Antlers Hunter S Thompson Stole from Hemingway’s Home Returned to Family
Posted: August 22, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: A Moveable Feast, Antler, Central Idaho, Ernest Hemingway, Gonzo journalism, Great Shark Hunt (Gonzo Papers, Hunter S. Thompson, Idaho, Ketchum, Scott Burton, Vol. 1) 2 CommentsThe late gonzo journalist ‘got caught up in the moment’ on a visit to his idol’s home, his widow explained, and had long planned to return them.
Alison Flood reports: A set of antlers stolen by the late Hunter S Thompson from the home of Ernest Hemingway has been returned to the Nobel laureate’s family by the gonzo journalist’s widow.
Anita Thompson told the website BroBible that Thompson took the elk antlers from Hemingway’s home in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1964. Hemingway shot himself in the home in 1961. Thompson visited three years later, to write an essay about his visit, What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?, exploring “just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America’s most famous writer”.

Ernest Hemingway’s home near Havana, Cuba, is expected to soon receive an infusion of badly needed building supplies from the United States. An American foundation restoring the legendary writer’s home in Cuba on Saturday, June 20, 2015, signed an agreement with the Cuban government to — for the first time — import construction materials directly from the United States to aid the preservation efforts. (CNN)
The young man who would go on to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and to invent gonzo journalism also, according to his widow Anita Thompson, “got caught up in the moment” and stole the antlers, going on to hang them in his own garage. In his essay, Thompson refers to “a big pair of elk horns over the front door” in Hemingway’s “comfortable-looking chalet”.
Anita Thompson told Brandon Wenerd at BroBible that her late husband, who killed himself in 2005, “had so much respect for Hemingway” and “was actually very embarrassed” by his actions. Read the rest of this entry »
Happy Birthday Ernest Hemingway
Posted: July 21, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Reading Room | Tags: A Moveable Feast, American literature, Ernest Hemingway, Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises, United States 1 CommentThe great author Ernest Hemingway was born on this day, July 21, 1899. Pictured here in 1952, Cuba. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Ernest Hemingway and Carlos Gutierrez aboard Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar, 1934. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
‘Paris est uno Fete’: Hemingway’s Paris Memoir Flies Off Shelves in Show of Defiance
Posted: November 19, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, France, Mediasphere, Reading Room, Terrorism | Tags: #jesuisenterrasse, A Farewell to Arms, Books, Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's the Old Man and the Sea (Monarch Notes: A Guide to Understanding the World's Great Writing), F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Paris, Paris est une Fete, Traite sur la Tolerance Leave a commentOrders surged after a BFM television interview on Monday with a 77-year-old woman called Danielle, who urged people to read the memoir as she laid flowers for the dead. The video was shared hundreds of times on social media.
Andrew Roberts reports: Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about the time he spent lounging in cafes and bars in 1920s Paris has become an unlikely totem of defiance against the terrorist attacks that claimed 129 lives in the City of Light last Friday.
“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”
Hemingway’s ‘‘A Moveable Feast,’’ or “Paris est une Fete” in French, is flying off the shelves at bookstores across the French capital and is the fastest-selling biography and foreign-language book at online retailer Amazon.fr.
“Copies have been laid among the flowers and tributes at the sites of the massacres, and people are reading the book in bars and cafes.”
Daily orders of the memoir, first published in 1964, three years after the American author’s death, have risen 50-fold to 500 since Monday, according to publisher Folio.
[Order Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition” from Amazon.com]
Copies have been laid among the flowers and tributes at the sites of the massacres, and people are reading the book in bars and cafes, Folio spokesman David Ducreux said Thursday. Orders surged after a BFM television interview on Monday with a 77-year-old woman called Danielle, who urged people to read the memoir as she laid flowers for the dead. The video was shared hundreds of times on social media….(read more)
Source: Bloomberg Business
The Secret Life of Fidel Castro
Posted: June 7, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Diplomacy, Global, History | Tags: Associated Press, Cuba, Cuba–United States relations, Cuban cuisine, Ernest Hemingway, Finca Vigía, Havana, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, Miami, Nancy Pelosi, The Double Life of Fidel Castro, United States 1 CommentA former security agent shows the leader lived large while preaching revolutionary sacrifice
Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes: For 17 years Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was part of the elite team of Cuban security specialists charged with protecting the life and privacy of Fidel Castro.But in 1994 his loyalty came into question when, with a daughter already living abroad, a brother jumped on a raft for Florida. Castro fired him.
