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It’s dismissed as coincidence*

That tree? The one that falls in the forest without anybody nearby to hear it? It still makes a sound, as long as the tree has its own Twitter account.

The Internet detects the previously undetectable. It is, among other things, a machine for detecting long-distance coincidences. Three decades ago there would have been little chance for me on one side of the country and David Dobbs on the other to find out that we both own copies of John McPhee’s Coming Into The Country and that our copies are turned to exactly the same page.

But it is not three decades ago. It is now. So yesterday, within about an hour of me posting this snapshot of a passage I’d just read in Coming Into The Country, I got Twitter messages and email from David. Here’s part of one of the tweets: “I JUST LAST NIGHT looked up that passage as an example of a great transition. It’s right on the dresser here next where I just saw your post. This is blowing my mind.”

Me, too.

—————-

* For the edification of anyone who didn’t misspend the 1980s watching “Bewitched” reruns on WGN, “It’s dismissed as coincidence” is a reference to this commercial for “an important new library.”

This is a notebook I’ve started carrying. The image taped to the cover is from the paperback of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. That’s because I’m using this notebook to write down supposedly fun things. It’s also for to-do lists, dates I want to feed into my laptop’s calendar later, things like that. But the notebook’s real reason for being is to serve as a drab waiting room for supposedly fun things. By supposedly fun things, I mean all the little bursts of curiosity that interrupt my conversations, my jogs, my life and send me to my iPhone to track down some fact, some title, some long-ago actor’s name, some YouTube clip. My plan is to let these curiosity bursts accumulate in the notebook, where I can review them at the end of the day and decide whether I still care enough to seek that fact or see that video. I decided to do this after finishing a book by William Powers. It’s called Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. The book spoke to the part of me that decided to take five weeks off from blogging. It includes passages like this: Rather than bringing the crowd ever closer, our machines should help us find some distance, whenever we need it. And this: Given my maximalist tendencies, I should have been delighted to see digital connectivity spreading far and wide. Wasn’t this what I’d wished for? No more of those irritating moments of isolation. But here’s the weird thing: I started missing them. It wasn’t the annoyance and frustration I wanted back—I’m no masochist. It was the state of mind that I’d found myself in after I couldn’t get a connection and gave up. And this: A decade ago, the digital space was heralded for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd. When we think and write from within our busyness, surrounded by countless other voices, too often the result is reactive, derivative, short-shelf-life stuff. The greatest gifts one can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there. I’m not a technologist, so I can’t say exactly how the outward bias of today’s technologies might be changed. But the first step would be to adopt a different philosophical approach, one that acknowledges that in a busy, crowded world, less is more. That for many of life’s most important and rewarding tasks, inwardness isn’t just nice but essential. Perhaps on booting up, a digital device of the future might ask me how connected I want to be right now and offer various options … I was completely primed for the book, so I don’t know how much to trust my own urge to recommend it to just about anybody with a smartphone or a Facebook account or a Twitter habit. Getting back to my notebook and the image I’ve taped to the cover, here’s one of those save-it-for-the-end-of-the-day-and-see-if-you’re-still-curious things I did decide to go ahead and track down: Where did that image come from? It turns out to be by Joseph Mills, a collage artist and longtime street photographer. I hadn’t heard of him, but Washington City Paper profiled him in 2003. The piece includes this quote from Mills: “So finally I quit photography and got into pumpkins. At first I was growing them casually, and then somebody threw this book on how to grow giant pumpkins at me—and soon I was thinking about competitive pumpkin-growing 24 hours a day.” He isn’t joking. Neither is the article. A sensitive, worthwhile read. One more bit from it, and then I swear I’ll stop. I won’t even say goodbye. Here: Giant pumpkins aside, perhaps the oddest thing about Mills’ career is that Mills himself judged much of it, for the longest time, a failure. When he stopped working the streets, with just a few hundred of his thousands of shots printed, he believed “the work was good, but there was something I had not accomplished. I definitely felt that something I desired had not come about.” With the passage of time, however, his attitude toward the work shifted. “Ten years go by, you have kids, and you get healthier,” he says. “And at some point I revisited the negatives and, lo and behold, the photographs I had only dreamed of taking all lay in front of me. The photographs ended up being the pictures I thought I’d failed to take, the work I thought had never existed …” Click for high-res photo

