Dorthy Parker On Ernest Hemingway

Dorthy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967), seen in the above photo, was a brilliant and quite clever writer.

Her 1929 New Yorker profile of a young Ernest Hemingway is a classic piece of journalism.

You can read the piece via the link below:

People Want to Hear Things about Ernest Hemingway | The New Yorker 

Hemingway's Previous Unpublished Story, 'Pursuit As Happiness' Is Published In The New Yorker

The New Yorker has published a previously unpublished story by the late, great writer Ernest Hemingway called Pursuit As Happiness. 

The story is about Hemingway fishing for marlin off Cuba.

“I know it. Because it can’t. But what I didn’t like the most was that policeman saying he liked my face. What the hell kind of face have I got, Cap, that a policeman like that would say he liked it?”

I liked Mr. Josie’s face very much, too. I liked it more than the face of almost anybody I knew. It had taken me a long time to appreciate it because it was a face that had not been sculptured for a quick or facile success. It had been formed at sea, on the profitable side of bars, playing cards with other gamblers, and by enterprises of great risk conceived and undertaken with cold and exact intelligence. No part of the face was handsome except the eyes, which were a lighter and stranger blue than the Mediterranean is on its brightest and clearest day. The eyes were wonderful and the face certainly not beautiful and now it looked like blistered leather.

“You have a good face, Cap,” I said. “Probably the only good thing about that son of a bitch was that he could see it.”

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

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/pursuit-as-happiness

You can also read an interview with Sean Hemingway, the late writer’s grandson who discovered the story, via the below link:    

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/ernest-hemingway-06-08-20 

Hemingway As The Godfather Of Long-Form

Richard Brody at the New Yorker offers a piece on Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa. 

Hemingway’s 1935 book “Green Hills of Africa,” which has just been republished by Scribner in a new and augmented edition, is a work of nonfiction. It’s not his first; his encyclopedic account of the world of bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” was published in 1932. But that book is about bullfighting overall, occasionally adorned with references to Hemingway’s own experience. It’s not a narrative; it’s a history and an analysis sprinkled with anecdotes. In “Green Hills of Africa,” by contrast, Hemingway states his ambitions clearly in a brief foreword: 

Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary. . . . The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.

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

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/hemingway-as-the-godfather-of-long-form

Dorothy Parker Slices And Dices: A Look Back At The Book Reviews of Writer Dorothy Parker

Ellen Meister at the Daily Beast looks back at the sometimes vicious wit of writer Dorothy Parker, but notes that she also wrote fondly of two of my favorite writers - Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett.   

You may know Dorothy Parker as the acid-tongued wit who once said a performance by Katharine Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B,” and who reviewed a Broadway play with the line, “The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”

But Parker was more than just a hard-bitten theater critic. She was also a poet, short story writer, screenwriter, and literary critic. In fact, she was The New Yorker’s book reviewer from 1927-1933, writing under the pseudonym Constant Reader, and held a similar post at Esquire decades later. 

Of course, not all of Parker’s reviews were negative.  An avid reader, she loved and hated with equal intensity. And though the positive reviews might not be as entertaining as the scorchers, the books live on, and are worthy of our attention.  Here are five examples of books Dorothy Parker recommended.

Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
Parker adored this collection of Hemingway short stories, while castigating those who insisted that only his novels should be taken seriously. She said, “Mr. Hemingway's style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.” She goes on to say Men Without Women is “a truly magnificent work,” and “I do not know where a greater collection of stories can be found.”

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
Dorothy Parker was a big fan of Dashiell Hammett’s work, calling him “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.” And while she explains that he doesn't have Hemingway’s scope or beauty, she says it's true that “he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. And it is also true that he is a good, hell-bent, cold-hearted writer, with a clear eye for the ways of hard women and a fine ear for the words of hard men, and his books are exciting and powerful and—if I may filch a word from the booksy ones—pulsing.”

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

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/22/dorothy-parker-slices-and-dices.html

Ellen Meister is the author of Farewell Dorothy Parker. 

The Hunt For El Chapo, The World's Most Powerful Drug Trafficker

Patrick Radden Keefe at The New Yorker offers a long piece on the capture of Joaquin Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo.