“The Obama administration has just removed Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism amid sharp criticism from exiles. Their concerns are sensible: Though Castro is now rumored to be feebleminded, the intelligence apparatus he built—which specializes in violence to destabilize democracy and trafficks in drugs and weapons—remains as it has been for a half century.”
Sánchez was imprisoned for two years and tortured. In 2008 he defected to the U.S., making him the only member of el maximo lider’s personal escort ever to flee the island.
“When a Canadian company offered to build a modern sports-facility for the nation, Castro used the donation for a private basketball court. Wherever he traveled in the world, his bed was dismantled and shipped ahead to ensure the comfort he demanded.”
Last month Sánchez died, weeks after he published “The Double Life of Fidel Castro,” an English-language version of “La Vida Oculta de Fidel Castro,” first published in 2014 in Spain. The timing of his demise has some wondering if the long arm of the dictatorship did not reach out to exact revenge for his tell-all about his former boss. The official cause of death has been reported as lung cancer.
The legend of Castro as a great revolutionary who sacrifices for his people is preserved by keeping the details about his life a state secret. Sánchez’s account shows the real Castro: vengeful, self-absorbed and given to childish temper tantrums—aka “tropical storms.” “The best way of living with him,” Sánchez wrote, “was to accept all he said and did.”
[Order Juan Reinaldo Sánchez’s book “The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo“ from Amazon.com]
The book is timely. The Obama administration has just removed Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism amid sharp criticism from exiles. Their concerns are sensible: Though Castro is now rumored to be feebleminded, the intelligence apparatus he built—which specializes in violence to destabilize democracy and trafficks in drugs and weapons—remains as it has been for a half century.
Sánchez witnessed firsthand Castro’s indifference to Cuban poverty. The comandante gave interminable speeches calling for revolutionary sacrifice. But he lived large, with a private island, a yacht, some 20 homes across the island, a personal chef, a full-time doctor, and a carefully selected and prepared diet. Read the rest of this entry »
[PHOTO] Hemingway and Castro
Posted: December 18, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History | Tags: Cuba, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, Literature, Marxism, Miami, Photography Leave a commentMovie Poster: ‘À Bout Portant’ Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’, Don Siegel, 1964
Posted: October 28, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, Mediasphere | Tags: Angie Dickinson, Claude Akins, Clu Gulager, Crime Thriller, design, Don Siegel, Ernest Hemingway, Gene L. Coon, Illustration, John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Norman Fell, Ronald Reagan, typography 1 Comment
Réalisateur: Don Siegel
Acteurs: Angie Dickinson, Claude Akins, Clu Gulager, John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Norman Fell, Ronald Reagan, Virginia Christine
Scénariste: Gene L. Coon
Compositeur: John Williams
Directeur De La Photographie: Richard L. Rawlings
Monteur: Richard Belding
Distributeur: Inc.
Date De Sortie: 8 novembre 1964
Titre original: The Killers
[PHOTO] Books, Babes, Bullfights, Bravado; 20th Century Man, Ernest Hemingway
Posted: October 16, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: 20th century, A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, Bullfights, Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms, Henry Miller, Life Magazine, Literature, novels, Pamplona, Paris, Photography, Pulitzer, SPAIN, Sun Also Rises Leave a commentFrom LIFE magazine
[Explore the vast Hemingway collection at Amazon]
Hemingway Grandsons Celebrate 60th Anniversary of Author’s Nobel Prize
Posted: October 6, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Global, History, Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: Cojimar, Cuba, Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms, Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway, John Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, United States 1 CommentHemingway, who lived from 1899 until his suicide in 1961, was a journalist, author, world traveler and sportsman. In the 1940s and 1950s, he spent half the year in Cuba and would summer in Idaho
“This is a really emotional day, being here with the people of Cojimar. It’s something personal, it’s a family thing, and I also think it is historic.”