This is a notebook I’ve started carrying. The image taped to the cover is from the paperback of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. That’s because I’m using this notebook to write down supposedly fun things. It’s also for to-do lists, dates I want to feed into my laptop’s calendar later, things like that. But the notebook’s real reason for being is to serve as a drab waiting room for supposedly fun things. By supposedly fun things, I mean all the little bursts of curiosity that interrupt my conversations, my jogs, my life and send me to my iPhone to track down some fact, some title, some long-ago actor’s name, some YouTube clip. My plan is to let these curiosity bursts accumulate in the notebook, where I can review them at the end of the day and decide whether I still care enough to seek that fact or see that video.

I decided to do this after finishing a book by William Powers. It’s called Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. The book spoke to the part of me that decided to take five weeks off from blogging. It includes passages like this:

Rather than bringing the crowd ever closer, our machines should help us find some distance, whenever we need it.

And this:

Given my maximalist tendencies, I should have been delighted to see digital connectivity spreading far and wide. Wasn’t this what I’d wished for? No more of those irritating moments of isolation.

But here’s the weird thing: I started missing them. It wasn’t the annoyance and frustration I wanted back—I’m no masochist. It was the state of mind that I’d found myself in after I couldn’t get a connection and gave up.

And this:

A decade ago, the digital space was heralded for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd. When we think and write from within our busyness, surrounded by countless other voices, too often the result is reactive, derivative, short-shelf-life stuff.

The greatest gifts one can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there.

I’m not a technologist, so I can’t say exactly how the outward bias of today’s technologies might be changed. But the first step would be to adopt a different philosophical approach, one that acknowledges that in a busy, crowded world, less is more. That for many of life’s most important and rewarding tasks, inwardness isn’t just nice but essential. Perhaps on booting up, a digital device of the future might ask me how connected I want to be right now and offer various options …

I was completely primed for the book, so I don’t know how much to trust my own urge to recommend it to just about anybody with a smartphone or a Facebook account or a Twitter habit.

Getting back to my notebook and the image I’ve taped to the cover, here’s one of those save-it-for-the-end-of-the-day-and-see-if-you’re-still-curious things I did decide to go ahead and track down: Where did that image come from? It turns out to be by Joseph Mills, a collage artist and longtime street photographer.

I hadn’t heard of him, but Washington City Paper profiled him in 2003. The piece includes this quote from Mills:

“So finally I quit photography and got into pumpkins. At first I was growing them casually, and then somebody threw this book on how to grow giant pumpkins at me—and soon I was thinking about competitive pumpkin-growing 24 hours a day.”

He isn’t joking. Neither is the article. A sensitive, worthwhile read. One more bit from it, and then I swear I’ll stop. I won’t even say goodbye. Here:

Giant pumpkins aside, perhaps the oddest thing about Mills’ career is that Mills himself judged much of it, for the longest time, a failure. When he stopped working the streets, with just a few hundred of his thousands of shots printed, he believed “the work was good, but there was something I had not accomplished. I definitely felt that something I desired had not come about.”

With the passage of time, however, his attitude toward the work shifted. “Ten years go by, you have kids, and you get healthier,” he says. “And at some point I revisited the negatives and, lo and behold, the photographs I had only dreamed of taking all lay in front of me. The photographs ended up being the pictures I thought I’d failed to take, the work I thought had never existed …”

“

Holed up in a redwood forest on the Northern California coast, the nearest McDonald’s two hours away, I clicked through to some photos of Occupy Wall Street protestors in New York City, and saw that one of their signs displayed in big block letters 46 words that I wrote! They’re being held aloft by an attractive 20-something blond woman I’ve never met before.


This is the story of how they got there — or at least the small part of it I know, which is all that’s required to see why it could only happen now, and how political engagement in America is changing.

