if I had $300,000,000

I don't like television. As a general rule, I find it flabby, unwholesome, dissatisfying, crude, and pointless.

So when I tell you that my favorite television show is Firefly, you should understand that the show itself is none of those things. It is, in fact, pure awesomeness incarnate.

Tragically, it was canceled after a measly 14 episodes had been filmed, due to Executive Meddling. More's the pity.

In an interview, Firefly's male lead Nathan Fillion stated that, if he had $300 million on hand, he would buy the rights to the show, and probably continue it, free of interference from the powers-that-be.

That got me thinking. What would I do if I had $300 million?

I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd start up my own movie studio.

On-Target Productions, I'd call it. Or maybe Faithful Studios. Something to convey my sententious but entirely truthful belief that Hollywood is incapable of producing a piece of cinema which is in any way faithful to the source material, and that my studio, by virtue of its firm grounding in literary value (and complete disregard for monetary gain), is.

Anyway, the name isn't important. What's important is that I'd outfit this studio with the best equipment my limited budget could buy, hire the most hardworking personnel I could find, write a bunch of screenplays (the way I like 'em), and make some movies that are entirely accurate and complete interpretations of the media upon which they're based.

I mean that quite literally. Entirely accurate and complete. No chopping or dissecting or mulching being done here; if I mean to make a movie out of a book, I'm using the whole goddamn book: every scene, every line of dialogue, every sentence if needs be. There'll be no "lost characters" like Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings or Peeves the Poltergeist from Harry Potter. And there'll be none of this cutting-out-minor-scenes-because-they-don't-advance-the-action-fast-enough-and-we-can-totally-skip-those-scenes-anyway-because-all-they-do-is-reveal-minor-nuances-of-character-that-we-can-gloss-over-in-the-third-act malarkey. These are going to be faithful interpretations, like I said. That means every little scene, no matter how insignificant a two-bit brain-dead Hollywood screenwriter might consider it, will be reproduced in exact facsimile. No exceptions.

Having my own studio (and not giving a fig whether my productions are marketable, or even if they will be marketed) will give me room to breathe. I don't have to worry about length, or mass appeal, or tone, or censorship, or any of that other crap that the Gilded Mulcher has to worry about in order to sell movie tickets. I can reproduce these great source works as I see fit, with complete creative control, and revel in the realness and truthfulness of the results. I can bring my imagination to life for myself and a few other acolytes to enjoy. Everyone else can go spit.

I'm not saying these films will be unwatchably violent, sexy, or disgusting. There's practically no sex in any of the works I have in mind to adapt. And the violence won't be worse than anything you'd see in a typical action flick. As for the darker, scarier stories...well, it all depends on what you think might blast your soul from your body with cosmic horror.

                                                                                         by Pete Amachree

And mind you, I won't object if a few independent-minded cinemas agree to pick up my works and release them at a few small drive-ins and dollar theaters. Those are the kind of folks I'd want watching my films anyway, not the bigwigs from Hollywood and Cannes.

But that's beside the point! Aren't you curious to know which books and stories I will be adapting for the screen? 

I thought you'd be. I have some very specific ideas on that score. They include, but are not limited to...

• Several tales from Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian mythos. If you haven't read any of Howard's original Conan tales, it's time you started. Howard's barbarian makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a pantywaist choirboy. The stories are gritty, bloody, sweaty, and hard-boiled, bursting with darkness, danger, hideous evil, swashbuckling adventure and testosterone. Some of the stories I have in mind are Beyond the Black River, The Tower of the Elephant, Iron Shadows on the Moon, and Red Nails...as well as a weird Western tale, unrelated to Conan, The Horror from the Mound.
• Selected works of H.P. Lovecraft, including At the Mountains of Madness, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Shunned House, The Haunter of the Dark, The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Dunwich Horror. It'll be interesting to see if Lovecraft's works translate well onto the screen. A lot of the horror and suspense in his stories is conveyed through description and inarticulate mentality, not through dialogue or action. Many of the horrific implications and disgusting monsters are best left to the realms of the imagination, too, rather than put up on a screen in CG and pixels. Still, I'd be willing to give it a shot.
• Most of H.G. Wells's full-length works, including The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Most have been made into films already, but none of them have been done correctly. That's not my opinion, that's fact. I'll treat 'em right if no one else will.
• Many of Jules Verne's classic tales, like Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Can you imagine what giant squids, raft-rides through lava tubes, and thrilling heroics on speeding steam trains would look like on a humongous theater screen? It gives me the chills!
• Dozens of science fiction novels and short stories by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, Arthur C. Clarke, C.M. Kornbluth, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, and Fritz Leiber. Here are a few I've got in mind.
• The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
• The Novel of the Black Seal by Arthur Machen
• The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (a respectful interpretation); also The Roads Must Roll and Universe
• The Empire of the Atom, The Wizard of Linn, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and Black Destroyer by A.E. van Vogt
• The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Big Front Yard by Clifford D. Simak
• Baby Is Three by Theodore Sturgeon