— John Hemingway
COJIMAR – Carlos Batista writes: Just like Ernest Hemingway used to do, two of his grandsons sailed into the fishing town of Cojimar on Monday, marking 60 years since the iconic US author won the Nobel prize.
John and Patrick Hemingway sailed in from the Ernest Hemingway International Yacht Club west of Havana, through the Gulf waters where “Papa” used to fish, with a group of 16 that arrived Sunday.
[Explore books and other cool stuff about Ernest Hemingway at Amazon.com]
“This is a really emotional day, being here with the people of Cojimar. It’s something personal, it’s a family thing, and I also think it is historic,” John Hemingway, 54, said in Spanish to about 200 people who gathered on the fishing town’s waterfront to greet them.
The author, also known for works such as “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “A Farewell to Arms,” received the Nobel prize for literature in 1954.
About a dozen boats joined the four yachts carrying the Hemingway party in the two-hour sail over to Cojimar.
- New Hemingway Artifacts From Cuba At JFK Library (punditfromanotherplanet.com)
- Author: Hemingway watched Che’s firing squad massacres ‘while sipping Daiquiris’ (punditfromanotherplanet.com)
- The Last Days of Ernest Hemingway: He Thought the Feds were Spying on him (punditfromanotherplanet.com)
Hemingway, who lived in Cuba for over 20 years, rented a home in the town. He fished enthusiastically and was inspired here to write the classic “The Old Man and the Sea.“
Hemingway’s boat is in dry dock these days, near his Cojimar home, now a museum run by the government of Raul Castro, 83
The four yachts flew both US and Cuban flags; the two countries have not had full diplomatic ties since 1961.
Events like this “could contribute to some positive things between the United States and Cuba,” said John, a writer who lives in Montreal, alongside brother Patrick, 48, a photographer who lives in Vancouver.
Hemingway’s close ties to Cuba
Hemingway, who lived from 1899 until his suicide in 1961, was a journalist, author, world traveler and sportsman. In the 1940s and 1950s, he spent half the year in Cuba and would summer in Idaho.
“I met Hemingway myself when I was very young, maybe 13 or 14, and then we became friends.”
— Osvaldo Carrero Pina, now 78.
The dramatic twists were not just in his books; he struggled with mental illness and health consequences of heavy drinking even as he became an acclaimed author with a singular and strong spare style.
Married four times, Ernest Hemingway had three sons: Jack, Patrick and Gregory, the latter being John and Patrick’s father.
Ernest Hemingway was fascinated by game hunting and deep sea fishing, capped with drinks and some writing.

Ernest Hemingway and Carlos Gutierrez aboard Hemingway’s boat, the Pilar, 1934. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
The author, also known for works such as “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “A Farewell to Arms,” received the Nobel prize for literature in 1954.
And it was here in Cojimar that Hemingway docked his boat “El Pilar,” obsessed about marlin, knocked back mojitos, and where Cuban fishermen inspired his “Old Man.”
When the Americas’ only communist government took power, around 1960, Hemingway left Cuba for the last time—but not before meeting longtime president Fidel Castro. Read the rest of this entry »
Vintage Hemingway: ‘The Sun Also Rises’
Posted: September 25, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Mediasphere | Tags: Books, Charles Scribner III, Charles Scribner's Sons, design, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Francis Cugat, Great Gatsby, Illustration, Maxwell Perkins, New York Times, Sun Also Rises, typography Leave a commentScribner’s, 1926. This is a later printing with a different and more modern dust jacket from the stated first.. Check out the tagline: “Wherein the lost generation that followed the War goes to the devil with a smile on the lip but with despair in its heart.”
