My Nature Walk with Patrick Hemingway

The day was raining but I didn't wear a raincoat. I figured the second son of Ernest Hemingway might not care about the weather and so I got very wet. Patrick wore a raincoat. The group was taking a river walk along the Des Plains River outside of Oak Park. The Des Plaines river had seen better days, but there was some thinking that Patrick would enjoy this and so I went along with out group that included a couple of journalists, park rangers, a few scholars, and myself.

Patrick was a small man with a big smile in a yellow slicker. Not the type of man you would expect who had run a Safari company in Africa and been on many many big game hunts. Some of the hunts were with his father of course. But this was a different time and we were walking through foliage with the rain pattering on the leaves as the Forest Service Rangers explained different plants and restoration plans. Several times Patrick stopped them to ask questions, but then we just plunged on down toward the river. The weather had given us a break and it wasn't cold for May in Chicago.

The man who walked ahead of me was the second son of Ernest Hemingway, born to Pauline Pfeiffer and led a life befitting the son of  Ernest. After running his safari company he worked for the United Nations for a while, had a farm in Africa where he lived for twenty five years. After his father died, he edited True At First Light and oversaw publication of his father's book and republished A Moveable Feast with some sections restored that had been omitted when Mary Hemingway edited the manuscript. He taught wildlife conservation in Tanzania and then returned to Idaho where he oversaw the literary estate of his father.

I knew none of this as I followed the small man down to the river. We reached the river and the smell of muck and decay cast a pall on our small party. The Des Plaines was mud brown and corrugated with rain drops. Trash had collected in the low parts along with logs and a ten gallon drum. The rangers talked about the cleanup effort that was underway and of course one could not help think back to a young Ernest Hemingway fishing the Des Plains in a time when the river had seen better days. But now of course there was only our small group in a city forest preserve down by a dirty river.

The rain turned heavy on the trees around us, drizzling down. One of the scholars held an umbrella over Patrick while the rangers rambled on. Patrick coughed several times and someone said we should head back.  The unsaid thought of course was that no one wanted the son of Ernest Hemingway to get sick on their watch. But he did me one favor and asked how the writing was in the attic and motioned to the journalist with his camera. It is there I had my picture taken with Patrick, a young writer who had tagged along to a much bigger life, in a much bigger time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Twain Brings on my Kindle Epiphany

I mean I didn't physically buy it. Not yet. But I get it. I understand why someone would own this flat rectangle for reading. It is not that it is more convenient to carry around and that you don't have to lug books although that is attractive. Or that it holds a thousand books. That's cool too. Or that you can whip it out anywhere and read it for a few moments then flip it off and slip it back in your purse or briefcase. What got me finally to understand the appeal of this technology is Mark Twain's Autobiography.

Alright. I am out of books to read. For a writer, death. I need to find something after Franzen's brick and the dog narrator book. So I want to read Twain's Autobiography. Perfect. So I trudge around to some bookstores. Nope. Sorry we have them here on reserve for other people. How about letting me buy one of those? Nope. Sorry. Huh. So I end up at the coffee shop with nothing to read because stupidly I forgot to bring any kind of reading material. Burn through the NY Times and there is...what? So I started thinking. Man I would do anything to read that biography, hell I would even read it online.

But here is the real epiphany. I wouldnt' have to trudge to a bookstore and have another salesperson tell me they don't have the book but I could order it. No. I don't want to order the book. I want it NOW. I want to read the book right now! So sorry. Shite! So I sit here in the coffee shop and yes I would gladly have a Kindle right now to download Twain and starting reading. I don't care about the texture, the cool photos, the cover with Twain looking like he is hung over...I just want to read the book.

So there is my Kindle epiphany. Ultimately convenience trumps all. If you can sit in a corner and zap in a book well it is better than driving into some strip mall and getting bombarded by all those books you don't want to only find they don't have the book you do want. I have even considered taking the train to the city to buy the book from a bookstore I know has it. So that journey would be hours and expensive and make me question my sanity for the thousandth time. Or, I could just download the book and like the ad says start reading in seconds. Hmmm...Maybe I should buy one. You think?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

A Book By a Dog

Well I just read The Art of Racing in the Rain. There are two things I would point to after reading this book with a dog narrator: one, there is value to the kindle, and two, always read the first few pages. Alright. The whole Kindle revolution brings up the same advantages of the IPOD. You don't have to buy the whole CD. Or you don't have plunk down eighteen dollars to read a book by a dog. It is not that The Art of Racing in the Rain was bad, it is just that by choosing to have the dog narrate we are limited to what he can interpret. He is a dog after all.

And saying that you have to wonder what the author was after. Well, why not have the dog narrate the book? It is new. It is different. And the dog was very Zen. He thought of the afterlife and then spoke to us from the afterlife and then he came back as a...well, I won't tell you. Needless to say the authors work was cut out for him when he made this decision. I will tell it form the perspective of a dog...now how can I get that dog into all the scenes?

Well  he doesn't. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I used a thirteen year old I had to get in all the scenes. In courtroom scenes I became creative and used other people, newspaper articles, literally having my narrator peeking in keyholes. The problem with any first person narration is that you are stuck in the person (or the dog in this case) head and everything has to filter through the canine brain before it reaches ours. Now this dog got a lot of his information from the television, from his master, from hearing, from a Zen knowledge of the Universe and racing (auto racing).

There were a few scenes where the dog just claimed knowledge and we went with it. Fine. A literary first person can do this. Prior knowledge. Well, prior dog knowledge. Of course the rubber meets the road when the dog has to interpret sex scenes. Our dog did this by well, comparing human sex to dog sex with some knowledge of anatomy and then again, we just went with it. There were courtroom scenes as well our canine friend was able to give us the nuts and bolts declaring more than once humans just think dogs don't have a clue, but they do.

By the books end our dog narrator moved on to the great dog pound in the sky. I must admit after finishing the book I didn't look at my golden retriever the same. I stared into his brown eyes and said to him: do you really know what is going on? To which he stared back and essentially said: Woof! Now like the dog narrator he might be hiding knowledge from the oblivious human. I will say that I kicked him out of the bedroom.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January