Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Hemingway is a thief

Reading books has made the best of me feel like I am the worst.
I wish that I had written The Old Man & the Sea before Hemingway.
Even if I can’t get it published first because my name isn’t the name of a celebrity or because I don’t have the Warhol stamp of Charles Scribner Jr. at least, after Hemingway printed his copy in 1952, I can sue his brains out of his skull, literally. I would like to sue him and instead of money I would like to have, at gunpoint, his brains sucked out of his skull like the Egyptians used to do (and still do, at least I think they still do it. Well, why would they ever stop?). The civil trial should be quick & easy or quicker & easier if he settles out of the courtroom, which he’d probably do just to get out the headlines.
As long as I am writing the Old Man & the Sea before Hemingway, I should also write all of the Nick Adams stories before him, except the ones that make Nick Adams seem mysteriously gay. I would let Hemingway write those ones so that he gets the heat for creating a homosexualized Brawny man, even though I know in my heart that Nick Adams, even if I create him first, will always drink himself to sleep next to his we’re-only-friends, boy friend in a small tent next to the river, where earlier that day they had erected fishing poles and wagged their lines in a ballet with nature. Nick Adams is only a little gay, not slightly gay as Hemingway writes, at least that’s the distinction I make in court, under the accusation of copyright infringement, I sue Hemingway again, this time for the legal rights to anything he ever writes in the future that I might not be able to write before him because of his newly altered history.
I would also like to have written that one about abortion except in the original––my version––the young couple would argue during their vacation in the Swiss Alps about an unspecific operation that most obviously to the keen reader is actually the necessary surgical removal and careful culinary preparation of the women’s yet-to-be-birthed placenta for a ritual dinner to be presented to the father.
Later, when I finally reveal that Hemingway once again has stolen a story from me, I not only sue him for plagiarizing but also perverting my story of a beautiful tradition into such a morbidly boring, political topic like abortion. How vulgar to write about abortion when there was such a great opportunity to paint a colorful social commentary of the unfair stigma that has been nailed into the act of afterbirth consumption like Christ to the Cross.
After all of this, Hemingway is still a role model of mine, but I would rather have it be the other way around. I think if I write all his books before him, then he will only be left to realize what an impact I am having on his writing on an unconscious level.
I won’t acknowledge his presence though. Why should a writer of my importance answer his annoying letters? He never answered mine.

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