One afternoon last December, an assassin on board a K.L.M. flight from Mexico City arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. This was not a business trip: the killer, who was thirty-three, liked to travel, and often documented his journeys around Europe on Instagram. He wore designer clothes and a heavy silver ring in the shape of a grimacing skull. His passport was an expensive fake, and he had used it successfully many times. But, moments after he presented his documents to Dutch customs, he was arrested. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had filed a Red Notice with Interpol—an international arrest warrant—and knew that he was coming. Only after the Dutch authorities had the man in custody did they learn his real identity: José Rodrigo Arechiga, the chief enforcer for the biggest drug-trafficking organization in history, Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

To work in the Mexican drug trade is to have a nickname, and Arechiga went by the whimsically malevolent handle El Chino Ántrax. He supervised the armed wing of the Sinaloa—a cadre of executioners known as Los Ántrax—and coördinated drug shipments for the cartel’s leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who was known as El Chapo, or Shorty. Arechiga was a narcotraficante of the digital age, bantering with other criminals on Twitter and posting snapshots of himself guzzling Cristal, posing with exotic pets, and fondling a gold-plated AK-47.

Guzmán, who is fifty-seven, typified an older generation. Obsessively secretive, he ran his multibillion-dollar drug enterprise from hiding in Sinaloa, the remote western state where he was born, and from which the cartel takes its name. The Sinaloa cartel exports industrial volumes of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamine to America; it is thought to be responsible for as much as half the illegal narcotics that cross the border every year.

Guzmán has been characterized by the U.S. Treasury Department as “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” and after the killing of Osama bin Laden, three years ago, he became perhaps the most wanted fugitive on the planet. Mexican politicians promised to bring him to justice, and the U.S. offered a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to his capture. But part of Guzmán’s fame stemmed from the perception that he was uncatchable, and he continued to thrive, consolidating control of key smuggling routes and extending his operation into new markets in Europe, Asia, and Australia. According to one study, the Sinaloa cartel is now active in more than fifty countries.  

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

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/05/140505fa_fact_keefe?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_daily166_stn&mbid=nl_Daily%20Test%20Template%20(9)

Mark Twain's Eternal Chatter

Ben Tarnoff at The New Yorker looks at the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2.

When Mark Twain opened his mouth, strange things came tumbling out. Things like hoaxes, jokes, yarns, obscenities, and non sequiturs. He had a drawl—his “slow talk,” his mother called it—that made his sentences long and sinuous. One reporter described it as a “little buzz-saw slowly grinding inside a corpse.” Others thought that he sounded drunk.

He loved to talk: to friends, to reporters, to the crowds of adoring fans who filled lecture halls to hear him. He gave famous after-dinner toasts and tossed off witty one-liners that made great copy for the next day’s papers. He could talk all night, preferably with a plentiful supply of cigars and Scotch on hand. He was always bursting with opinions on topics large and small and humming with ideas for new books and new business ventures. He often had trouble sleeping, and drank to numb his nerves. But he never had trouble talking.

He kept talking until the end. In the last years of his life, when he began writing his autobiography, Twain decided to do it mostly by dictation. He sat in bed, with his head propped up on pillows, and riffed and reminisced for hours at a time, while his stenographer took down everything in shorthand. When he was done, he had more than five thousand pages of typescript.

The result is the “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a monster that has haunted Twain scholars for a hundred years. Its forbidding size and freewheeling structure have puzzled and infuriated generations of researchers who have descended into the archives, hoping to find a finished memoir and instead discovering ten file feet of musings, interspersed with letters and newspaper clippings. Twain insisted that his sprawling memoir not be published until a century after his death, in 1910, so that he could speak freely about everyone and everything. But he couldn’t resist publishing excerpts in the North American Review before he died. And, in the decades since, more has trickled out as editors have waded through Twain’s papers to uncover pieces that they considered worth publishing.

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

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/11/the-eternal-chatter-of-the-autobiography-of-mark-twain-volume-2.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20(60)
 

Lunch With James Bond Creator Ian Fleming And A Look Back At His Time As A Journalist For Reuters

With the success of the new James Bond film Skyfall a good number of magazines and newspapers have offered articles on James Bond's creator, the late great thriller writer Ian Fleming.

Joshua Rothamn at The New Yorker offers a piece on the lunch New Yorker writer Geoffrey Hellman had with Ian Fleming in 1962.

It’s a little hard to believe, but the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No,” was released more than a half-century ago, on October 5, 1962. At that time, Ian Fleming, the writer of the James Bond novels, was fifty-three. In April of that year (when Daniel Craig, it’s worth pointing out, was negative five), The New Yorker’s Geoffrey Hellman met Fleming for lunch at the Pierre (now the Taj). Fleming was in New York to visit his publishers. He’d stopped en route between his vacation house, in Jamaica (where Dr. No also has a hideaway) and his home in London.