- Conor Friedersdorf 

(via The Atlantic)

finding Mary Gaitskill

If you’ve seen this post, this post and this post, then you know I’m reading Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 short-story collection.  My path to Gaitskill and her writing gives me a fresh chance to poke at Nicholas Carr’s idea that the Internet “is turning us into shallower thinkers.”

I’m not going to do that — partly because I want to get back to reading Gaitskill, partly because my original 5/30/2010 critique remains right here for anyone who wants to find it.

I’m reading Gaitskill’s stories because Andrew Sullivan wrote a post about an anti-masturbation, anti-porn group called Dirty Girls Ministries. Sullivan’s post didn’t mention Mary Gaitskill. Nor did the Blaire Briody article that triggered Sullivan’s post. But I decided to blog about Briody’s article myself. While writing my post, I tried to build up an idea by referring to a scene from “Secretary.” I Googled the movie. Google led me to the movie’s Wikipedia page, where I learned that the movie is based on a Mary Gaitskill story. I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry for Mary Gaitskill, where I learned that Gaitskill “characterized the film as ‘the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice).’” More Googling led me to a nerve.com interview and this quote from Gaitskill:

My reaction to (the movie), when I saw the rough cut, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. But I just thought, well, whatever. I felt sorry for Shainberg [the director]. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I thought, the poor son of a bitch went through so much trouble, he’s never going to find a distributor, that’s really sad. But then there became this whole thing with money. I didn’t get paid when I was supposed to, and I was concerned that they were going to cheat me, and a lawyer told me they very well could. That was what upset me. I didn’t give a fuck about anything else. I just thought, if I don’t get my money, I’m going to have to kill somebody.

So I didn’t see it for a long time. I got paid, and as far as I was concerned that was the end of the story. Then my sister came to visit, and she wanted to see it. It had been out for some months at that point, and we went to the theatre, and I enjoyed it! It’s not what I would have done but it’s kind of sweet. My actual character in the story, Debby, she would have loved it. It was too cute and ham-fisted, too “wanting to create a positive image.” It wanted to make people feel good about themselves. It was so odd, because I read an interview with the screenwriter, who was sort of blathering about political correctness and how awful it was — well, the movie is the epitome of political correctness! It was a positive statement about people who are into S&M, and those who don’t understand. Which I find icky.

I decided to find and read Gaitskill’s version of “Secretary.” I’ve done that. Now I’m reading more of her stories and getting all caught up in details of why, for example, it was so crucial that she used the word “roughly” in a particular sentence. This experience, like so many others, cements my sense that this part of my original critique of Carr was especially right:

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

Tonight is not the night that my patience enables me to end my expectation that I can Google my way to the source of any striking phrase. The above comes from Henry Alford’s “Is Anyone There?” in the 7/15/2011 NYT. It’s about coping with the bad manners of people who don’t answer email. My dad has been known to refer to my email account as “David Quigg’s read-only email,” so I’m not saying another word until my lawyer gets here. Click for high-res photo

Tonight is not the night that my patience enables me to end my expectation that I can Google my way to the source of any striking phrase.

The above comes from Henry Alford’s “Is Anyone There?” in the 7/15/2011 NYT. It’s about coping with the bad manners of people who don’t answer email. My dad has been known to refer to my email account as “David Quigg’s read-only email,” so I’m not saying another word until my lawyer gets here.

(Source: squeela)

(this post was reblogged from squeela)
“
Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.

- Michael Pollan

This sentence made me want to seal my iPhone in one of those nuclear waste barrels. But this isn’t about our technology. It’s about us and what we voluntarily surrender. By “us” and “we,” I mean “me.”

beyond “the medium is the message”

Since five words — “the medium is the message” — are literally the entire extent of my exposure to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, this passage from a Wednesday piece by Douglas Coupland had its intended effect on me:

Here’s what he wrote in 1962, and see if it doesn’t give you a chill: “The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” Brrrrr.

Coupland’s piece is called “Why McLuhan’s chilling vision still matters today.” It’s here. If it’s remembered a month from now, it will likely be for this one-liner: “Google isn’t making us stupider, it’s simply making us realise that omniscience is actually slightly boring.”

