When he was trying.

DocNoodle

ian spiegelman

dcbadger

I don't think it's particularly surprising.

Frank O'Hara worked full-time at MOMA. Philip Larkin worked full-time as a librarian. Dana Gioia was a big-shot at General Foods for a long time.

(It's when you get to the confessional poets that things get real dicey employment-wise. Most of them were too fuckin' crazy to hold down a real job.)

About Harvard. Elizabeth Bishop really, really hated teaching there, but did so at the end of her life for the $$ and benefits. She didn't like the stuffiness or the meetings.

About Stevens. There's not much to know about his life. His marriage was disappointing in the conventional ways. He was mildly bigoted in the conventional ways.

Veterinarians routinely read aloud from Stevens biographies when they need to put very large animals to sleep.

Hamud Ibn Hamud

belltolls

I've never had strong feelings about Wallace Stevens as a person (Not that I know all that much about him.). I do remember being shocked as a kid to read an article that said he'd turned down a prestigious Harvard lecture fellowship because he was afraid of jeopardizing his position as an insurance company executive.

Years later, I understand why a poet might want to keep his relatively lucrative day job.

Still, too bad he couldn't work something out.

Seeräuber Jenny

That's fascinating.

I knew William Blake disguised himself as a lamb and roamed the meadows Sussex in order gain the first-hand experience he needed for writing Songs of Innocence, but I never read about Dickinson's delirious tenure as a gun.

I think this all just goes to show that the great writers of yesteryear were far more honest and resourceful than today's puling Ivory-Tower know-nothings who sit on their fat white asses in Berkelely or Sag Harbor and write limp-wristed tone poems about things they can only imagine.

Hamud Ibn Hamud

So you can keep up with the hipsters, these days the preferred English translation of that work's title is In Search of Lost Time.

The line from the Shakespeare sonnet used by the first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is considered too passive. I'm not sure, but I don't think Proust was crazy about it either.

Seeräuber Jenny

SheWalkedWithAZombie

Dickdogfood

belltolls

"It's likely hard for people to understand there was a time when writers actually went out and did things before they wrote about them."

Flaubert was of course exemplary in this regard.

It wasn't easy, mind you, for a fat, prematurely balding epileptic man to pass himself off as a beautiful and dainty convent-educated provincial lass in order to marry a boorish but good-hearted officier de santé.

But Flaubert's devotion to his craft was such that he excelled at this masquerade, not only marrying a country doctor, but consummating the marriage and somehow from such congress became pregnant and successfully gave birth to a daughter.

Like all great writers, Flaubert disdained the dilettantish reveries worshipped by middle-brows as "imagination." Nothing less than hands-on flesh-and-blood personal experience would ever inform his work. And so Flaubert persisted in his lifeless provincial marriage with the dullard physician.

But gradually Flaubert, still magnificent in faultless imposture, grew restless and embarked on a number of doomed affairs with unavailable men, borrowing money lavishly for the gowns and bagatelles needed for nurturing and maintaining an inconstant lover's fancy.

Flaubert's ingenious ruse would likely have continued until his "fun money" ran out, had not one of Flaubert's overbearing lovers discovered that Flaubert had in fact an extraordinarly large and exquisitely functional penis.

With only minutes to spare, Flaubert managed to escape the crowd of vengeful philistines who ransacked the home he shared with his husband and daughter. Fully assuming his identity as a man, Flaubert made his way to his mother's home in Croisset where, armed with ample and highly vivid first-hand factual experience, he spent the next five years writing Madame Bovary.

Hamud Ibn Hamud

I read that as Frey Fest. We should start one.

miss_msry

Shit, it's Hemingway's fault I even know about the Murpheys.

For that alone he deserved the shotgun up the mouth.

miss_msry

@belltolls: Much obliged!

GraniteInMyVeins

Furious George

belltolls

belltolls

It is worth looking up, Granite. The summary doesn't do the scene justice.If you can imagine, you'll find it in the chapter "A Matter of Measurements."

minou

minou

belltolls

ian spiegelman

In fact, you're probably right. On those increasingly predictable midafternoon occasions when I've had to lift a forlorn, crying figure off the patio bricks, worry the oversized soft-lead pencil from her white-knuckled grip, and ease her into a warm, scented bath with her favorite Cat Stevens album playing softly in the background, all the while drying her tears of frustration with my fashionably untucked shirttail -- you're right, it's probably the Jumble(tm) itself that is the actual recipient of my ministrations as often as one-eighth of the time. I suppose I'd been overlooking that fact until you pointed it out just now. My bad.

skahammer

famousauthor

Hez

Not that I judge, at all. I just think you'd enjoy it more if you mixed in some soda and ice rather than nipping straight from the bottle when you think I'm not looking. As always, it's your well-being I have uppermost in my mind.

skahammer

Hez

You're forgiven, though, as long as you keep doling out those lusty hugs. ::hint::

skahammer

Hez

SnarkTwain

skahammer

skahammer

Hez

mark duffy

Dickdogfood

belltolls

GraniteInMyVeins

belltolls

minou

minou

rojac

belltolls

One of my all-time favorites:

[www.cscs.umich.edu]

Seeräuber Jenny

And when Wallace came to he had a new idea of order at Key West.

Seeräuber Jenny

belltolls

Hemingway boasted(in a letter to Sara Murphy)that, in a boxing match at his home in Key West, he had knocked Wallace Stevens down quite handily: "... for statistics sake Mr. Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs and ... when he hits the ground it is highly spectaculous."

Also, Stevens was 20 years older than Hemingway.

minou

mydeadgayson

belltolls

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belltolls

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