You can read Joshua Rothman's piece and link to Geoffrey Hellman's 1962 piece via the below link:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2012/11/lunch-with-ian-fleming-bond-at-fifty.html

John Entwisle also offers an interesting piece on Ian Fleming's time as a young journalist for Reuters.

Ian Fleming was the man behind Bond. Born in 1908, he died in 1964 at the age of 56.

From 1945 to 1959, he worked as Foreign Manager for Kemsley (later Thomson) newspapers. But early in the 30s, when still a young man, he was a Reuters journalist.

Fleming never forgot his time with Reuters. He frequently recalled those years in interviews, describing the British newsagency as “a very good mill”. “The training there gives you a good, straightforward style” he said.

In February 1988, retired Reuters journalist, Basil Chapman, wrote an excellent account of Fleming’s time with the company for its then house-magazine ‘Reuters World’.

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://blog.thomsonreuters.com/index.php/ian-fleming-the-reuters-journalist-who-gave-us-all-a-run-for-our-money/

Thank You For The Light: F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'New' Story Rounds Out Our View

 

Nicolaus Mills at Newsday offers an interesting piece on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story and posthumous publishing.

The New Yorker has just done a favor for all of us who are admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Great Gatsby." Earlier this month, the magazine published a story of Fitzgerald's, "Thank You for the Light," that it rejected in 1936. In so doing, it opened up the whole question of what we should expect from posthumously published writing.

The New Yorker got its second chance at "Thank You for the Light" because Fitzgerald's grandchildren found it while going through his papers for an auction at Sotheby's. It wasn't the first Fitzgerald story to be discovered after his death. His uncompleted final novel, "The Last Tycoon," was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941, a year after Fitzgerald died from a heart attack at the age of 44.

In the case of "Thank You for the Light," the good news is that the one-page story required no editing. It stands as Fitzgerald wrote it, so we don't have to wonder about his intentions.

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

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/mills-f-scott-fitzgerald-s-new-story-rounds-out-our-view-1.3909298

The Man Who Was Liberty Valance: Lee Marvin On John Ford And John Wayne

Richard Brody at the New Yorker remembers the late actor Lee Marvin as the baddest of the bad in the Old West in his role as the outlaw Liberty Valance in John Ford's wonderful The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The film is one of my favorites.

Marvin’s work is a model of intelligence played for malevolence: Valance’s amorality and corruption—his delight in malice—are matched by an exquisite control of tempo, of diction, and of gaze. The fact that Valance thinks so hard and so well about what he’s doing makes his evil all the more horrific.

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video of Lee Marvin being interviewed about John Ford and John Wayne via the below link:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/02/the-clippings-file-lee-marvin-on-john-ford.html

Author And Former Navy SEAL Stands By Account Of Bin Laden Raid, Says Obama Administration Out To Get Him

In an interview with the Daily Caller, former Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer defends his book on the Osama bin Laden raid, SEAL Target Geronimo.

“I think it’s very important that the administration itself push back on this. They have never really come out with a complete story,” said Pfarrer, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller.

“The story they did come out with was a series of factoids: a 45-minute firefight, the deliberate wounding of a woman, a ground–up assault, trying to explain how a helicopter landed on the wrong side of a 20-foot wall and a 10-foot steel gate.”

Pfarrer, whose tale rejects each of those claims, says that the administration’s story — told most comprehensively by The New Yorker — was borne of haphazard political expedience.

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

http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/16/former-seal-stands-by-account-of-bin-laden-raid-says-administration-out-to-get-him-2/

September 11th: Ten Years, With Former NYPD Detective And Writer Edward Conlon

The New Yorker asked their contributors to look back and comment on how their lives have changed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Edward Conlon, a former NYPD detective and author of  Blue Blood and Red On Red, offered his comments in the current issue of the magazine.

I was a new detective in a South Bronx precinct. That morning, I’d caught a case—a gunpoint bodega robbery from the night before—when the news came on the TV. The sergeant told us to put on our uniforms: “We’re at war. Let’s suit up.”

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

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/09/september-11th-ten-years-with-edward-conlon.html  

You can also read an earlier post on Edward Conlon via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/07/writing-detective-retires-to-focus-on.html