samoyeddogs

“-Jet taking off and  nobody know where it going?  Boss, you taking ghetto man for idiot again?

-Mister, me say nobody duh know.  Not even the commissioner know.  He don’t even know that the Singer plan to fly out.

-Is a top secret?

-More secret than the colour of the queen panty.”

That’s the funniest line in Marlon James’ nearly 700 page epic “A Brief History of Seven Killings”.  In fact it has the distinction of being the only somewhat humourous line in the book which is populated by a very large cast of violent, murderous, corrupt human beings.  Find out more than you would probably ever want to know about Jamaican gangs.  Marlon James did.  He, in his own estimation, just used his imagination. It’s very good.

“In his Facebook post, James said that being famous hasn’t made him feel any safer in Minnesota.

“I have a big global voice, but a small local one, because I don’t want to be a target, and resent that in 2017, that’s still the only choice I get to have. … I go out of my way to avoid police, because I don’t know how to physically act around them. Do I hold my hands in the air and get shot?  Do I kneel and get shot? Do I reach for my ID and get shot?

“Do I say I’m an English teacher and get shot? Do I tell them everything I am about to do, and get shot? Do I assume that seven of them will still feel threatened by one of me, and get shot? Do I simply stand and be big black guy and get shot? Do I fold my arms and squeeze myself into smaller and get shot? Do I be a smartass and get shot? Do I leave my iPhone on a clip of me on Seth Meyers, so I can play it and say, see, that’s me. I’m one of the approved black guys. And still get shot?”

“… You will never know how it feels to realize that it doesn’t matter how many magazine articles I get, or which state names a day after me. Tomorrow when I get on my bike, I am big black guy, who might be shot before the day ends, because my very size will make a cop feel threatened. Or if I’m a woman, my very mouth. And a jury of white people, and people of colour sold on white supremacy will acquit him. And even me hoping for hipster points on my fixed wheel bike, is countered by them thinking I probably stole the bike.”

Quoted in the Washington Post June 2017 in an article by Susan Hogan

Marlon James is a big man.  He grew up in Jamaica, in Kingston.  I sorta figured that.  I didn’t know his mother was a cop and his father a lawyer and that he’s “gay” until a few days ago.  That’s the word he uses so I’m all right with it.  I just finished the book.

I didn’t have the guts to get in line to have “A Brief History of Seven Killings” signed by the author at the Granville Island Hotel these scant couple of years ago during the “Vancouver Writers Fest”.  “Don’t hurt me, Marlon.  Would you, ah, mind autographing or signing your, um, book?  Like, ah, before I faint?”

So I put my consort up to it.  Nursing my drink I was chatting with John Vaillant who happened by, hunkered down, and we reminisced about “Trivento Private Reserve Malbec” from my great days of wine consulting.  He was going on at the festival a bit later, same as Marlon.  We’d met before and I mentioned I’d reviewed his book “The Jaguar’s Children” for “Postmedia”.

“I never read my reviews,” he said.

“Totally understand,” I said.

And this is what Marlon James wrote on the title page of “A Brief History…” that fine early evening.  “To Cathy!  “If it no go so, it go near it” – Jamaican proverb.”  The date was October 27, 2015.

I wish I was back there in 2015 and had the opportunity again.  I’d know what to do.  “Marlon. Hombre.  Where you get that scar, man?  That is hot.”

samoyeddogs..

Image crop from “Signature”.

Literary Free Store.  Ace the test with this. There’s still something that tears at you about Ernest Hemingway, right?  Who was he?  How did he do it?  How did he write and publish and become so famous, a literary celebrity, and impress you not because you had to read “The Old Man And The Sea” in grade school, but because of just two stories?

“Soldiers Home” and “The Gambler, The Nun and The Radio”.  These stories stay with you.  They’re priceless.  And I wish I’d written them myself. Yeah, for sure.  Maybe I could be famous then. They’re the only reason I have left for still being interested in Ernest Hemingway.

A billion books have been written about “Papa”, but there haven’t been too many movies.  

None of his novels really impressed me.  Not really.  Now that you ask.  “Islands In The Stream” was okay. Maybe that’s because I got it as a Christmas present.  It was kind of cobbled together ten years after the guy who wrote it knelt down one morning in the front hallway of his house in Ketchum, Idaho.

Ernest Hemingway placed the butt of a double-barrelled shotgun on the floor and the other end against his forehead, reached down with his right hand and tripped the trigger and left a big mess for other people to clean up.

And  how’s this for the opening of a novel published in 1926, back when there was no internet?

“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton University.  Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”

That first couple of sentences is an impact statement for the literary crowd who reads books in 1926 and likes the sound of “The Sun Also Rises”.  Sort of biblical and it’s set in Pamplona, Spain.  Published as “Fiesta” in England, which was pretty lame.

“A Farewell To Arms”?  Good quips like “only seven thousand died of it in the army”, but a lot of it too something or other.

“To Have And Have Not”.  Published 1937.  “You know how it is there in the early morning in Havana…”  The novel has some merit as a cartoon.  It’s a Hemingway novel.

Same with “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.  It tolls for thee, Ernie.  But even more a bit too something or other although it sold like a bomb.

“Across The River And Into The Trees”?  No one would have bought it or read it if it wasn’t by Ernest Hemingway.  It’s a strange novel.  The esteemed author is doing as much as he can with pretty well nothing.  Colonel Cantwell.  There’s a reason that’s the guy’s name.

“The Garden Of Eden”.  I know nothing about this super-posthumous pastiche, there being no interest.

But we’re talking about Hemingway the movie.  “Papa Hemingway In Cuba”.  The question is why is this guy the subject of the picture?  What is “Papa” doing at the Finca Vigia?  Hacking at an old Remington and getting nothing out of it after winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954?  Que?

Papa isn’t even seen to be working on one of his best books, “A Moveable Feast”, published from a complete manuscript not long after he blew himself up.  He was certainly working on it in the late 50s at the Finca in Cuba.

This movie could have been much better.  That seems to be the consensus.  Adrian Sparks is the spitting image of old Hemingstein.  But although Minka Kelly tries hard she just doesn’t strike you as Mary Hemingway.  Too modern.

Not the sort of semi-matronly middle-aged refined looking woman Hemingway met in London, England during WWII and shared the rest of his life with after three previous marriages.  This version of Mary Hemingway just doesn’t seem to come across as the one.

The Finca looks finking perfect.  Hemingway’s real home in Cuba is retained as a museum by the Cuban government.  It’s a darn good reason for vacationing in Cuba, if you need a reason.  Put it on your itinerary.  Apparently, everything has been left pretty well as it was.

When you fly in tell them you want to go to the “Finca Vigia”.  Tell them we sent you.  They’ll know what you’re talking about. The sets in “Papa” are good.

The problem with the movie is Hemingway is just some sort of moody prick who’s accomplished things we just aren’t told anything about.  We’re supposed to know who he is and go from there.  What are we supposed to feel?  Movies are about feeling.  And there’s very little.

One and a half diamonds on the four diamond movie rating system.  ♦◊

Moving on.  Next we explain who Yosemite Sam was.  Have a beautiful evening…