Hemingway's Elephant Gun for Sale

Looking for a new gun? Do you have an extra $150,000-200,000 lying around? If so, you're in luck. Ernest Hemingway's 1913 .577 caliber, double barrel Nitro Express elephant gun is for sale! This is a big gun, weighing in at 16 pounds. It was made by English gun makers Westley Richards, who continue to make some beautiful firearms even today. This particular gun accompanied Hemingway on a safari in 1953.

Read more on Garden and Gun and check out some more photos too. Auction starts March 14 through James D. Julia!

10 Works - List 2 - American Greats on the American Great Outdoors

A couple weeks ago I decided to periodically post lists of works of literature that could comprise the syllabus for a college literature course. It's fun and I'd really dig it if folks shared some works with me in the comments section. My first list was American Nature Writing before 1900. If you didn't read that list, check it out too.


List 2 - American Greats on the American Great Outdoors 

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature - 1835 - Emerson looms large in the New England Renaissance. He was a Unitarian minister and his combination of naturalism and spiritualism later came to be known as Transcendentalism. We may have lost some of Emerson's starry-eyed (and transparent eyeballed) idealism, but he set the tone for the nature writing that followed him. I can't read John Muir and not think about Emerson.

 2. Henry David Thoreau - Walden: of Life in the Woods - 1854  -  Emerson lent the land to Thoreau, so he gets some credit here too. I was initially disappointed when I learned how close Thoreau was to civilization. While living near Walden Pond, he'd sometimes take the short walk to downtown Concord, Massachusetts to visit his mother. I've re-read Walden several times now and I realize that it's not how far you live from people, but how close you live to nature.

3. Mark Twain -  Life on the Mississippi - It's not enough to say that Mark Twain loved the Mississippi River. The river appears throughout his works. I even consider it a character in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When Twain became famous and moved to Hartford, Connecticut, he designed the office in his house to resemble the bridge of a steamboat.

4. Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass - Leaves of Grass explores America in the space between nature and civilization. For example:

I WILL take an egg out of the robin’s nest in the orchard,
I will take a branch of gooseberries from the old bush in the garden, and go and preach to the world;
You shall see I will not meet a single heretic or scorner,
You shall see how I stump clergymen, and confound them,
You shall see me showing a scarlet tomato, and a white pebble from the beach.

5. John Muir - Studies in the Sierra - John Muir was Scottish, but did more for American conservation that anyone before the Roosevelts. In fact, when Theodore Roosevelt visited northern California, he requested to go camping with John Muir. He and Muir snuck away from the presidential entourage and spent a night around a campfire.

6. Jack London - The Call of the Wild - For some reason middle school teachers like to torture their students with this book; it's not for sensitive animal lovers. Though a dog is the protagonist, we're left to question if, like Buck, we could revert to something more primitive. I think we'd like to think so.

7. Ernest Hemingway - In Our Time - Includes Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, including "Big Two-Hearted River."

8. William Faulkner - Go Down, Moses - A collection of semi-interrelated short stories including "The Bear" and "Delta Autumn." Isaac McCaslin is Faulkner's Nick Adams.

9. John Steinbeck - Travels with Charlie - When Steinbeck was older and living in New York, he read a review that said he was out of touch with America. Dismayed, he built a camper out of his pickup, packed up his standard poodle, Charlie, and headed out on the road. It's a great road trip memoir.

10. Tim O'Brien - Northern Lights - One of O'Brien's earlier works, it's the story of two brothers on a snowshoe trip in Minnesota. There are some very Nick Adams-like themes going on.

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.