Flickr –Hemingway: Expository Writing Class
[More: Hopkins Rare Books, Manuscripts, & Archives]
Why Paris is forgetting Ernest Hemingway
Posted: September 7, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Global, History, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: BBC News, Boulevard Saint-Michel, Charles De Gaulle, Ernest Hemingway, German, Hemingway, Hugh Schofield, Moveable Feast, Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition, Paris, Place Saint-Michel, Travellers Club Leave a commentAmerican writer Ernest Hemingway had close links with Paris. He first lived there in 1920 and played a marginal, much-mythologised, role in the 1944 liberation of the city. But now, 70 years on, memories of the author are starting to fade.
Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris: Twenty years ago when I first started reporting from Paris, a story on Hemingway would have been so corny that you would have got short shrift from any editor had you ever had the gall to suggest it.
[Order “A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition” and other books by Ernest Hemingway at Amazon.com]
Paris was full of Hemingway wannabes – young people just out of university sitting dreamily in cafes and struggling to get their prose more muscular.
There were guided tours round the sites – his homes on the Left Bank and the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.
No self-respecting acolyte would be seen on the street without a copy of Hemingway’s magisterial memoir of Paris in the 1920s, published posthumously under the title “A Moveable Feast”.

Crowds gathered to cheer French General Charles de Gaulle, 26 August 1944
The commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from the Germans brought it all back, because August 1944 was in fact one of the most celebrated episodes in the Hemingway legend.
“I’ve seen you beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for… you belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
Already famous for his books, he was working as a correspondent attached to the American 5th Infantry Division, which was south-west of Paris in the town of Rambouillet.
“This is the kind of stuff that used to set young writerly hearts racing.”
Here, in flagrant breach of the Geneva Conventions governing war reporting, Hemingway set up as a kind of mini warlord. His hotel room was full of grenades and uniforms, and he had command of a band of Free French fighters who reconnoitred the approach to Paris and provided information to the Allied armies. Read the rest of this entry »
Movie Poster: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’
Posted: September 5, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Comics, Entertainment | Tags: Angie Dickenson, Cinema, design, Ernest Hemingway, Illustration, John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Movies, Poster Art, Ronald Reagan, typography, Universal Pictures, vintage Leave a comment[PHOTO] Ernest Hemingway
Posted: September 5, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Food & Drink, History, Mediasphere | Tags: Book, Drinking, Ernest Hemingway, Fiction, Literature, Moveable Feast, Paris, Photography, Sun Also Rises Leave a comment“An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.”
— Ernest Hemingway
[VIDEO] Classic Bogart & Bacall: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow’
Posted: August 12, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, History | Tags: Big Sleep, Casablanca, Ernest Hemingway, Hoagy Carmichael, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not 4 CommentsThe Rejection Letters: How Publishers Snubbed 11 Great Authors
Posted: June 15, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Reading Room | Tags: Cassandra Clare, Ernest Hemingway, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Nigel Nicolson, Peacock, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Nabokov 1 CommentFor the Telegraph, Alice Vincent writes: From Gertude Stein and William Burroughs to recent rags-to-riches writers such as JK Rowling and Cassandra Clare, there have been brutal rejection letters to accompany most bestselling novels. Here are extracts from some of them:
1. “Overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian…the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream… I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”
Thankfully, for both Vladimir Nabokov and literature as a whole, Lolita wasn’t buried, but published in France after two years of rejections by New York publishers such as Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. When Graham Greene got hold of it, shortly after its French publication, he reviewed it in The Sunday Times, describing it as “one of the three best books of 1955”.
Despite this, the novel still wasn’t published in the UK until 1957, because the Home Office seized all imported copies and France banned it. When British publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson took it on, it was at the cost of Nigel Nicolson‘s political career.
2. “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”
One of the 15 publishers who didn’t think The Diary of Anne Frank was worth reading.
3. “First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?
“While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?”
Herman Melville‘s leviathan novel was rejected, as above, by Peter J Bentley. However, Richard Bentley, of the same London publishing house, eventually offered him a contract in 1851. Moby Dick was published 18 months later than Melville expected and at great personal expense, as he arranged for the typesetting and plating of his book himself to speed up the process. Young, voluptuous maidens never made the final edit.
4. “For your own sake, do not publish this book.”