• A live-action film adaptation of the superb and underrated Hanna-Barbera cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian. A fur-clad warrior with a magic sword wanders the post-apocalyptic Earth in the year 3999, after a rogue planet cast human civilization in ruin. In his ongoing quest to save the scrawny, ragged survivors from evil wizards, mutants and strange monsters (many of which are holdovers from the 20th century), Thundarr is aided by the beautiful Princess Ariel, a sorceress, and a huge, furry Mok named Ookla. I'm thinking some big-budget disaster scenes and a lot of Scenery Gorn. 
• Some of the video and computer games I've played have definite potential, such as Crimson Skies. Maybe if I'm in a really fun-loving and goofy mood I'll do Serious Sam.
• Yes, I know I've railed against remakes on this here blog. But I can't help it. I'd redo a few of the old stop-motion monster flicks, not because I think CG would make them better (certainly not; Ray Harryhausen has no equal and never will), but simply because I'm curious to see what they'd look like with a technological makeover. Just curious, is all. I can't help but wonder what a reboot of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Valley of Gwangi, Them!, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad would be like. Specifically, the monsters. You know how much I like monsters.  

And that's it. I think it'd be a lot of fun. I've always wanted to try my hand at screenwriting. And I'll bet I could hire an assistant until I got good at it. Then I'd just go to town. My studio would crank out these films, and they'd go for limited theatrical release or direct-to-DVD, and whoever was interested in real, faithful, true adaptations of good books and cartoons and movies could buy 'em and watch 'em. That's all I want. That's what I'd do with $300,000,000. Maybe a few bucks to charity here and there, but for the most part I'd launch my vendetta against  Hollywood and revel in unmitigated artistic license.

What would you do with $300,000,000? Buy a monkey?

 

distressing trends in fiction

I know, I know. This is the Sententious Vaunter. I should be penning you a panegyric, not a philippic. But sometimes I discover things which make me want to scream, and the only place I can scream eloquently enough is here on this blog. So strap yourselves in. It's ranting time. 

I'm drawing attention to this subject because (a) it bugs me and (b) to my knowledge, the phenomenon has only recently been named. Finally, we have a label for all those teen romance books that involve vampires, werewolves, zombies and aliens.

I first saw the label at Barnes & Noble. Two whole sections of bookshelf had been given over to the genre, whose individual components were earmarked by the Goth-looking teenagers on the covers, the sinister titles, the dark colors, and their universal, superficial resemblance to the Twilight series. The placard over this section indicated that these works were "Teen Paranormal Romance."

What? What the hell is teen paranormal romance? I thought.

Then I realized. The resemblance to Twilight wasn't superficial. People—grown men and women, not just teenage girls—had gotten so infatuated with the type of story which Twilight offered that the series had sparked an entire genre: teen girls (and, in some cases, teen guys) falling in love with eldritch monsters.

Oh jeez, I thought. That's ridiculous. Thanks a heap, Stephanie Meyer. You really started something.

As you can probably tell, I don't approve of Twilight or anything remotely resembling it. Specifically, I take issue with the manner in which Twilight has degraded and diluted the definition of masculinity. Instead of being rough, hardy, muscular, forthright and boisterous, like real men ought to be, Meyer's ideal man is a skulking, pale, sensitive, soft-spoken freak of a pretty boy. I don't consider that manly at all. And yet scores of swooning teenage girls have gone wild for Edward Cullen; Indiana Jones, Conan the Barbarian and James Bond are chauvinistic fossils by comparison.

This is not the kind of world I want to live in.

