Hemingway A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick
Have you been seeing on PBS the advance trailers for the new Ken Burns film on Hemingway? I’m getting excited. Now, to be honest, I haven’t always been a Hemingway fan. In college I had a knee-jerk reaction to the macho, big-game hunter misogynist image. I say image, because I had a change of heart after reading A Moveable Feast—after which I turned to his earlier works, the novels etc. It is the style, not the man, I most admire. I’ve tried to adopt his use of the declarative sentence. In flash there is a need to pare down words into a paragraph essence. A squirt or a dab will hopefully evoke, jusgt enough to bring the reader into the equation. I still tend to overwrite, throw the whole thesaurus at an idea. Hemingway was a complicated man and I’m interested in what Burns and Novik have uncovered in their documentary. One of the trailers hinted at one of the obstacles I had with the man/writer: his focus on gender and how it might not be as boxed in as critics once thought....