Out of Bangladesh: Out of Luck? Three Ground Zeros and We’re Out? Outting ‘Mmmericans? 24 Hours to Get the “F” Out? All titles rejected within seconds.

The frustration of fiction. No more.

“‘The chilling scope of the bomb attacks that swept the length and breadth of the country yesterday should have no one in doubt as to the intent, organization, and capability of the terrorists that were behind it,’ a leading English newspaper, the Daily Star, said in an editorial.”

That was straight up from a Reuters report on the desk of Richard Martin Oxman. It knocked him clear out of *the person* he was using.

This week, roughly 200 homemade bombs exploded on the streets, at courts and near key government buildings in at least 60 cities and towns across the Islamic nation of Bangladesh *simultaneously*, shortly after Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia left Dhaka on a five-day visit to China…echoing the sounds of the scenario delineated in the opening chapter of ‘Mmmerican Waterloo0.

Big Bang in Bangladesh, little bang for our buck stateside or anywhere. Little acknowledgement. *Les plus les choses….* No. *Cela changes tout!* *Cela les changera de leur routine.* More than like what happens when one tries to learn another language.

Richard Martin, wannabe author, had been marveling at how Richard Ford, real (successful) author — albeit with limited ambitions — had provided minor literary parallels when the news out of Bangladesh hit him — almost exclusively, it would seem — like a two-ton brick.

It pricked his curiosity, Ford’s having a church person named Big Al and a writer absorbed in Morocco in The Sportswriter. Fictional fun, comparative analysis.

But enough about the Pulitzer Prize person with the beautiful eyes. And all those who people his works and works like them. And those who read them, and loved them.

If anyone ever bought any of *his* writing, he was certain even they would make him cringe. The consumers, publishers, authors all (almost to a one), citizens of the ‘Mmmerican world were worse than Good Germans. He was working on moving closer to people in real life. For the time being, however, Richard Martin couldn’t see being with them. Agreeing with the disagreeables. The Hemingway wannabes, children.

“I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.” He loved Beckett; agreed. But he was different too, of course.

For now it was sufficient to point out that he’d change the above (for the moment) to: “I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess Americans were making of life without having left a stain upon America.”

Richard wrote:

An Unmoveable Beast

by Richard Oxman

This is The Last Generation we’re facing, way beyond lost.

“Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), an enjoyable if fanciful reminiscence of his early life in the Paris of the Twenties, can only be understood when considered against the fact that the memoir was begun in 1957, completed in 1960, and only published posthumously, after the author’s death from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head in 1961. Though it is widely known that Virginia Woolf experienced periods of ‘madness’ and eventually committed suicide when she felt another such period approaching, few people outside academia seem to be aware that Hemingway, with actor John Wayne the definitive ‘man’s man’ of the 20th century, killed himself; and those that are have tended to downplay the fact to an extraordinary degree. Doubtlessly, this is because his suicide appears to fly in the face of every quality Hemingway stood for: strength of character, courage, adventurousness, robust health, stoicism, poise, and manliness.

But the book includes one telling chapter on poet Ernest Walsh titled ‘The Man Who Was Marked For Death’ that is somewhat chilling in light of what was to follow. Walsh remarks that both he and Hemingway share the same first name, and when the question arises whether Hemingway is also ‘marked for death,’ Walsh says, ‘No, You’re marked for Life.’ Hemingway presciently responds, ‘Give me time.’

Another memento mori: in the first of several chapters dedicated to the author’s exploits with F. Scott Fitzgerald, an episode occurs which Hemingway refers to as ‘very strange.’ The two men are enjoying drinks with a third when a sudden change comes over Fitzgerald: ‘the skin seemed to tighten over his face until all the puffiness was gone and then it drew tighter until the face was like a death’s head. The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight and the color left the face so that it was the color of candle wax. This was not my imagination. His face became a true death’s head, or death mask, in front of my eyes.’

With A Moveable Feast, Hemingway, who suffered from both depression and alcoholism, was clearly reflecting back on a happier time in his existence, which explains the book’s slightly unreal tone, which often wavers between a travelogue, a light hearted comedy of manners, and a mild European fairy tale, though no outright cracks in its facade of ‘realism’ appear.

However, it is significant that Hemingway wrote in his preface that ‘if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.’ Though World War I is fresh in the young writer’s mind and gruesome evidence of it is everywhere on the streets of Paris, Hemingway writes as if life were a lovely, sensuous, and fulfilling parade in which aggression, fear, deprivation, oppression, frustration, and treachery play no part whatsoever.

For example, though the young Hemingway is chronically short of money and thus goes hungry on occasion, his hunger is always couched in quaintly romantic terms that border on the narcissistic: he avoids acknowledging his inability to purchase food to friends and acquaintances because such an act would represent a breach of his excellent good manners, though both he and Shakespeare and Company co-owner Sylvia Beach clearly believe that three meals a day are a necessity. Few readers will find it believable that Hemingway ever genuinely knew what real hunger was: A Moveable Feast treats the subject as merely another fashionable prerequisite for struggling young writers. Though some critics have applauded the book for its unsentimental character, it is in fact nothing but a sentimental reverie, though never overtly one; on the other side of that reverie, a loaded shotgun was waiting.

In keeping with its title, A Moveable Feast also describes how Hemingway and wife Hadley routinely spend a fair portion of whatever incoming money they receive on the most sumptuous Parisian food and wine available, though the author is shrewd enough to include episodes in which he equally appreciates common café fair and fish caught in the Seine. Hemingway’s descriptions of eating and drinking color the book, but become increasingly extended to the point that they begin to resemble campy self-parody, and his obvious sophistication about the nuances of Parisian culinary habits eventually sound cloying (’Macon’ is ‘a good white wine, moderately full-bodied but with a low alcohol content,’ while, as an aside in a chapter taking place in Lyon, he says “the mutton had been excellent.’).

Written in the crisp high WASP style for which he was famous, Hemingway seems unaware that, for many people of all races and ethnicities, such style often seems thin, transparent, and obvious, and one that doesn’t disguise the writer’s ambitions, pretensions, false humility, and underlying smugness nearly as well as they believe. The high WASP style always includes a distancing effect which presents itself as objectivity wrapped in elegant good manners, but which unfortunately nonetheless stands on unequal footing above its audience. With the F. Scott Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby (1925), Hemingway was its greatest practitioner. Hemingway mastered the art of literally selling his own sense of subduedly expressed superiority to readers everywhere, and thus making them pay for the opportunity to revere and admire him.

A Moveable Feast also includes a number of charming and funny vignettes about famous writers, most notably Americans Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. But the book, as a potential fiction, cannot be read as an accurate account of events as they occurred, and thus Hemingway’s dreamy memoir of a more innocent time has to be accepted as highly suspect, especially in its details.”

Who wrote these *on target* words? One of my former students? God bless attics.

Doesn’t matter. I’m going back to Paris, leaving for good. Me and Sylvie and Marcel. And maybe Jesse too.

For one, it’s cheaper than Silicon Valley these days.

For another, I feel compelled to leave a stain upon The Beast, and I can’t very well do that at home in its belly. I am surrounded by Hemingways here. I have to pretend it’ll be different in Paris.

Perhaps my salvation will be that I don’t understand French. And that I can make Fiction wait.

Unlike Samuel I hear noise and unsettling threats, not silence. For the moment.r the moment, they are sounds that oblige me to put my fork down. To ground the vibrations to a pulp, much like what SB did in taking part in The Resistance.