Kickstarter

If the people heading up the project fail to raise enough money, none of the backers have to pay out. It’s a great way to support new creative plans, without having to make a huge financial commitment or risk, and so is a great way for those creative folk to raise funds from “the crowd” rather than depend on one funder, or on their own capacity to flirt with bankruptcy.

Anyway, the project that has really caught my eye is for the documentary Plimpton! and the funding of the film’s post-production.

I love a good documentary, and George Plimpton seems pretty much the ideal subject for one. I guess he is most famous for being the editor of the Paris Review for fifty years, publishing works from Jack Kerouac to Philip Roth to Jonathan Franzen, along with the interviews with many of the key writers of the twentieth century, such as Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow and Truman Capote.

That story would be interesting enough, yet Plimpton was also a Zelig-like figure who seemed to spring up in all sorts of unlikely places. He pitched against major league players, trained with the Detroit Lions and attempted to play professional golf. He was friends with Presidents, took photographs for Playboy and appeared in several Hollywood movies. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Plimpton was one of the men who wrestled the assailant, Sirhan Sirhan, to the ground.

All in all, he led a spectacular, improbable life. As clichéd as it sounds, if this was fiction you wouldn’t believe it.

So, this films seems well worth our support. If I have any money floating towards the end of the month, I’ll certainly consider making an investment in order to play a very small part in making this documentary the best it can be.

There is more about the project, including a preview video and information about rewards for backers, on the Kickstarter website.

Image from MDCarchives via Wikipedia

1. On writing: The romance of the writer from Hemingway to Gladwell – this was my first non-sporting post here, and bizarrely ended up on WordPress’ front page, as part of their ‘Freshly Pressed’ deal. It certainly brought in lots of readers, and I think one or two have since hung around. It’s a shame more didn’t, but considering my scattergun approach to blogging, I’m not surprised.
2. England win – let the hype begin! – England reach the World Cup! And the journey to inevitable disappointment began! I think most people find this because they are looking for a nifty England flag photo, rather than to read my incredible footballing insight.
3. Injury time – time for reform? – I moan about the unfairness of injury time. People always moan about this, hence it has remained a popular post.
4. An unfunny night at the Greenwich Comedy – Ah, a recent one. My main example of how great social media can be. My little complaint got a fair bit of local coverage, which made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
5. MLB.TV – What shall I buy? And when? – People looking for cheap baseball on their computer are disappointed to read this post, I’d imagine, as it offers few practical solutions.
6. Man Crush Friday – Does what it says on the tin.
7. What would Joe DiMaggio do? – Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea – Me going on about Hemingway again.
8. Sports pages I’ve enjoyed this week – I think people looking for information about the old Sportspages bookshop make their way here. It is not a classic post. It does have a handy link or two.
9. Fernando Torres and the stolen moment – More man crush-ery.
10. What is a session beer? – BOOZE! All part of a really fun discussion.
11. Stationery pleasures – Me talking about pens and paper and stuff.
12. The Great Gatsby – or is he? – Me pretending to know what a book is about and stuff.

Well, that was fun. And a good way of digging up some old posts, I guess. I’d tell you the dozen least-viewed, but they haven’t been looked at for a very good reason…

So, to bring you up to speed on my Hemingway adventure, on the advice of this parish’s Steven Harris, I picked up the complete short stories late last year in one of those beautiful Everyman hardback volumes, using my Borders vouchers just before the place went belly-up. Then, for Christmas, as part of an array of writing-inspired gifts, my wonderful Significant Other gave me Ernest Hemingway on writing, a brilliant little book compiling many of Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and the life of the writer. So…I’ve been keeping up.

Last week I popped into one of those strange discount bookshops, that sometimes have some incredible bargains and other times have nothing but hopeless junk. This time, I got lucky. I picked up the slim The Old Man and the Sea, the story that won Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature.

My verdict? Well, I loved it. It is one of those stories that will stay with me a long time, hopefully forever.

And I used the word ‘story’ rather than ’book’ quite deliberately.

Here we have a real tale, a fable even. Here we have an old man, a young boy, a fish and little else. Everything is honed down and necessary, like a good story should be. In its 100 or so pages there is no room for flowery prose, or padding. And while it is set in contemporary times, the 1950s, it feels like the kind of story passed from generation to generation, as old as the act of fishing itself.

The one concession to the modern-day is baseball. Oh yes, there’s another reason why I loved reading this, apart from Hemingway’s prose and its brevity (I do love a good short book to rip through). The Old Man’s mind often wanders to baseball, and in particular the great Joe DiMaggio, wondering how the Yankees’ great centre fielder would deal with the Old Man’s situation, being the son of a fisherman himself.

So, concise, timeless and it namechecks baseball. It’s as if this was written for me. Don’t you just love getting that feeling from a book?

I haven’t read a whole lot around the book yet, but it is clear that this is a book that divides opinion. There seems to have been a fair bit of criticism in terms of its symbolism, and if it veers too far from the writer’s famed realism.

I’ll just let the man himself reply:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. … I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”.

This is, of course, forgetting that you can get all this, and more, from good fiction. I can find out just as much, and be just as moved, as I would be by a true-life story.

This was certainly the case with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. After reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which features Fitzgerald around the time The Great Gatsby was written, the novel itself seemed a sensible next stop. Here I could perhaps flesh out that 1920s world, and see if Hemingway was right about this being Fitzgerald’s best work.

It did also help that the book is my Significant Other’s favourite. She has pretty good taste (well, she lives with me, right? OK, apart from living with me, she has good taste) and I doubted she’s recommend a book I wouldn’t go for.