Omnipresence, meanwhile, remains slightly awesome.

austinkleon: George Orwell on “Newspeak,” from 1984 See also: “Politics and the English Language.” (via @coudal > Yewknee) ============== I’m reblogging this because “Liking” it would make my brain hurt. Not in a good way. The good-ish news: My reluctance to “Like” this suggests that Orwell’s words don’t describe where we’re headed. “Like” is precisely not “exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” If “Like” is headed anywhere, it’s toward having its meaning washed away by vagueness — the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” just so you can get email each time someone posts a new Facebook comment; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” on a story about genocide, not because you like genocide but because you’re grateful that a journalist is risking her life to document the genocide; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” because you really do like this drawing your friend posted; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” because you’re glad your friend is putting his art out there again, even if all he’s doing is posting this new drawing that you basically don’t like at all; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” simply to signal (dog-on-fire-hydrant style) that you’ve been somewhere. Part of me wants to quote Zadie Smith’s Facebook essay again, but a bigger part of me wants to believe in a fundamental human drive to communicate, to resist even the most extreme efforts to “narrow the range of thought.” So I’ll quote the former Argentine political prisoner I blogged about back in May: We had no contact with the outside world or our past. No Bible. No Radio. No newspaper. No books. No conversation. Our conversation was limited to Morse code and hand signals. We used morse code and our hands with the dexterity of radio operators. First you had to identify who was on the other side of the cell wall. Depending on the identification, you would continue communicating or not. We taught each other history lessons, and we told stories. Go heft a dictionary. We’ve got plenty of words. Sure, they can atrophy, but only if we don’t use them. So use them. - David Quigg, 7/13/2011

austinkleon:

George Orwell on “Newspeak,” from 1984

See also: “Politics and the English Language.”

(via @coudal > Yewknee)

==============

I’m reblogging this because “Liking” it would make my brain hurt. Not in a good way.

The good-ish news: My reluctance to “Like” this suggests that Orwell’s words don’t describe where we’re headed. “Like” is precisely not “exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” If “Like” is headed anywhere, it’s toward having its meaning washed away by vagueness — the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” just so you can get email each time someone posts a new Facebook comment; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” on a story about genocide, not because you like genocide but because you’re grateful that a journalist is risking her life to document the genocide; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” because you really do like this drawing your friend posted; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” because you’re glad your friend is putting his art out there again, even if all he’s doing is posting this new drawing that you basically don’t like at all; the vagueness that comes with clicking “Like” simply to signal (dog-on-fire-hydrant style) that you’ve been somewhere.

Part of me wants to quote Zadie Smith’s Facebook essay again, but a bigger part of me wants to believe in a fundamental human drive to communicate, to resist even the most extreme efforts to “narrow the range of thought.” So I’ll quote the former Argentine political prisoner I blogged about back in May:

We had no contact with the outside world or our past. No Bible. No Radio. No newspaper. No books. No conversation. Our conversation was limited to Morse code and hand signals. We used morse code and our hands with the dexterity of radio operators. First you had to identify who was on the other side of the cell wall. Depending on the identification, you would continue communicating or not. We taught each other history lessons, and we told stories.

Go heft a dictionary. We’ve got plenty of words. Sure, they can atrophy, but only if we don’t use them. So use them.

