Hemingway

First off, I would just like to point out that this looks like a picture of Ernest Hemingway and our cat, Razzle. Here's Razzle:

This seems to be Ernest Hemingway week. I taught "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in my ENG 242 course. A Continuous Lean has an awesome photo layout of Hemingway up and there are several great pictures of him on The Impossible Cool.Well, now he's on Making Owls Cool, too.

When I'm teaching, it's hard to send me off on tangents, but talking about Hemingway will do it. I mostly just tell Hemingway stories, such as the time he punched out Wallace Stevens or how he used his own fishing boat to patrol for submarines off the coasts of Cuba. There are some things I didn't share with my students. I didn't show them my Hemingway themed tattoo. It's the cover of the first edition of The Sun Also Rises. I also didn't tell them about my Hemingway drinking game. It's a very involved and informative drinking game. It's not a game that gets you wasted, but rather a sort of mixological means of invoking Hemingway; it's a seance that uses spirits instead of invoking them. And it's really simple:

1. Read Hemingway's books.

2. Drink what the characters drink.

That's it. For instance, if you're reading The Sun Also Rises, you're drinking Pernot. If your reading A Farewell to Arms, you're drinking grappa. Get the idea? Don't drink too much or you'll stop fully appreciating the stories. Have fun.