The problem is simple. The very fact that this disturbing trend has been labeled means that it's entrenched. Teen paranormal romance is here to stay, at least for a while. It's the big thing in fiction right now. The Twilight movies are slaughtering the box office and paranormal romance of every variety is infecting the shelves of booksellers nationwide. There's no way to dislodge the phenomenon. It makes me cringe to think of what might come next.

As always, I shall be the lone voice of sanity in these insane, chaotic times (boy, ain't that ironic). While teen girls (and, I suspect, a generous sample of middle-aged women) ooh and aah over the pencil-necked vampire boys, I shall continue to write stories which feature musclebound guys, ball-crushing badasses, and suave, straight-talking champions. I shall let the purity of the masculine ideal speak for itself in my fiction. Bold adventurers, quick-thinking rogues and rock-hard heroes will never go out of style, and though some distressing trends in fiction have arisen of late (and will do so again), I shall remain a bastion of artistic integrity and truth.

There shall be a good deal of romance in my books, and no street-smart, gorgeous heroine of mine is going to fall for any pale, bloodsucking pretty boy.

So help me Crom.

(Funny story: Conan's facial expression here exactly resembles mine whenever somebody mentions Twilight.)

I also think steampunk is way overrated, but that's a story for another day. I need to go fix myself a drink. Annyeong!

Liberties Taken: a sestina

Today is my official Write Your @ss Off Day, so here's one of the results. This is my entry for the Big Ole Poetry Challenge the Pollinatrix has got going on her blog. As part of today's eight-hour writing marathon, I'm also working on a new science fiction short story (going well), some nonfiction travel articles (going worse) and, of course, the novel. Maybe I'll put up a report card or something later on and tell you how I did. But in the meantime...

Liberties Taken: a sestina

And once again, they come inside to find                                                     

that time did not see fit to wait, and fly                                                        

across the road to fields of light and dance                                                   

their time away. The dancers do not see                                                        

the answers which can help. And soon they break                                        

and scatter far, until the next new day.                                                         

For endless nights, these folk who dream by day                                         

and waste their nights in revelry, and find                                                    

no dreams, no gold, no life, they soon will break.                                         

But we who sit behind the walls and fly                                                       

on wings which we in dreams can use, we see                                              

the light of years, the life ahead, and dance.                                                 

In time we grasp the stems of hopes in dance,                                              

climb up the stalk to flowers, gleaming days.                                                

For now, we sit at home and work. I see                                                       

the happy land that only I can find.                                                              

I work and slave to someday go, and fly                                                      

into the clouds, where windows shake, and break.                                       

Between that land and I lie years. It breaks                                                  

my heart and wounds my mind. I do not dance                                            

to think of what is there. Someday to fly,                                                     

I do not wish to live on Earth. The days                                                       

go by, as slow as snails. I cannot find                                                                       

the light, the hope, the dream I once could see.                                            

So time I waste, and dreams I spurn. You see                                              

in me a lazy man, with faith which breaks                                                     

in toil and sweat. I think and dream, but find                                                           

no reason, purpose worth the strife of days.                                                  

I dawdle, treading water, scorn the dance,                                                   

Forget  that once back then I dreamed to fly.                                                

I do not want my liberties to fly                                                                    

away against my will. I want to see                                                               

the hour when I achieve my goals, the day                                                   

when all I worked for comes to me and breaks                                             

the doors and windows down, and I can dance.                                           

The toil of ages dies. My dreams I find.                                                        

Thence comes my life. I find that I can fly,                                      

I find my feet can dance, my eyes can see,                                       

my hands can break. In time will come the day.

FOOTNOTE: Just in case you're wondering, I stuck to the rules. This is a proper English sestina: thirty-nine lines (six six-line stanzas and a tercet), all of which end with one of six words. Each stanza's end-words are properly ordered, and (this is the part I decided to grit my teeth over) the poem is written entirely in iambic pentameter. W.H. Auden, eat your heart out.

I also want to say, right here and now (just so I won't be like this idiot), that this poem was inspired by Robert E. Howard's short story The Tower of the Elephant. In it, the elephant god says, "Let me be free of this cage of broken blind flesh, and I will once more be Yogah of Yag, morning-crowned and shining, with wings to fly, and feet to dance, and eyes to see, and hands to break." I always thought that was a lyrical turn of phrase, even for Howard...and that's where I got four of this sestina's six end-words. Attribution over.

monkey tests and chopstick wars

Symbolic convergence theory has got nothing on my Korean sojourn. There are dozens of inside jokes that my students, my fellow expatriates and I have cultivated over the course of this year, none of which would be in any way comprehensible to an outsider or a non-Newbie.

