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Marie P.'s avatar

Guilty. I too avoided Hemingway for the reasons you list here. And yes, that is an unfortunate pre-judgement, but as you say, the myth became so outsized it dampened my interest.

our article is sending me to the library tomorrow. Thank you.

And talk about clear sentences that allow me to drop into my imagination, I find your writing does this as well, Fred. Your inner Hemingway is showing!

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Victoria's avatar

I hear you, loud and clear. I had to get over the personalities and reputations of all artists years ago in order to go back and appreciate the work! My mother, who was a practicing artist, said that most great artists are driven by their art, and don't care about anyone or anyone else. They can also practice a persona in public to keep the riffraff away!

Here's another example of masterful use of words in forming music for mind pictures, but it's the chosen subject that is distasteful in this case: "Lolita" by Nabokov (Taurus-Virgo-Aries: https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Nabokov,_Vladimir). And Nabokov wasn't born to English! For me, it is the most beautifully written - taken artfully formed sentence by artfully formed sentence - book in the English language about a most distasteful subject, from the POV of a most distasteful human.

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