One publisher turned down D.H. Lawrence‘s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, first published in 1928. Perhaps they had predicted the furore that was unleashed when the full novel did hit the British bookshelves in 1960. Read the rest of this entry »
[BOOKS] Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
Posted: May 26, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Reading Room, War Room | Tags: Ernest Hemingway, Francisco Franco, Gerda Taro, Hotel Florida, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, Robert Capa, SPAIN, Spanish Civil War 1 Comment
Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, c. 1940 (Ernest Hemingway Collection / John F. Kennedy Library)
Whores de Combat: In search of adventure and engagement
“Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, by Amanda Vaill, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp.
For The American Scholar, Charles Trueheart writes: For its young cohort of reporters and photographers, and citizens of conscience, the Spanish Civil War was the place to be. It was not just the big war of the moment, although it was bloody enough, tearing Spain apart for three years (and for succeeding generations) and killing nearly 400,000 people. The conflict also bore the weight of a burgeoning global struggle, keenly watched and abetted by Hitler and Stalin, and was widely understood to be the harbinger of an inevitable world war.
“Hemingway had a clever phrase for the women who hung around the hotel, which may just as well have described the accredited reporters and photojournalists, day-trippers and do-gooders…whores de combat.”
Enter the cast of Hotel Florida, Amanda Vaill’s energetic group biography of six characters who found themselves—or rushed to place themselves—in the heat of this great battle to defend a shakily democratic, fractiously Republican Spain against the Nationalist rebellion of General Francisco Franco.
“…It captures the intellectual promiscuity of war reporting, and perhaps of journalism in general.”
In July 1936, when Franco led the army uprising, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro were young photographers in Paris, Jewish émigrés from Hungary and Germany, respectively, with newly assumed trade names. When they heard the news from Spain, Vaill writes, they felt “the adrenaline rush of a scoop in the making” and decided to leave for Spain immediately. “Here was a chance to document the struggle between fascism and socialism that was already consuming their homelands and might soon spread to all of Europe. It would all be a most extraordinary adventure, and it would make them famous. Together. They could hardly wait.”
[You can order the book “Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War” from Amazon]
Far away in Key West, Ernest Hemingway was in the doldrums. He was struggling over a collection of stories that would turn out to be To Have and Have Not and then be forgotten. He was worried that his success had turned him into a sellout. His rivalry with John Dos Passos was on his nerves. His marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer was on the skids. Spain was an escape to opportunity: “If he went to Spain with an assignment to report on the war, he’d get the makings of any number of novels.” Read the rest of this entry »
New Hemingway Artifacts From Cuba At JFK Library
Posted: February 11, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, U.S. News | Tags: Boston, Cuba, Ernest Hemingway, Finca Vigía, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Nobel Prize, Swedish Academy, United States 2 CommentsBOSTON (AP) — Materials from the Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban home are available to researchers for the first time at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
“It’s a personal peek into his life — it’s just wonderful..”
The 2,500 digitally scanned materials were housed at Hemingway’s former Cuban estate, called the Finca Vigía, where he lived for 21 years until he died in 1961.
This material reflects Hemingway’s everyday life in Cuba, said Susan Wrynn, an Ernest Hemingway curator at the Kennedy Library.
Books: The Authentic Hemingway
Posted: January 4, 2014 Filed under: History, Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: Books, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fiction, Gertrude Stein, Hadley Richardson, Hemingway, Literature, Paris, Reviews, Sun Also Rises 3 CommentsJoshua Kotin on The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 2 : 1923-1925
Joshua Kotin writes: Ernest Hemingway’s from the summer and fall of 1925 are especially thrilling. “I’ve written six chapters on a novel and am going great about 15,000 words already,” he tells Sylvia Beach in August. Two weeks later, in a letter to Ezra Pound, he declares, “48,000 words writ. […] If novel not suppressed sh’d sell 8 million copies.” “It is a hell of a fine novel,” he tells Jane Heap a few days later; “Written very simply and full of things happening and people and places and exciting as hell and no autobiographical 1st novel stuff.” Then in a letter to his father in September, he triumphantly announces, “I have finished my novel — 85,000 words — and am very tired inside and out.”
