On October 27, ironically my mother’s birthday, I went to see the Nick Adams Stories with an all-star cast at the SF Symphony’s Davies Hall: Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Casey Affleck, Bruce Willis, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Rita Wilson (maybe that’s half a star), Joachim Phoenix, Danny Devito, Billy Crystal and Jack Nicholson playing old Papa himself. All were performing in a play written by a friend of Hemingway’s – A.E. Hotchner, for a benefit for Paul Newman’s charity. The money raised went to support the Painted Turtle – the West coast version of the Hole in the Wall Gang in Connecticut; both provide support and a place to find friendship for children living with diseases and life-long disabilities.
In the wake of Paul Newman’s death, the performances seemed to carry an additional weight. The actors read from script books, but occasionally didn’t need them at all. The symphony sometimes drowned out their voices, which was a shame, and generally detracted from the performances instead of adding the emotional depth I think that they were meant to offer. Overall, a good night with some stellar performances and some so-so acting.
I also wasn’t sure that I left with the charitable feelings that the night meant to protract from me. As I sat in the dark, watching the children led onto the stage at the end of the play, listening to Bonnie Raitt singing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”, I felt manipulated. And I wondered if pity was really the motivator of all charity, when it should be something else. I thought about Leslie Butt’s critique of the “suffering stranger” as a rhetorical device and humanitarianism as culturally constructed. Yet, I still paid my $40 and felt good about it, even if it only pays for one week out of 52 and doesn’t fix any of the structural reasons that these children need help in the first place.
What I did leave the event with, however, were some overall thoughts on Hemingway, writing and death. Basically, I rediscovered what it means to be human. I had forgotten how powerful Hemingway’s simple prose could be. No fancy tricks, no turning books upside down, no footnotes, no clever use of punctuation – just the bare bones human experience to turn around in your fingers like a dollar-coin, pondering what you can do with it.
Hemingway’s character, Nick Adams, is the complete symbol of America. He’s selfish, ego-centric, searching, and alone. He claims near the beginning of the play that he doesn’t love anyone at all. Sometimes, he seems incapable of feeling anything at all. He’s the center spoke in the wheel of activity around him; he records, observes, participates in an off-handed way, but never seems quite fully present. He’s young and brash and naive and foolish and brave all at once.
Nick Adams, for all purposes, is Hemingway – not entirely a fictional character. I’m writing a memoir right now, and I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time wondering how to ’structure’ my own life inot discreet, narrateable tales. The Nick Adams Stories gave me a clue.
The play – and the stories – are all about the same things: fear, loneliness and death.
Hemingway seemed almost obsessed with the truth versus social lies, masculinity in the form of violence or aggression (note all the war and bull-fighting stories), femininity and the ways in which women ruin or poison men’s lives (Hemingway hated his controlling mother, whom he blamed for his father’s suicide), and what it meant to be brave or a coward in the face of life – and by extension, death itself.
Hemingway’s stories reveal a man that desires to ‘be somebody’. That desire drives him out of his home in small-town Illinois and around the world, until he finds himself smack in the middle of WWI as an ambulance driver in Italy. Once he’s on the road, however, he discovers that loneliness and fear follow him wherever he travels. Nick Adams tells us that once loneliness and fear start, they never stop.
In the end, Hemingway discovers that he was always running AWAY from something, but never TOWARD anything. What he was running from was his ambivalent relationship to his father, whom Hemingway thought was a coward for killing himself with a shotgun. Hemingway, throughout his life and his stories, tries to face death head on, to be unafraid in the face of it.
I wonder if, just before he pulled the trigger of the shotgun, Hemingway had his last revelation about suicide and death. It’s not exactly cowardice to pull that trigger, and the false bravado that Hemingway tried to master his entire life was not exactly bravery or courage. In the end, Hemingway ran toward death – like his father before him – and who among us can judge him?
The last line in the play sums everything up for me:
“You cannot carry the wind, the wind carries you.”
As I write my path through my past, I’ll try to keep the wind at my back, instead of bracing myself against it.

Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair Pics vs. Pictures of Underage Models: What’s the diff?
30 04 2008[Is this also a 'sick' or 'sexual' photo? I suppose it's what we make of it. You could see a loving father/daughter or incest. I, personally, see a picture of two beautiful people who happen to be related.]
The backlash against Miley’s pictures in Vanity Fair should have been timed with a stopwatch. The reaction would have been fast, maybe even a world-reactionary record (where the ‘world’ is mostly confined to the United States, natch). The problem? People seem to be outraged that a 15-year-old girl is draped in a sheet, looking all ‘post-coital’.
Um. Yeah.
It is definitely disturbing, but hasn’t anyone been paying attention for the past 30 years or so? Fashion models are often naked, and barely 18. Other models, under 18, are scantily clad ALL THE TIME in fashion ads. But, maybe ‘fashion’ gets a pass. I’ve always been a little suspicious of the barely legal girls, looking dead sexy, trying to sell me a bra, or jeans, or whatever. You rarely see, however, any real backlash against them. Perhaps because they aren’t on the Disney channel, hardly anyone thinks of them as ‘role models’, and none of them are easily recognized except a few big names. And anyway, can you imagine your daughter worshiping Kate Moss as a role model? What would the Kate Moss merchandise look like? A small pile of cocaine, a meth-ed out boyfriend, and a fashionable bag and hat to match?
These photos are beautiful, no matter what you think they mean. Meaning is applied by the viewer. You’d have to ask Leibovitz about the intent. And who knows? Better yet, who cares?
Why is this ad any less disturbing? To some – especially in fashion – it was a direct strike at what the media and marketing/PR companies promote to us as ‘beauty’. This women is naked, but she isn’t half as sexualized as Miley.
How young do you think the girl in the middle of this ad is? Does it matter if she is actually 23, but looks 16? Isn’t it the looking 16 that the advertisers are really after?
Now, I know that most people who have been calling Miley a whore will also think these girls are whores, too. And, because of my own picture above, I’m probably in the same bag. But before we cast stones at Miley, shouldn’t we analyze the culture in which she exists? Shouldn’t we look at what we take to be normal in 2008 and ask some questions? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves some hard truths?
Sex sells. Until it doesn’t, this is just going to be ‘business as usual’. As a feminist, I waffle about my own sexuality, wearing bikinis, and trying to look good all the time. But, then I think, why not? Why can’t a woman be beautiful, celebrate it, and also be savvy or smart about how she uses it? Certainly, women in Rome wouldn’t have blinked at this picture, if they had had pictures back then. And, Greeks and Romans did provide the model for all the freedoms we so passionately support.
Maybe this is just all to do with our Puritan ancestry. We just can’t escape from our own prudery. And the irony is that prudery leads to more underground perversion. The more you make sex into a big deal, the bigger problem you will have. Which is great for the advertisers and anyone selling us anything. It’s a vicious cycle, and I can’t see it disappearing anytime soon.
These are my two cents. But, then again, what do I know? I’m just a cultural anthropologist trying to make sense of how we see China. And that’s a-whole-nother can of worms.
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