Marcus: I just re-read the first thirty pages of the book on the way over here things made more sense the second time around. For example, when Jake said that Brett was tight, I thought he was talking about her vagina. It just meant she was fucked up. Also, knowing about what happens to Cohn at the end, I picked up context clues about him in the beginning – like him watching Brett dancing
Mike: the book was easy and accessible and the sarcasm was like our humor today
Marcus: but probably deceptively difficult to write. The little details make it believable and conversational. But the choice of details was weird. He would relate how he balanced his checkbook and how many checks he wrote, but when he mentioned that he dropped Brett off, he said he had no idea what time it was.
Mike: Those details point to larger themes. They were Left Bank expats and writers who had no money – Mike was deep in debt. Also, the entire book has a skewed and ambiguous sense of time.
When are we going to buy wine skins?
Erik’s (Leedom) Latvian grandmother had a cheap souvenir wine skin that smelled like mothballs and had a matador on it hanging on her wall. Dan, Erik & Wilson took it down, washed it out, and drank from it.
Wilson: I sprayed wine all over my t-shirt and my Mom said she drank lying on her back with a wine skin clenched between her knees in the 50s in college
Marcus: Do wine skins get hard and brittle?
Alex: My Dad has a wine skin that he’s had for years and it’s still quite supple
Dan: Vinyl tastes like shit
Marcus: You have to fight through that
Dan: I liked the bus part. It was a great bus and probably my favorite part of the book.
(a round of Hurumphing agreement about the universal cultural bridge of getting fucked up)
Marcus: There is something to be said for the beauty of getting fucked up. It is something that unites people of all ages, which is why I love my parents.
Mike: The bus scene was the best one. It was like being drunk and watching TV, but with a really cool show on. Like going on one of those city tours with a cooler.
All: Mmm Hmmm
Mike: The landscapes were something that I noticed. They were beautiful, but not overly specific. The book left it so that the blanks were easily filled in by imagination.
Hemmingway’s narrative style is a good balance of sparse and provocative and a lot is effectively communicated without being said or guided to a point and then left for the imagination to round out
Dan: The fishing scene did that for me. I was like, "FISHING IN EUROPE!"
Wilson: Brett was like that for me
Dan: She was a delightful slut (KT). She’s idyllic. I wanna bang her. She’s so bad, but it’s so good.
Did Brett make you think of a certain person? Missy Elliot (Marcus)
Confusion about her hair length
Another moment of golden accord when it was mentioned that, for men of our age in their mid-late twenties, we feel a lot of attraction to women in their mid-30s
Mike: Brett is my girlfriend’s favorite literary character
Dan: (re Brett) I love to hate her and, uh, love her. Ooooh that slut. She’s going to bang bull-fighting dude.
Brett is powerful
ADB: Brett is powerful in that she is in control of the moment, but not in control in a grand sense.
Brett drives and/or is at the center of much of the book’s conflict because of her short-sighted HEDONISM which fractures normal life
Wilson: That’s where the Jake/Steer metaphor fits in. I was thinking they had to be tied together since neither of them have dicks. I think that the hedonistic chaos of the people in Jake’s life are the bulls trampling towards the bull ring and I think that Jake is the steer who’s role it is to receive them – buffering and calming whenever there is a Brett-inspired blow-up.
Mike: Or is Jake more the bull-fighter?
Jake is removed from the bull ring in his role as the observer "aficionado?", he is removed from boning because he has no nuts, he is above the narrative since he is the narrator
Alex: He’s detached and it’s strange. I would be pissed if I lost my dick.
Dan: I like the Count. He’s a righteous dude, contrary to initial expectations.
Marcus: I need a Count….Kel?
Agreement about Count’s righteousness as demonstrated through purchasing of champagne and generally not giving a fuck.
Wilson: With the climate – is there any correlation between the heat and the sordidness and confusion of Spain and the cold and calm at other points?
Climate is not so big a major narrative device. Though during the fishing scene, the point was made that it was cold and the fishing trip with Jake and Bill was generally calm. The fiesta, on the other hand, was hot.
Marcus: It was odd that the first 30 pages focus so much on Cohn and then his role changes to the point that he is almost a peripheral character. And though the book is about bullfighting, the bullfighting doesn’t come in until much later. There are specific points at which you can trace that Cohn has traversed to a different character.
Dan: Speaking of the two books (of the book), I liked the France part more than I liked Spain.
France v. Spain
France – things were more certain (sense of time, you know who your friends are because you pay them)
Spain – the sense of time is much more confused and friendship seems to be more defined along codes of honor and tradition
Someone: When we think about vacations, we think about going to an unspoiled place. What I get when I read this was the desire for an unspoiled time or at least to revisit this particular time. Hemmingway captures and cultivates the time and place and then wrecks it with yuppies and Americans. Montoya, for example, did not want the American ambassador near bull-fighting guy. Montoya was the keeper and custodian of old school tradition – down with Jake in the beginning, but not by the end.
Brett (with her vagina rampant) taints and destroys things. She breaks two masculine men who do manly things (Cohn – boxing; bull-fighting-guy – bull-fighting) with her haphazard coochie-applications.
Jake’s dick is not explicitly mentioned as being blasted off, but it is, and it informs the entire narrative. If Hemmingway is such a man’s man and a man’s writer, why does he choose a guy without a penis for his first major book? Maybe it is easier to render the pitfalls of masculinity through the eyes of someone who is emasculated.