- David Quigg, 7/13/2011

(this post was reblogged from austinkleon)
To start by stating the obvious, I am not a cartoonist. This is just something I found myself drawing after I read these words in “How to survive the age of distraction” by Johann Hari: “The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone.” The sentence struck me as something that wouldn’t be written by anyone who has ever been circled by a shoal of sharks. Nor can I fathom these words coming from anyone whose own “Sophie’s choice” saved one child and doomed another: “Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice …” I’m nitpicking like this because Hari’s mostly strong essay is about distraction, and those sentences of his distracted me — more than any urge to check Twitter or email or Instagram or whatever else. Here’s something from Hari’s essay that I liked a lot: “It’s precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen’s apartment – that the book matters. That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive.” Hari writes, though, that “it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. … If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.” This made me think of a passage in a May piece by Bella Bathurst: “In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people.” I don’t know how many of those Bethnal Green books actually got read. Surely, some did, and surely the Blitz was more distracting than “your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room.” My point is not that we’re weak nowadays or that Hari’s attention span is defective. My point is that distraction should make us question whether we’re reading the right book.* Given the right book, there’s nothing impossible about “trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other.” After getting distracted by the excess of Hari’s “Sophie’s Choice” reference, I did some quick trolling for William Styron quotes. I wanted evidence that Styron is as prickly as I am on the subject. But I found something better, something that sings in the same key as Hari’s essay. It’s from Styron’s 1999 interview with The Paris Review: Not long ago I received in the mail a doctoral thesis entitled “Sophie’s Choice: A Jungian Perspective,” which I sat down to read. It was quite a long document. In the first paragraph it said, In this thesis my point of reference throughout will be the Alan J. Pakula movie of Sophie’s Choice. There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron’s novel for clarification. This idiocy laid a pall over my life for a dark brief time because it brought back all these bugaboos we have about the written word. But in the nineteenth century they said that the railroads were going to jeopardize the written word; in the 1920s they said that the appearance of sound movies was guaranteed to drive novels into purdah; then later, television. All of these means of communication have existed happily side by side and parallel with writing. I don’t think for a minute that literature is going to perish. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of forty years ago simply didn’t pan out. Even the Internet and the idea of the electronic book reinforces my belief—they will not threaten the written word but actually complement writing, and perhaps even ultimately enhance it. —————————— * Beyond the search for “the right book,” there’s also the matter of how some of us are wired. My literary world would shrink so drastically without audiobooks and my Kindle’s text-to-speech feature. For more on this, see my post inspired by E.B. White’s statement that “It takes more than a genius to keep me reading a book.” Click for high-res photo

To start by stating the obvious, I am not a cartoonist. This is just something I found myself drawing after I read these words in “How to survive the age of distraction” by Johann Hari: “The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone.”

The sentence struck me as something that wouldn’t be written by anyone who has ever been circled by a shoal of sharks. Nor can I fathom these words coming from anyone whose own “Sophie’s choice” saved one child and doomed another: “Ask me to throw away a book, and I begin shaking like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice …”

I’m nitpicking like this because Hari’s mostly strong essay is about distraction, and those sentences of his distracted me — more than any urge to check Twitter or email or Instagram or whatever else.

Here’s something from Hari’s essay that I liked a lot: “It’s precisely because it is not immediate – because it doesn’t know what happened five minutes ago in Kazakhstan, or in Charlie Sheen’s apartment – that the book matters. That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive.”

Hari writes, though, that “it is becoming almost physically harder to read books. … If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.”

This made me think of a passage in a May piece by Bella Bathurst: “In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people.”

I don’t know how many of those Bethnal Green books actually got read. Surely, some did, and surely the Blitz was more distracting than “your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room.”

My point is not that we’re weak nowadays or that Hari’s attention span is defective. My point is that distraction should make us question whether we’re reading the right book.* Given the right book, there’s nothing impossible about “trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other.”

After getting distracted by the excess of Hari’s “Sophie’s Choice” reference, I did some quick trolling for William Styron quotes. I wanted evidence that Styron is as prickly as I am on the subject. But I found something better, something that sings in the same key as Hari’s essay. It’s from Styron’s 1999 interview with The Paris Review:

Not long ago I received in the mail a doctoral thesis entitled “Sophie’s Choice: A Jungian Perspective,” which I sat down to read. It was quite a long document. In the first paragraph it said, In this thesis my point of reference throughout will be the Alan J. Pakula movie of Sophie’s Choice. There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron’s novel for clarification. This idiocy laid a pall over my life for a dark brief time because it brought back all these bugaboos we have about the written word. But in the nineteenth century they said that the railroads were going to jeopardize the written word; in the 1920s they said that the appearance of sound movies was guaranteed to drive novels into purdah; then later, television. All of these means of communication have existed happily side by side and parallel with writing. I don’t think for a minute that literature is going to perish. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of forty years ago simply didn’t pan out. Even the Internet and the idea of the electronic book reinforces my belief—they will not threaten the written word but actually complement writing, and perhaps even ultimately enhance it.

