Allow me to digress for a moment. I'm learning how to throw a rugby ball along half the length of a soccer field. It's all about technique, right? Sometimes, we men resort to brute force and end up with a slight twinge in the tendon directly below the right elbow. I'm typing this with my left hand. Looks quite amusing. Hurts like - well, like a laceration on tender tissue.
Still digressing - as an exercise in exploring different dance forms, I got a bunch of my salsa students to go out lounge-hopping. We ended up not dancing anywhere and I got home not in the least bit wondering why I stopped clubbing when I did. It's pointless. And a waste of time.
Mini rant over. This is where you should have started reading:
For the past few weeks, I've been struggling with a book. Titled, 'Intellectuals,' the book scrutinizes the lives of some of the most brilliant literary minds of the past few centuries. In the words of the author (Paul Johnson), "This book is an examination of the moral and judgmental credentials of certain leading intellectuals to give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs." Men I have admired at some point in my life. Men who wrote stories, books, compounded intellectualism which changed the landscape of literature.
Earnest Hemingway's books are easy to read. He worked at his craft, perfecting the art of communicating in simple English and creating a new way of writing that has shaped much of current fiction. His attitude to his wives was appalling and in general, his life is a good example of how not to live. Apart from his literary brilliance, the guy had chutzpah. A portion from the book describes his (sometimes amusing) tendency to accidentally hurt himself:
"As a result and also because of the awkward shape of his big body, Hemingway was prone to accidents all his life. The list of them is dauntingly long. As a child, he fell with a stick in his mouth and gouged his tonsils; caught a fish hook in his back; sustained injuries at football and boxing. The year 1918 saw him blown up in the war and smash his fist through a glass showcase. Two years later, he cut his feet walking on broken glass and started internal bleeding by falling on a boat-cleat. He burned himself badly smashing up a water heater (1922), tore a foot ligament (1925) and had the pupil of his good eye cut by his son (1929).
In Spring 1928 came the first of his major drinking accidents when, returning home, he mistook the skylight cord for the lavatory chain and pulled the whole heavy glass structure down on his head, sustaining concussion and needing nine stitches. He tore his groin muscle, damaged an index finger with a punch bag, was hurt by a bolting horse and broke his arm in a car crash (1930), shot himself in the leg while trying to gaff a shark (1935), broke his big toe kicking a locked gate, smashed his foot through a mirror and damaged the pupil of his bad eye (1938) and got two more concussions in 1944, by driving his car into a water tank during a blackout and jumping off a motorcylce into a ditch. In 1945, he insisted on taking over from the driver to take Mary (one of his wives) to the airport, skidded and hit a bank of earth, breaking three ribs and a knee and denting his forehead (Mary went through the windscreen). In 1949, he was badly clawed playing with a lion. In 1950, he fell on his boat, badly gashing his head and leg, severing an artery and concussing himself for the fifth time. In 1953, he sprained his shoulder falling out of his car and that winter, there was a series of accidents in Africa: bad burns while drunkenly trying to put out a bush fire and two plane accidents, which produced yet another concussion, a fractured skull, two cracked spinal discs, internal injuries, a ruptured liver, spleen and kidneys, burns, a dislocated shoulder and arm and paralyzed sphincter muscles. The accidents, which usually followed drinking, continued almost to his death.
On July 2, 1961, after various unsuccessful treatments for depression and paranoia, he got hold of his best English double-barrelled shotgun, put two cannisters in it and blew away his entire cranial vault."