(GROUP PAUSES TO WATCH DAN STRUGGLE WITH CHILI & CHEESE)
When that guy Mike was drunk, he was a real brutal asshole.
Mike: I liked him, but he was a fucking prick
Wilson: What was the story with that tight guy who sat down with them in Paris and didn’t say anything.
Mike (having just seen Two Towers): He reminded me of Golom.
Marcus (having never owned a 20-sided die): Who’s Golom.
Dan: That’s some Tol-kan shit!
Someone: I am a big fan of all the cigarettes and absinthe.
QUICK ATTEMPT AT SUM-UP:
Sex:
- Women with vaginas breaking men
- Hedonism = bulls
- Bullfighting is a Freudian field day – penetration of bulls, steers & horses, fighting in a big, vaginal ring.
- betrayal & infidelity were an institution of the social circle as it was in Tropic of Capricorn. Cohn couldn’t handle it though (like Miller’s Jewish friend whose mistress he fucks while she sleeps) and freaks out. He goes from boxer to wimp and back to boxer.
Mike: I was pissed at Brett for getting with Cohen.
(Harumph)
Booze:
Marcus: They had a lot of aperitifs, finis, etc. It was disgusting, but it was romanticized in a way and I could learn to love it.
Mike: I liked the book a lot. They ran around and saw cool stuff, but in the end there is no real story. Their experience was all superficial, sensualistic & sensory – getting fucked up, anger, jealously, etc. – with no real spirituality At the beginning of the book, Jake starts out by abortively making out with Brett and that’s how the book ends. Nothing really changed.
Marcus: Well that seems to be the message of the Ecclesiastes quote at the beginning of the book and about the title. It’s the overriding theme of the book. It’s a symptom of the post-WWI era in which the book was written.
Marcus: We don’t like brandy.
Wilson: You don’t like brandy.
DIGRESSION ABOUT ABSINTHE AND RITUAL CHAIRED BY ALEX
Marcus (re: Absinthe): So it’s not like the sugar is dissolving, it’s just (hand wiggle) dissolving.
Hemmingway seemed to be the author of literary meatheads and high-school English classes. We are not literary meatheads and apparently did not go to high school.
ADB: It was just drunk, bangin’, drunk. In Tropic of Capricorn, there was a lot more to discuss and get riled about.
Marcus: In comparison to Tropic of Capricorn, Sun Also Rising seems more simple. It’s good to have that juxtaposition of another writing style.
Mike: Sun Also Rises was modernist/existential, but unlike Pound et. al. made no allusions to stuff that came before. The style is more shallow and cinematic.
Wilson: maybe SAR delivered as well or better than ToC, but with more subtlety. ToC was easier to talk about because it was so heavy-handed and over-the-top.
SAR & ToC similar:
Marcus: Hemmingway was not anti-Semitic.
Wilson (smelling conspiracy theory): Yes he was. Cohn was set apart from the group and I think it was because of what Hemmingway viewed as a certain "Jewishness" which he then wrote into the character.
Marcus: It can be viewed both ways.
Wilson: Oh yeah.
Mike: Except for Bill & Jake, all of the characters are tragic.
Bill is Jake’s boy and loves getting drunk. He is not attracted to Brett – really – but hated Cohn. In the grey world that they inhabited, Bill was one of the good guys. He wouldn’t pile on and kick the others while they were down.
Mike: Let’s talk about the Cohn meltdown.
Dan: Crazy.
Marcus: Crazy
Mike: Crazy…vivid shit.
Marcus: Joe Conaty style meltdown – HOLLA! Write it down.
THE CHILI AGAIN TAKES CENTER STAGE
Dan: It’s not spot on, but it feels like chili.
Marcus: Something I noticed was the at the sleep schedules. People were always passing out, being put to bed, being woken up, etc. at all hours. It contributed to the strange sense of time. The bars and cafes were always open and they got a drink whenever they happened to be conscious.
Between Paris & Spain, Paris’s time schedule was more standard. People would talk about seeing each other the next night while in Spain, it was just a sloppy, writhing mess.
Mike: They are all in their mid-thirties, how do they drink so much at their age? I can barely do what we do
at Book Club.Marcus: Jenny now tells me that when I get really drunk, I’m not just drunk, I’m Book Club Drunk. It’s at once troubling and rewarding.
Dan: It’s smoother without the whiskey.
Mike: Yeah – Wilson’s not yet in tears.
(Mike pats Wilson’s shoulder and smiles, Wilson smiles while trying to blink back tears)
Mike distracts group with commercials, ADB cunningly ties Lincoln from commercial back to page 121 (new edition) on which Bill says that the Civil War was faggot-driven and that Abraham Lincoln was hammering Grant. We then note that Hemmingway takes a crack at ex-pat writers and journalists on page 120 and we then digress about Mencken whereupon Wilson relates a story about his teacher telling him to read a Mencken book and how he did not. The group is at a loss for what to say.
BUSINESS ITEMS:
Five choices from Mike –
The Good Soldier
The Things they Carried
In the Hands of Dante – crime
Steppenwolf
Master and Margarita
Master and Margarita approved by received enthusiastically
Tentative meeting place: KGB or Pravda
Time: mid-January around 14-17
Motion to create supplementary reading list made and carried