Radical Transparency

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lady brett ashley

September 10, 2008

Come On

Just finished The Sun Also Rises again.

I was in Beijing the first time I read it.  Reading Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley and The Art of Loving as well.  About ready to take off on the trip that almost made a writer out of me, one that still might someday make a writer of me.

Hemingway's effect was different this time.  It was about the poetry and the adventure then.  About discovering love.  And it'll always be about that.  But there was more this time. 

Lady Ashley was real.  A force.  Something unstoppable. 

And Jake was forgivable.  No longer a traitor to aficion.  No longer a steer or blinded bull or washed up matador.  Dude was just simply stuck in love, hardened, frozen, arthritic and struggling, nowhere to go.  And pretty damn elegant about it, given the circumstances.  Stupid.  And in a mess he'd made himself.  But still smiling.  Smiling and shaking his head at the situation.

"Bring me a telegram form, please"

He brought it and I took out my fountain-pen and printed:
LADY  ASHLEY  HOTEL  MONTANA
MADRID  ARRIVING  SUD  EXPRESS
TOMORROW  LOVE  JAKE.

That seemed to handle it.  That was it.  Send off a girl with one man.  Introduce her to another to go off with him.  Now go and bring her back.  And sign the wire with love.  That was it all right.  I went in to lunch.

Hemingway was 26 and 27 when he wrote that.

Anyway, this one goes out to Jake Barnes and Ernest Hemingway and the lovely Lady Brett Ashley.  It's a song I remember from way back, when my dad introduced me to rock and roll the proper way, first things first, starting with Chuck Berry.  This is a Rolling Stones version, though, one I discovered a couple of weeks ago. 

Come On.

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September 08, 2008

Lady Ashley and the White Garlics

No question this woman leaves a path of destruction in her wake (that a mixed metaphor?), but, man, I'm way more sympathetic this tme through the book.

Fiesta in Pamplona. Everyone's dancing. Everywhere. And our characters are swept into a circle of celebration.

They wore big wreaths of white garlics around their necks. They took Bill and me by the arms and put us in the circle. Bill started to dance, too. They were all chanting. Brett wanted to dance but they did not want her to. They wanted her as an image to dance around.

Not easy being Brett. 

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