Hemingway On Giving Advice

Happy Birthday To George C.Scott

As Biography.com notes, today is the birthday of the late great actor George C. Scott.

George C. Scott was born on October 18, 1927, in Wise, Virginia. His first movie, The Hanging Tree, earned him an Oscar nomination in 1959. He was nominated again in 1961, but refused the award, stating his belief that competition among actors demeaned the profession. It was an ongoing struggle between the Academy and Scott. Scott is best known for his film portrayal of General George S. Patton. He worked until his death in 1999.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/george-c-scott-9476845

Note: Although George C. Scott is best known for his role in Patton, he left behind a series of powerful performances in The Hospital, The Hustler, Islands in the Stream, A Christmas Carol, Dr Strangelove, and many others. He is one of my favorite actors.

You can read an earlier post on George C. Scott in The Hospital via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/12/a-look-back-at-christmas-carol-with.html 

And you can watch a trailer of Islands in the Stream, with George C. Scott as the Hemingway hero, via the below link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3LQ-upoQQE  

Hemingway was The Babe Ruth Of American Literature

Jack Engelhard at the Washington Times looks back at novelist Ernest Hemingway.

NEW YORK, July 2, 2013 — In the end, the will to die was stronger than the will to live. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway aimed a double-barreled, 12-guage shotgun at his head, pulled the trigger and thus ended the short happy life of America’s most famous writer. He was 61 and we do not know what would-be books he took to his grave.

Fittingly, he often spoke of the power of silence, or as biographer Kenneth Slawenski reminds us about J.D. Salinger, the secret to great writing resides in the “fire between the words.” On the temptation to write long, Hemingway remarked that there are times to resist and to “say no to a typewriter.”

Was Hemingway a great writer? The greatest? That is an argument, so let us leave it at that, but without a doubt he was a prose stylist par excellence, even though his most beloved work, The Old Man and the Sea, was more poetry than prose, and it earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize.

He was the Babe Ruth of American literature. Often enough he did swat it out of the park. He was a boozer and a brawler but turned devotional when he sat down – or stood up – to write. Famed for that granite-like style, he claimed to have no style, only the blood, sweat and perseverance to cobble together the cleanest sentence possible. In virtually all his paragraphs there is a sense of urgency. This is also how he lived.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/jul/2/engelhard-hemingway-and-generation-lost/  

A Guide To Drinking With Hemingway

Jason Wilson at the Washington Post offers a piece on a new book about author Ernest Hemingway and the drinking in his novels and short stories.

For the better part of a century, a certain type of young person has learned to drink from the pages of Ernest Hemingway. I should know. I’ll sheepishly admit that I was once that certain type of young person.

 

“The Sun Also Rises” might do more to spark an interest in spirits and cocktails (and wine) in people like me than does an entire library of mixologists’ guides. Look back through my Spirits columns and recipes, and you’ll find Hemingway’s fingerprints are all over them, including the Negroni, the daiquiri and the Jack Rose.

Philip Greene, the Washington-based author of the new book “To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion” (Perigee), is a kindred spirit.
 

“Hemingway introduced me to Campari. He introduced me to Valpolicella wine. In the 1980s, I was reading ‘Islands in the Stream’ while visiting my in-laws in Florida and decided to make Green Isaac’s Special — with gin, coconut water, lime juice and bitters,” Greene says. “The first time I had it, I thought, ‘This is cool. I’m drinking what Hemingway drank.’ ”

Whatever one feels about the literary legacy of Hemingway, one thing is indisputable: The man was detailed and exacting in which drinks his characters imbibe, and the choice of drink is always important.

“We watched the beginning of the evening of the last night of the fiesta. The absinthe made everything seem better. I drank it without sugar in the dripping glass, and it was pleasantly bitter.” So says narrator Jake Barnes in the waning pages of “The Sun Also Rises.”

At this point in the novel, Jake’s friends have beaten the hell out of each other, and the girl has run away with the bullfighter. Jake’s decision to drink absinthe “without sugar in the dripping glass” is no small thing.

... “People ask me, ‘Could you do this with another author?’ I don’t think so. Maybe Ian Fleming or Raymond Chandler, but no one else,” Greene says.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/hemingway-and-me-at-the-bar/2012/11/05/fa3f3094-2381-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_story.html