A Farewell to the Last Good Country. Also The Battler

I kind of got hit in the gut with the idea that I don't expect people to come through for me. I made plans to go see someone, and we did, but the past few days I wasn't REALLY expecting anything to come of it. That's a huge problem. That's ridiculous! What's my deal? Man that sucks.

It'll seem less earth shattering after I get some rest, but argh, I kinda suck right this second.

Finished "A Farewell to Arms" this morning. It's got a really sad ending that hits close to home. I heard that a lot of Hemingway's stuff could be described as "his life but with this change..."

I also understand that this was his first big novel, what put Hemingway on the map at 30, so I reckon this is the what if he lost his first wife at the time he was most in love with her.

Then again, the portrayal of their relationship is about the same as that of Nick Adams and his sister in the short story "The Last Good Country", so that's kind of weird. Maybe that's why Hemingway never published that story (or finished it for that matter) until it was put out posthumously.

Reading through the collected Nick Adams stories I finally came across that OTHER Hemingway story that I'd read before, the second one after The Old Man and the Sea (which I'll be re-reading soon, bringing things full circle) the one I read in my modernisms class back in the day. Turns out it's the short story "The Battler" about Nick getting thrown off a train and meeting up with a crazy old boxer. Well, that's what happens, not so much what it's about.

I'm hesitating as far as prescribing a meaning to the piece, I'm not sure the author had any meaning in mind when he came up with it. It'd be one thing if the author was all "I'd like my audience to make up their own mind about the piece" or even just a "yeah, there's a meaning" without going into details, but Hemingway is more of a "well, that's life" kind of guy.

Kind of like Harvey Pekar, now that I think about it.

Anyways, a weird friendly guy who lives at my workplace gave me a Reece's Peanut butter cup bar (cup bar? is that right?) at like 3:30am. That was pretty cool.

Also, scandalous, got a fortune cookie over the weekend: romance is about to blossom.

And now that that's recorded, I can trash the fortune.