——————————

* Beyond the search for “the right book,” there’s also the matter of how some of us are wired. My literary world would shrink so drastically without audiobooks and my Kindle’s text-to-speech feature. For more on this, see my post inspired by E.B. White’s statement that “It takes more than a genius to keep me reading a book.”

“
Do not use any of these photos on any other website, mailing list, or online collection without express permission. Upon request, I will willingly post any photo (with a copyright caption) anywhere you wish. When using any photos (by permission), please include a credit as follows: ‘Photo by Frank Florianz’

I found the words above when I set out to do something seemingly simple: give credit to the photographer who shot this 1979 street photo of New York City. My fellow Tumblr users have either reblogged or “liked” the photo 648 times. If you look at it, you’ll see why it’s been so popular.

As far as I can tell, “Photo by Frank Florianz” never made it to Tumblr. The first Tumblr post included the word “Source.” If you clicked on “Source,” you got sent to a 1/31/2011 gothamist.com post. The Gothamist post credited Florianz and linked to the site where Florianz asks that people get permission before using his photos “on any other website.” It’s not obvious that Gothamist sought or got that permission.

Regardless, Gothamist paid Florianz in the Internet’s imperfect but real currency of link and credit. With minimal effort, the original Tumblr post could have paid Florianz in the same way and put his work and his name on many thousands of screens around the world. Legalese aside, that would have been a cool thing. It might have taught Florianz the value of loosening his grip a bit.

The Florianz photo that started all of this comes from his engrossing “New York City - 1978-1979 - PART I” set. Part 2 is here. Many more sets are here.

I saw this Hemingway quote several times today: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” At first, given this week’s MLK quote that wasn’t an MLK quote, I wondered if the Hemingway quote was authentic. It is. So that’s a start. How about the context? (And yes, I’m fixated on context today.) I can’t find what Hemingway wrote in its entirety. This passage from the introduction to Hemingway on War has some ellipses, but it lifts us far beyond the bumper-stickerized excerpt that’s making the rounds: Hemingway was back in Cuba at the Finca Vigía, his farmhouse just outside San Francisco de Paula, when World War II finally came to an end with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote down his thoughts on the advent of atomic warfare, which were published as the foreword to a book entitled Treasury for the Free World: We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated. … We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. … An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead. Now that’s Hemingway. The war-is-a-crime quote isn’t even the most potent bumper sticker in the bunch. How about “no weapon has ever settled a moral problem” or “we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated”? As a side note, I’m glad that the quote getting tweeted and retweeted is actually something Hemingway wrote as Hemingway. It would have made me queasy to see the words attributed to “Ernest Hemingway” if they had been, say, something the fictional Pilar said in For Whom The Bell Tolls. Click for high-res photo

I saw this Hemingway quote several times today: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

At first, given this week’s MLK quote that wasn’t an MLK quote, I wondered if the Hemingway quote was authentic. It is. So that’s a start.

How about the context? (And yes, I’m fixated on context today.)

I can’t find what Hemingway wrote in its entirety. This passage from the introduction to Hemingway on War has some ellipses, but it lifts us far beyond the bumper-stickerized excerpt that’s making the rounds:

Hemingway was back in Cuba at the Finca Vigía, his farmhouse just outside San Francisco de Paula, when World War II finally came to an end with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He wrote down his thoughts on the advent of atomic warfare, which were published as the foreword to a book entitled Treasury for the Free World:

We have waged war in the most ferocious and ruthless way that it has ever been waged. We waged it against fierce and ruthless enemies that it was necessary to destroy. Now we have destroyed one of our enemies and forced the capitulation of the other. For the moment we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated. … We need to study and understand certain basic problems of our world as they were before Hiroshima to be able to continue, intelligently, to discover how some of them have changed and how they can be settled justly now that a new weapon has become a property of part of the world. We must study them more carefully than ever now and remember that no weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. … An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.

Now that’s Hemingway. The war-is-a-crime quote isn’t even the most potent bumper sticker in the bunch. How about “no weapon has ever settled a moral problem” or “we are the strongest power in the world. It is very important that we do not become the most hated”?