The completion of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel, is the denouement of the second volume of his letters, which collects his correspondence from 1923 to 1925. (The first volume, published in 2011, includes letters from 1907 to 1922.) The letters document his development as a writer, his life in Paris and Toronto (where he worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star), his travels across Europe (including to Pamplona and Schruns), his marriage to Hadley Richardson and the birth of their son, and his friendships and quarrels with Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. The letters are a real time version of A Moveable Feast, combining the memoir’s romantic and gossipy depiction of expatriate life with a powerful sense of precarity. Hemingway describes his life as a struggling writer without knowledge of his future success.
[VIDEO] ‘Sweet Smell of Success’: Burt Lancaster Classics on TCM in November
Posted: November 3, 2013 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, Mediasphere | Tags: Alexander Mackendrick, Burt Lancaster, Ernest Hemingway, Lancaster, Osterman Weekend, Robert Siodmak, Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis Leave a commentIf you haven’t seen Alexander Mackendrick‘s masterpiece “Sweet Smell of Success,” get it on Netflix, or tune in when it airs on TCM. Shot in black-and-white, it’s a dark, nasty little slice of big-city show business and monopolistic journalism. It’s loaded with rich, sharp dialogue, and great photography. If you think the media isbrutal now, this will make you reconsider: the treachery of bare-knuckle journalism in the height of newspaper age is deliciously portrayed. It’s my personal favorite movie from that era. Arguably the best role Tony Curtis ever played. And the best film featuring the seamy side of 1950s New York city.

Burt Lancaster, right, and Tony Curtis in “Sweet Smell of Success”
Here’s Indywire.com‘s description of November’s Lancaster lineup:
Anne Thompson and Beth Hanna report: Classic screen actor Burt Lancaster (1913-1994) would have turned 100 this year, and to celebrate his centennial TCM is rolling out a month-long salute with back-to-back programming all night every Wednesday in November.
Included is Alexander Mackendrick‘s acid-tongued portrait of corrupt ambition “Sweet Smell of Success,” starring Lancaster and Tony Curtis as an unscrupulous gossip columnist-and-press agent team. A must-see.
Also playing is Fred Zinnemann‘s Pearl Harbor drama “From Here to Eternity,” which famously features Lancaster and an uncharacteristically bombshell Deborah Kerr kissing passionately on the sands of Hawaii; Jules Dassin‘s explosive prison-breakout thriller “Brute Force”; and the Robert Siodmak noir version of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers.” Read the rest of this entry »
Absinthe: Meet the ‘Green Fairy’
Posted: October 28, 2013 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment | Tags: Absinthe, Charles Bridge, Ernest Hemingway, Fairy, France, New Orleans, Pernod Ricard, Prague Leave a commentAbsinthe Popularity Rises Worldwide
“The stories about green fairies are exactly that: Fairy tales,” bartender David Andrle says with a laugh and a Czech accent.
He’s standing behind the wood of Hemingway, the best kept secret of Prague’s bar scene, expertly preparing my first sip of absinthe. “Or perhaps they are more of a reflection of the absinthe of the early 1900s actually being cut with other substances? Either way, you have nothing to worry about here.”
Author: Hemingway watched Che’s firing squad massacres ‘while sipping Daiquiris’
Posted: September 5, 2013 Filed under: Global, Reading Room | Tags: Castro, Che Guevara, Cuba, Cuban Revolution, Ernest Hemingway, Fidel Castro, Humberto Fontova, United States 6 Comments
Author Humberto Fontova says you don’t know squat about Cuba.
“[A]lmost everything most people (except Cuban exiles) think they know about Cuba isn’t just wrong — it’s almost the exact opposite of the truth,” Fontova, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba and the author of numerous books about the country, told The Daily Caller in an interview about his new book, ”The Longest Romance: The Mainstream and Fidel Castro.”
The Last Days of Ernest Hemingway: He Thought the Feds were Spying on him
Posted: July 4, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, Reading Room, The Butcher's Notebook | Tags: A. E. Hotchner, Cuba, Ernest, Ernest Hemingway, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hemingway, J. Edgar Hoover, New York Times 6 CommentsDelusional? Mentally deranged? In need of shock therapy and medication to treat persecution fantasies involving mysterious government forces?
