Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for September 03, 2014

We don’t know how to stop them?

I confess I had to look this title up; it’s an Ernest Hemingway work, and considered by many today to be his best work due to its unconventional writing style for its day. That right there should make the comic’s point clear, but basically its saying that there are times when its good to be grammatically perfect, and there are times when its too suppressive for one’s intent behind writing it. And anyway, readers who spend their time looking at any and all grammatical flaws in a work, deliberate or otherwise, are missing the point, which is, in the end, more important.

Either that, or Zach just doesn’t like Hemingway’s writing. It’s not for everyone, I suppose.

Sometimes there’s artistic justification, like in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” I have a harder time justifying William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!”

Good thing he’s not reading anything by Cormac McCarthy!

Eventually enough years pass so the themes in books become archaic and can’t be read without effort and background knowledge. ULYSSES is an extreme example of that. I took a class to learn what it’s about, and try to read it once a year..You have to go with the flow in reading Faulkner. I read all of his books and stories. The early ones are best – before he seemed to parody himself. Try reading THE HAMLET, if nothing else..Hemingway himself was a better story than his novels. His short stories are superior to his longer works, in my opinion, not as forced. A book that I just read after having it for years is THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS (Gertrude Stein). Stein was proto-Hemingway-esque..Sherwood Anderson, Elmer Rice, Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, the Algonquin Round Table writers, Steinbeck … I looked forward to checking them out from libraries when I got old and had time. And now — they are usually not there in entirety, no room for dusty stuff such as that. And real walk-in bookstores are disappearing. Why oh why in my lifetime?.I feel so old as I see the work of twentieth century writers, Nobel Prize winners even, forgotten and not comprehended. Even worse, they are relegated to esoteric college courses and made a forced chore to read. They used to LIVE, they used to express the spirit of generations. Thomas Wolfe, John O’Hara, Cheever, even Updike and Bellow crumbling into the past. I leave many unmentioned..Yet, I have a book called THE THESAURUS OF BOOK DIGESTS, published in the 1950s, that makes me feel far worse. Writings from hundreds of years past exist that sound so interesting – foreign-language (to me) works; philosophical treatises; Medieval plays; Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Arab poetry; ethnic sagas and histories; ancient Roman and Greek writings. . I have heard of them too late and will never meet them. I read about them, for instance, in A LIFETIME’S READING: The World’s 500 Greatest Books (Philip Ward) and wonder how my life would have been different had I known. I wish I could put my hands on the bindings and ABSORB them..Maybe in some future era they will be translated into wave patterns and squirted into minds.

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr has sentences that run on for several pages.

Problem is, too many of the people who write ungramatically only THINK they’re being as clever as Hemingway, instead of just morons.

After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.