As a side note, I’m glad that the quote getting tweeted and retweeted is actually something Hemingway wrote as Hemingway. It would have made me queasy to see the words attributed to “Ernest Hemingway” if they had been, say, something the fictional Pilar said in For Whom The Bell Tolls.

nevver: “He has no courage, has never climbed out on a limb. He has never used a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary.” — William Faulkner (on Ernest Hemingway) ===================== I wish this had context or a link to the original source. Google, what do you have for us? From Joseph Leo Blotner’s Faulkner: a biography:  Green’s promises that no professors would be present and no notes would be taken had not been kept. The university’s new public-relations director, Marvin Black, recently arrived from California, encouraged two of the students to revise their notes for magazine publication. … When Faulkner learned of the students’ projected magazine piece, he immediately asked Alton Bryant to see that it was stopped. … On May 11 excerpts from Marvin Black’s press release appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, and in due course Hemingway receieved his copy at his home in Cuba, Always vulnerable and sensitive to a slur, particularly depressed at the time, Hemingway was cut deeply when he read the assertion that he had “no courage.” He started an angry letter to Faulkner, listing the places where he had been in battle, but it began to get too long. … (Faulkner sent a) note to Hemingway. “I’m sorry of this damn stupid thing,” he told him. “I was just making $250.00, I thought informally, not for publication, or I would have insisted on looking at the stuff before it was released. I have believed for years that the human voice has caused all human ills and I thought I had broken myself of talking. Maybe this will be my valedictory lesson.” But he closed the brief note without an explicit retraction. “I hope it won’t matter a damn to you. But if or when[ne]ever it does, please accept another squirm from yours truly.” It was a painful sequence for Faulkner … Long before he had made a name, he had thought of Hemingway as the best of the young American writers. There’s even more context. Vivid, sad stuff: Hemingway getting the brigadier general who witnessed his courage as a war correspondent to send Faulkner a letter, for example. I realize I’m being a scold, but we cheat ourselves when we don’t even bother with a Google search. - David Quigg, 5/3/2011 P.S. I have many more Hemingway posts here.

nevver:

“He has no courage, has never climbed out on a limb. He has never used a word where the reader might check his usage by a dictionary.”
— William Faulkner (on Ernest Hemingway)

=====================

I wish this had context or a link to the original source.

Google, what do you have for us?

From Joseph Leo Blotner’s Faulkner: a biography: 

Green’s promises that no professors would be present and no notes would be taken had not been kept. The university’s new public-relations director, Marvin Black, recently arrived from California, encouraged two of the students to revise their notes for magazine publication. … When Faulkner learned of the students’ projected magazine piece, he immediately asked Alton Bryant to see that it was stopped. …

On May 11 excerpts from Marvin Black’s press release appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, and in due course Hemingway receieved his copy at his home in Cuba, Always vulnerable and sensitive to a slur, particularly depressed at the time, Hemingway was cut deeply when he read the assertion that he had “no courage.” He started an angry letter to Faulkner, listing the places where he had been in battle, but it began to get too long. …

(Faulkner sent a) note to Hemingway. “I’m sorry of this damn stupid thing,” he told him. “I was just making $250.00, I thought informally, not for publication, or I would have insisted on looking at the stuff before it was released. I have believed for years that the human voice has caused all human ills and I thought I had broken myself of talking. Maybe this will be my valedictory lesson.” But he closed the brief note without an explicit retraction. “I hope it won’t matter a damn to you. But if or when[ne]ever it does, please accept another squirm from yours truly.”

It was a painful sequence for Faulkner … Long before he had made a name, he had thought of Hemingway as the best of the young American writers.

There’s even more context. Vivid, sad stuff: Hemingway getting the brigadier general who witnessed his courage as a war correspondent to send Faulkner a letter, for example. I realize I’m being a scold, but we cheat ourselves when we don’t even bother with a Google search.

- David Quigg, 5/3/2011

P.S. I have many more Hemingway posts here.

(this post was reblogged from samarov)