Consider, for a moment, the term "monkey test."

Our semesters at my hagwon are three-month blocks. At the end of every month we have what are imaginatively called "monthly tests": standardized progress tests to check comprehension and retention. On a whim, to brighten the prospect up for some of my younger students who didn't like taking these exams, I referred to them (pseudo-mistakenly) as "monkey tests." They cracked up. I did it all my classes, even the older ones. The older kids seem to have less patience for it, but the younger ones love it. Even now, months later, it never fails to get a grin out of them. It's really quite heartwarming to see their little faces break into grins and hear their voices sound in a chorus of "monkey test!" when I walk into the room on test day.

"Chopstick wars" is a slightly more nebulous term. We don't call it that; we don't have a set name for it, so I made up this phrase just for reference. Down the street from Reading Town is our favorite sogogi restaurant. To be clear, so is the Korean word for "cow" and gogi is the word for "meat." Sogogi is just beef, fried on an open grill at your table, dipped in salted sesame oil or ssamjang, put onto a leaf of mustard or lettuce, covered with marinated onions, greens, fried kimchi, mushrooms or garlic, and then wrapped up and eaten. The meat is brought to you, raw, on enormous platters, which you personally transfer to the grill and cook up. Inevitably, when there are four of us, there's an uneven number of meat slices, so one of us has to polish off the last one. The tradition is set in stone: Elaine grasps the bit of meat and holds it roughly a foot above the surface of the grill. Adam, Jeff and I poise ourselves for action (Adam and I use chopsticks; Jeff sometimes uses the cooking tongs). Elaine counts off and drops the delectable slice of juicy beef onto the grill, whereupon we three rapacious meat lovers dive for it. Whoever snatches it away eats the spoils. So far the score stands thus: Adam - 2, Andrew - 1, Jeff - 1 (with one assist). It's a refreshing little tradition we've started up that will likely last long after we leave here.

Korean children are clever. Once they get the general rules of the language down, they're quick to spot opportunities for comedy. By that I mean puns.

Some months back I was standing in class, argumentatively trying to get the class to realize some salient fact or other, and when one of them finally got it right (intentionally) I hissed out a long "Yessssssssssssss." At some point after that the occasion arose to answer one child with the word "yesterday." I don't remember what the question was; maybe I was assigning homework and he asked what the date was and it was yesterday. Chris, a burly elementary schooler who has a body like a tank and the brain of a puppy, took the obvious phonetic similarity between the words "yes" and "yesterday" and ran with it. From there until the class ended whenever I said "yes" he'd finish with "...terday."

"Johnny is going to..." I'd say.

"School!" Carl, the brightest but noisiest kid in the class, a cute little kid with a flat top and a perpetual grin, would yell.

"Yessssss," I'd hiss.

"...terday," Chris would finish. Everybody would giggle, myself included. Soon Chris has the entire rest of the class doing it. From now on whenever I hear somebody hiss out a "yes" like that I'll automatically think "...terday." Thanks, Chris. That's a phonemic snippet I'll remember until the end of my days.

Then there's the lengthy list of monikers that Adam, Elaine and I have developed for certain "special" students. All the kids are unique (if that statement makes any sense at all) but some of them are uniquely unique, if you take my meaning. They stand out, either due to their mental prowess, their cooperative attitudes or (quite often) their debilitatingly annoying or obstructive behavior. To name a few:

• Stony-Faced Laura: She's now left Reading Town, but while she was here she might as well have been an ornament on the wall. In class, she used to sit in the rear row, in the very last seat, way back in the corner. She never spoke, not even a single word, and if she ever did, her voice was inaudible. Her face was like a stone statue's: devoid of life, eyes downcast, mouth fixed in an immovable line. She looked absolutely miserable. It was perhaps unkind of us to bestow a waggish nickname like "Stony-Faced" upon her, but given the profusion of other Lauras, we had no choice. That was her distinguishing feature.
• Reliable Sandy: She's a little gem, and also quite cute. Her mother always dresses her in skirts and knee-socks and buckled shoes. She's awfully soft-spoken (I can barely hear her above some of the wackos in her class) but her answers are always dead on-target. She always does her homework, and that's rare: even some of the diligent older kids "forget" theirs once in a while. What's more, though, she has integrity. She forgot her book once and I forgot to take the necessary ten vouchers from her. As I turned away, I felt a tug on my arm. I looked down and there she was, her big brown eyes staring quizzically up at me, holding two five-voucher bills in her hand. What an honest little girl. Right then and there I bestowed her moniker upon her.
• Sinister Jim: James is a good guy, and he's knowledgeable for never having done his homework, like, once. But still, he gets in the way of the class sometimes. He, like 80% of the other Korean boys, is always making extremely off-color jokes. You ask the class why Strega Nona punished Big Anthony, and Jim will say "Because he needed to die." You ask why King Lion summoned the Iguana before him, and Jim will say "Because he was going to kill the iguana." You ask why Goldilocks went to the Three Bears' cottage, and Jim'll say "To kill the three bears." Kill, kill, kill. Die, die, die. That's all it is. I nicknamed him "Sinister" because he's always making death-related funnies.
• Little John: Tiny little boy, but with as much energy as a pocketful of firecrackers. I knew he was going to be unique right off the bat. Picture this three-foot tall munchkin with a gap-toothed smile on his kisser, his shock of black, wavy hair sitting tousled on top of his head, making blub-blub-blub noises with his lips all during class. That's when he deigns to actually sit in his chair: usually he's up and running around, climbing over desks, peeking over people's shoulders and whatnot. I can't get angry at him for this (I was the same way at his age). He's a cute kid, light as a feather and as happy-go-lucky as you could want. He's easily the smallest kid in the entire hagwon, hence his nickname.
• Amy of the Opera: A somewhat spoiled girl...with a voice like a screech owl. Amy (bespectacled and stringy with a fringe of brown hair reaching to her shoulders) is not accustomed to being quiet, and as such will offer her opinion on whatever subject is at hand, curricular or no, stridently as a bullhorn. Of all the kids in that class whom I've told to be quiet, I've told her at least three times more. Unsurprisingly, she's also one of the worst at raising her hand. Like the rest of the "spoiled" crowd, she'll just shriek your name until you give her your attention.

Some of these shared meanings that have been created aren't even jokes, but are no less memorable. I think I've mentioned before what my job description is. I spend my afternoons being a jungle gym and my evenings combating mood swings. The little kids who come in first at two o'clock just love to climb on me. I think I started it. I invited John (Little John) to hold onto my arm, then hoisted him into the air. The other kids were wowed, and soon enough I resembled an ape-monster in one of Robert E. Howard's stories, warriors clinging to every limb, a colossus covered with tiny scraps of humanity. Bella and Angel learned to latch themselves around my ankles and sit on my feet, like two little legwarmers with earrings and ponytails, as I waddled down the hall.

Then I began giving them "assisted jumps": I'd hold the kids' hands, count to three, they'd jump into the air and I'd lift them really high. These caught on like wildfire: particularly with one little girl, Leslie. She's just about the cutest little girl I've ever seen, and working where I work that's saying something. She's got almond-shaped eyes (always half-closed, like she's planning something, or about to give you the mother of all dirty looks); a little round nose; and a squeaky voice. Whenever I give an assisted jump we always count off thus: "One, two, THREE!" So now when Leslie pokes her adorable head in the door, she holds up three fingers and says "Teacher, one-two-three!" (Only with her Korean accent, it sounds like "One-two-thlee!") Anyone else would be mystified as to what she means. Now I know that I must get up and go into the hall and give her a jump (or six) or else she really will give the aforementioned mother-of-all-dirty-looks. She's good at them, too.

On a final note, I'd like to leave you with the Newbies' Official Induction Ceremony. You must be burned with Elaine's cigarette, slip on the ice and fall flat on your face. Jeff started off this time-honored tradition on the roof of my apartment building one ill-fated cocktail party a while back. We'd all joined hands (this is when we were too drunk to care about how nerdy we were being). Elaine neglected to notice she was holding a lit cigarette. The next thing we noticed was hot ash on our hands. Jeff sort of sprang back to dust himself off, encountered a patch of black ice on the dark rooftop and collapsed instantaneously into the push-up position. Some good-natured laughter and bruises later we decided to incorporate the proceedings into our initiation protocol. Some good came of it after all. When I leave here, I'm going to have some killer stories to tell...which nobody will understand.

recommended reading

I don't own this image. It was created (with considerable skill) by Cary Nord for Dark Horse Comics, and belongs to Conan Properties International, LLC.

