pictures:

Reading Tim Dee’s Landfill: Notes on Gull-Watching and Trash-Picking in the Anthropocene, and reminiscing about the Cornwall pub that had the Hemingway quote on a wall:

Print by the German Symbolist artist Max Klinger (1857-1920), in an exhibit at the British Museum, April 2019 (Pictures of the art were allowed)

Here’s one more, since it looks like the call self received a half hour ago, alerting her to an imminent power outage, was Spam.

This garden ornament consists of broken shells, arranged to look like birds in flight. Not quite black & white, but close? It’s in her backyard.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro: SNARK

A direct quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Diamond As Big as the Ritz appears below. Poor Julian indeed! Hemingway’s contempt is code. The ‘someone’ is probably Hemingway.

• The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money.

 

A Boucherie Chevaline: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Pt 2

• The golden horse’s head outside the Boucherie Chevaline where the carcasses hung yellow gold and red in the open window, and the green-painted cooperative where they bought their wine; good wine and cheap.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Top, top angst:

Then one of her two children was killed in a plane crash and after that was over she did not want the lovers, and drink being no anaesthetic she had to make another life. Suddenly, she had been acutely frightened of being alone. But she wanted someone that she respected with her.

The narrator doesn’t know how lucky he is, to be stuck in the bush with a “rich bitch” (sic) who can shoot like nobody’s business and still, despite narrator’s gangrenous foot giving off fumes, calls him “Darling.”

But, the narrator must whine. This is one aspect of the famous Hemingway detachment.

P.S. Reading Hemingway makes self want to eat bacon. Every day. Sorry, yes. Despite reading about gangrenous foot today.

Stay tuned.

In Another Country

Food in this story: chestnuts. In Milan. In the fall. The war is just over (Which war? Self had to google: World War I)

Also, the Café Cova, “next door to the Scala” which “was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours” (a tourist trap now, according to Yelp)

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them, a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket.

 

The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber

It starts off the collection, and it’s pretty long (for a Hemingway short story). All about a safari in Africa. Interesting, told from the safari guide’s point of view, who OF COURSE finds the wife attractive. The husband, Macomber (only in his mid-30s, but intimidated by the safari guide), is portrayed as a wimp. Despite these clichés of manhood and/or lack thereof, self finds herself empathizing much with Macomber. His reluctance to shoot the lion, for instance.

In this short story, the meal in question is breakfast.

Robert Wilson, the guide, has kippers and coffee.

“Finish your breakfast and we’ll be starting.”

Also, the lion’s point of view is part of this story. Pretty cool, that part. And you will feel, in your bones, how disgusting it is to hunt lions. Feeling and knowing are two different things.

Wife rewards Big Lion-Hunter with a kiss on the mouth, right in front of her husband. Guess Hemingway thinks that’s what all real men deserve, when they’ve finished off a lion. They deserve to be rewarded with a kiss from a beautiful woman. Because — hey! Hunter-killers are rad! Self can’t think of any story she’s ever read that infuriated her so much.

Story becomes very noir-ish towards the end, characters speak very “posh,” in a version of British stiff-upper-lip.

Her sympathies to Macomber.

Stay tuned.

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First Forty-Nine

Not reading in the order in which they appear in the book. Rather, starting with the stories Hemingway wrote while he was marching with The Fifth Column.

There’s a date in self’s handwriting on the flyleaf: February 1984

Story # 1:  The Killers, p. 279

This story is about dinner.

“Everything we want’s the dinner, eh?”

“I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver — “

“I’ll take ham and eggs,” the man called.

“Give me bacon and eggs,” said the other man.

Which so does not sound like dinner to self, but anyhoo.

Stay tuned.