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A Sort of a Haze
tony [decorative spacer] April 08, 2006 [decorative spacer] 2:16 PM

Perhaps my new favorite thing in the world is this audio recording I discovered of Ernest Hemingway descibing the plot of a book, "In Harry's Bar in Venice" (which, to my knowledge, he never got around to writing). Besides Hemingway's awkwardly stilted delivery (not to mention his over-emphasized way of saying "Cipriani"), it includes such memorable lines as:

Harry's Bar is a small place, but it is, in effect, a microcosm of all of that great and beautiful city which has been so well described by those writers, Ruskin, Sinclair Lewis, Byron, and others.
Or, perhaps my favorite:
God himself is absent for a time, probably on his own business, but he returns to Tornicello to bring happiness to these star-crossed lovers.
Truly some of the best 8 minutes of audio I've heard in my life.


(I should mention that there's apparently an entire Salon.com Audio page, which I was unaware of, that has many other clips posted more recently than 2001.)

Comments:
Hemingway was probably a bit drunk when he recorded this, but I'm also pretty sure it was recorded sometime after his two airplane crashes in 1954. The second crash left him with a fractured skull that fucked his speech up and made him stop writing for several years. (A recording of his Nobel Prize speech from around the same time has the same stilted delivery.)

Posted by len at April 12, 2006 3:17 PM

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