You’ll be pleased to hear, dear reader, I wasn’t disappointed.

Here is a wonderful snapshot of 1920s decadence. Here was that sense of freedom and abandon after the First World War. Here was the truly modern(ist?) world, with its pleasures and its pitfalls. The book chronicles the recklessness of the age, which would eventually lead to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression (although obviously Fitzgerald was not to know of this when he was writing the book). People wallow in excess, on money that appears from nowhere, with no foundation, a modern Gomorrah, heading for disaster. Sounds familiar, eh?

Money is no object, and with Gatsby, he appears to have magicked it from thin air. The allusion is that he has gained his fortune by nefarious means (perhaps he is a con artist, perhaps a bootlegger, perhaps a fixer of the World Series). But the great and good are more than happy to accept his charming self, and more importantly are happy to see his money spent on their own enjoyment, at his countless parties. No questions asked.

I found Gatsby such a fascinating character as he does not seem of this (that?) world. He is a mirage. He seems to have appeared from nowhere, and can disappear just as quickly.

In the early passages of the book, Gatsby is but a mythical presence. The narrator, Nick Carraway, hears of him but does not meet him, despite living next-door. When he first catches sight of him, he vanishes. When they first meet face-to-face, Nick does not immediately realise who he is talking to.

Here is a character who is dropped into the ‘normal’ world and seems to unsettle everything. Yet, by the end, on the surface, normality has returned, or at least the unrest has been suppressed. This lends Gatsby an almost ghostly,dream-like air. For the main characters, to the outside world at least, it is as if nothing has ever happened. The status quo is restored.

He is soon forgotten by high society. They move on. Those who he genuinely touched will at least pretend to forget him, or wish that they could. Only Nick remains to mark and remember Gatsby. And so, Gatsby starts and ends a myth. He lives only in Nick’s words and memory.

Was Gatsby an illusion? Just as all that surrounded him was, and as the riches of that time were? It seems that way.

I recently read the Ernest Hemingway book, A Moveable Feast. One thing that was so striking about it was how Hemingway weaves multiple threads into such a short book (140-odd pages), and with such taut prose. For me, there were three distinct elements.

First, it is a postcard, maybe even a love letter, from 1920s Paris. Written with many years hindsight (it was one of the last books Hemingway wrote and was published posthumously), it details his life as a poor, struggling writer in Paris, with a young family. He had simple needs and pleasures, all that Paris seemed to fulfill.

The bookseller told me I’d want to live in Paris after reading the book, and she wasn’t far off. Here is Paris in all its glory, and a life of fine wine, good books and interesting company will eternally appeal. In Paris, a simple potato salad and a cold beer can bring immeasurable joy, as can a day at the races, or fishing at the canal. In Hemingway’s Paris you can be poor and happy.

The second strand, and I’m being a little flippant here, sees the book operate as a 1920s version of Popbitch or Heat, although obviously considerably better written, and perhaps even a little more scandalous in parts. We get Hemingway’s memories of the celebrities of the time, from Ezra Pound to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein to F Scott Fitzgerald. The passages on Fitzgerald are priceless, so I won’t ruin them for you. But you won’t think about Fitzgerald the same way again.

And the third strand is perhaps the most interesting to me. In chronicling his life as a young writer, Hemingway imparts his advice on the art of writing. For me, A Moveable Feast is the most concise and well thought out guide for writing I’ve encountered. One particular piece of advice that I think will stick with me is to always finish a day’s writing with something left to write for tomorrow.

There is also something in the tone of the book that suggests that he looked back at this simpler time as being good for his writing, and for learning his craft. The latter stages of the book perhaps hold a certain regret that life got more complicated. “We were very poor and very happy,” indeed.

But does this romantic idea of writing still exist? The Moveable Feast life will always have a certain pull. I’d love to wander cafés and bars writing, or arising early to watch the day begin whilst plotting my next story.

I think this romantic idea, at least in terms of freedom to write, and to live an exciting, interesting and diverse life does still exist. It’s not Paris in the 1920s, but the Wall Street Journal’s recent piece on how novelists write conjures up many scenarios where writing seems like a very good life. It may be in the routine, or the lack of it. Or in the research, or the opportunity to experiment. It might even be in the choice of stationery (I’m a sucker for stationery, but that is another post for another time). 

Malcolm Gladwell’s average day may not have the decadence, the adventure, or indeed the drinking of Hemingway’s Paris, but it still seems like a lovely life to lead, sitting in cafés, searching the libraries and enjoying a great city. A romantic life can be found in the small gestures as much as in the grand acts.

For me, the draw is as much in being a writer, and living that life, as in the writing itself. There is the freedom of having the time to write, and the freedom that sort of life affords. Much better than nine-to-five.

So, in books such as A Moveable Feast, and when reading articles like those linked above, the fascination for me lies as much in what surrounds the writing, as the writing itself. And just think: how wonderful would it be to have the time to develop and indulge a particular set of rituals for writing?

But ultimately, the romance for me in being a writer is in being able to earn money doing something you love, and to do so in any way you choose. Hemingway was a lucky man during his time in Paris, and so are those authors in the Wall Street Journal piece.

And so, wherever a writer may be, they hopefully can find that joy in their lives. And perhaps us amateurs can find that too, even without the security and freedom that a pay cheque ensures. I guess if we didn’t, we wouldn’t write at all.

We’ll always have Hemingway’s Paris, but that is not the only route to happiness and fulfillment.