Or..100% correct, but no one would listen to him?
We never got to tell him, “Damn, Earnest. You were right, you were under heavy surveillance. And… we’re really sorry you shot yourself…”
I read A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway Biography, many years ago, and recall being troubled by the passages describing Hemingway’s decline. Hemingway’s delusional state was vividly catalogued. Hotchner, a fellow writer and longtime a pal of Hemingway’s, visited Ernest in the hospital during the period when Hemingway was administered shock treatments. Tortured, in an attempt to “cure” his paranoid delusions.
Hotchner’s tone was in that final chapter was somber. Saddened by his famous mentor’s inability to distinguish paranoid fantasy from reality, Hotchner characterized the great man’s decline without ever considering the possibility that Hemingway’s anxiety was well-founded. His phones–even in the hospital–were tapped by the FBI.
Decades later, when it was revealed that Hemingway was being systematically spied on by his own government, I wondered if Hotchner would address it in print. Will Hotchner update his Hemingway biography to include a rewrite of that misguided last chapter? I can only imagine how mortified Hotchner must have been. The unintended damage to Earnest Hemingway’s legacy is impossible to measure.
The questions surrounding Hemingway’s suicide, in light of what we now know, could not have been easy for Hotchner to reconcile. Not only was Hemingway harassed by the U.S. Government, he was misunderstood by his closest friends. Hemingway’s pleas for intervention were ignored. Hemingway ultimately took a shotgun and ended his life.
The following item, from Reason.com, re: Hotcher’s essay in the NYTimes, shows the biographer revisiting these tragic events. Hotchner may have addressed it before, but this is my first time seeing it in print.
If we think Government abuse and surveillance of its own citizens is new, we can recall the life and death of Ernest Hemingway. The abuse is no longer limited to the famous and influential, but extends much further.
4th of July, 2013. Updated October 2nd, 2013 —The Butcher
Ernest Hemingway’s friend A.E. Hotchner has a moving essay in The New York Times about the closing months of the novelist’s life in 1960 and 1961. At that point Hemingway was anxious, paranoid, convinced the Federal Bureau of Investigation was following him and that his home and car were bugged. He tried several times to kill himself and was put in a mental ward, where he received 11 electroshock “treatments.” Even in the hospital, he insisted that the FBI was spying on him. Finally, 50 years ago yesterday, he ended his life.
Decades later, in a twist you may have seen coming,
“…the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.
In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide.”
Via Tom Jackson — via Reason.com
The Smell of a Book
Posted: February 25, 2013 Filed under: Reading Room | Tags: Arts, Ernest Hemingway, Hardy Boys, Hemingway, Luddite, McSweeney, Olfaction, smell Leave a commentBy TEDDY WAYNE
I know e-readers are all the rage, but I’ll never get one. Call me a Luddite, but there’s something irreplaceable about a printed book: the heft of it in your hands, the striking cover, and, most important to me, its smell.
I fondly recall hiding under the covers after lights-out as a kid, Hardy Boys mystery in one hand and flashlight in the other, escaping into the adventures of Frank and Joe through the portal of the pages’ woodsy scent as I deeply inhaled the trapped, bookish air inside my blanket. In high school and college, I went on to discover many of my longstanding favorites: spare, economical bouquets from Hemingway, elegant perfumes of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, the smoke swirling around a Chandler potboiler (my guilty pleasure!).
And now, as an adult, I love nothing more than curling up with a good book, closing my eyes, breathing in through my nostrils, keeping my eyes closed and not reading yet continuing to draw in oxygen for hours, and, thanks to my fetishized olfactory associations for printed and bound matter, becoming sexually aroused.
Indeed, nothing is more of a turn-on than receiving a thoughtful book as a gift. On a related note, I have found that only through the pervading odor of a postmodern tome can I achieve orgasm. I don’t even particularly like the postmodernists’ work—too cerebrally opaque for my taste—but the smell of their writing, it just…
More — via McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The Smell of a Book..