I am currently about halfway through the second volume of the complete Conan-related works of Robert E. Howard, so entitled The Bloody Crown of Conan. This particular volume isn't as thick as its predecessor, nor does it contain the same number of stories. However, as the adage goes, it is quality and not quantity that counts. This volume contains three of the longest Conan stories Howard ever wrote, including his only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon.

The first story, The People of the Black Circle, was excellent, if somewhat anticlimactic. It concerns Conan's involvement in a web of black sorcery (what else?). In this case, he is the leader of a ferocious band of Afghan-esque warriors who are raiding the borders of an Indian-inspired empire. The king of that empire has recently been destroyed by magic; his sister, Yasmina, now the queen, seeks revenge against the Black Seers of Yimsha, who have purportedly done the dirty deed. She travels to the borders to enlist Conan's aid, only to wind up being kidnapped by him. A series of chases, desperate battles, and scrapes ensues, after which the two protagonists wind up inside Yimsha itself, a demonic castle perched on an evil mountaintop. After wounding the nefarious wizard at the head of the Black Seers (who has transformed into a gigantic serpent), Conan manages to rescue Yasmina and return her to her countrymen after one last epic battle in a gorge. The wounded wizard, returning to slay Yasmina in vulture form, is instead slain by Conan, and so the story ends. Lengthier than most Conan stories it was for the most part a gripping tale and a high adventure, particularly the account of Conan's rough ascent of Yimsha and the sorcerous traps and obstacles he encountered in the process.

The second story in the volume is the aforementioned The Hour of the Dragon. The plot is far more intricate, convoluted, and just plain bigger in scope than anything I've read of Howard's before. It's really rewarding to see the time and effort he put into fleshing out this story and making it a complete novel. Since Howard was a commercial writer and most of what he wrote had to be published in magazines, many of his Conan tales are disappointingly short. It is set during the time when Conan was the king of Aquilonia, and had his throne wrested from beneath him by a scheming band of conspirators aided by (you guessed it) an evil wizard. But this ain't no ordinary evil wizard, folks. Most of Conan's necromantic adversaries are just men who have learned the dark secrets of arcane religions, practitioners of thaumaturgical arts too evil to be spoken aloud, who have gazed across nighted abysses and plumbed the foulest depths of the universe in search of power and influence. Xaltotun is something else. First of all, he's been dead for three thousand years. At least, he was dead, until those aforementioned conspirators woke him up. He's immensely powerful, exceedingly intelligent, and coldly calculating. Conan's got his work cut out for him, I can already see that much, even though he's managed to escape a few nasty traps laid for him. He's had to bug out of Aquilonia and head south to become a corsair again in order to find...

...well, I won't spoil it. You'll just have to read it yourself.

Prior to this I read Hemingway Adventure, an account of Ernest Hemingway's old haunts and stomping grounds written by Michael Palin, of Monty Python fame. Palin's a pleasantly sardonic travel writer and his anecdotes regarding his attempts to follow in Hemingway's footsteps are often hilarious: driving ambulances in Italy, or attending patently insane festivals in Spain, or roping cattle in the American West. There's more than enough to stimulate the interests of travelers, especially given the variety of places Hemingway lived or spent time: France, Italy, Spain, Key West, Cuba, Montana, Idaho, and Africa. Though the book is a superb and entertaining travelogue in its own right, it's also compelled me to read Hemingway's biography. Hemingway is one of the writers I admire most, and his wide travels and expatriate lifestyle I hope to emulate someday. For anyone, however, this book is a springboard into many other interests and destinations.

After I finish with Conan (for the time being) I will dive headfirst into 50 Great Short Stories, which as the title suggests is a compendium of fifty most exemplary short stories by some of the world's most renowned authors. Short story writing is something I never could do well. I'm fine with the literary aspect of it, but I'm too wordy and long-winded. Whenever I attempt a short story it inevitably winds up turning into a novella, or sucks canal water, or both. I'll keep you posted.