Do Men Taste Like Licorice?

            I couldn’t sleep when I went to bed after midnight on Wednesday, probably because I’d taken a late siesta on Tuesday evening and had only been up for six hours. I guess being wide awake made me more inclined to reach back between my shoulder blades and to fiddle with a bump that had been there for about two months. I’d tried squeezing on several occasions over that time but nothing happened. I was beginning to think that it was something that I should show to my doctor but this time when I squeezed it a tiny hole in the bump opened up and a stream of puss came out onto my hand. I got up and went to the bathroom to look at it. The liquid was clear but I really didn’t want to get it onto my sheets so I spent a long time reaching awkwardly back to squeeze what I guess was a boil so I could get as much out of it as I could so it wouldn’t come out while I was lying in bed. After at least the next half an hour I finally stopped from exhaustion, though some of the stuff was still leaking out.

            I’m not sure if I slept at all, but I’m pretty good at relaxing and so I nonetheless felt fairly rested when I got up at 5:00. The boil seemed to be gone though there was still an itchy and slightly elevated wound remaining.

            I spent quite a bit of the day writing about the events of Tuesday. In the evening I had to go to 20^th Century US Literature class. It was much cooler outside than it had been lately and on top of that it was raining a bit. I wore my hoody and my leather jacket. The rain wasn’t enough to make me wet before class.

            As usual I was early so I sat in a chair that happened to be sitting in front of the elevator. I finished reading W. E. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”, which struck a balance in the early part of the 20^th Century between encouraging African Americans to be patient with slow progress but also not to give up pushing for full civil rights. A guy approached me who happened to be one of the three other guys named Christian in the class. He wanted to know if I’d gotten the email informing us that this week’s reading had changed from Washington, Du Bois and Hurston to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I answered that I hadn’t gotten the message but I knew that it had changed because I’d heard Scott mention it at the end of last week’s class.

            After roll call, Scott Rayter went over the changes to the syllabus. Our test was moved two weeks forward into the middle of November. The strangest thing is that we only have one essay for a full course, but it’s worth 35%. We’ll only be reading Elliot’s “The Wasteland” and not Prufrock as well.

            Scott said he might throw in an extra story or two later on.

            He spent some time talking about the state of the Humanities at U of T. He explained that the Humanities are shrinking more and more each year. There are tenured professors getting paid by the university but with courses that get cancelled every year because nobody enrolls in them. One-quarter of incoming students are international and so it’s hard to get them interested in taking English literature. There are other Humanities programs that are less functional than English and with less nice people running them.

            F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were both alcoholics.

            One reason for a lot of these authors living in Paris was because the US dollar was worth a lot more over there in 1930. They were both celebrities.

            Ernest Hemingway didn’t like being interviewed; he was in his fourth marriage when he committed suicide. His father, his two siblings and his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway also committed suicide. His daughter or son Gloria or Gregory Hemingway (It’s not clear from my readings if Gloria identified as a woman or not) died of what was diagnosed as hypertension.

            When Hemingway died he was the most famous writer in the world.
            He lived for about three-quarters of a year in Toronto but still sent stories to the Toronto Star after moving to Chicago.

He was obsessed with masculinity. Scott says the gender politics is fascinating in “The Sun Also Rises”.

Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were Modernists but Hemingway was more radical.

We looked at the very short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”. This is classic Hemingway. There is no “he said, she said”. The prose has a journalistic feel.

Hemingway created a style of writing that he called “The Iceberg Theory” in which the deeper meaning (Scott says 7/8) of a story must be hidden.
            This story is pared down and does not have a lot of adjectives. The prose is turgid (Scott says “erectile”). There is a lot of anxiety.

            The writing is a reaction to the popularity of the sentimentality of 19^th Century women writers. The changes that literature has gone through historically can be seen as reflecting the changes in women’s fashions. Glenn Close had one of her ribs broken as a result of being tied into a corset for the film, “Dangerous Liaisons”.

            “Hills Like White Elephants” appeared in a short story collection entitled Men Without Women. Scott asked for some examples of men being without women. I offered “war”. Others said sports, some kinds of work and certain types of emotional and mental suffering. When Hemingway first thought of the title of “Men Without Women” he wrote to Fitzgerald about it and told him his readership would be the fairies and the spinsters.

            The first courses on Modernism only featured male authors, though there were outstanding female writers in the genre, like Virginia Woolf. Male writers have anxieties about the place of women. Woolf called T. S. Elliot “the banker”.

            “Hills Like White Elephants” is Hemingway’s most famous short story. He does strange things with time here. 35 minutes pass on one page. The missing parts are the silences between the man and the girl. There is no interiority. Are they communicating at all? The first paragraph gives weight to the location.

            She is the one who observes that the hills look like white elephants. She uses metaphor while he does not.

            He is taking her to get an abortion in a Catholic country in 1930. He’s been through this before. The story is not about the abortion but about their relationship. She is weary of his talking. What does her smiling mean? A white elephant is a burden that someone else might value. White elephants are sacred. There is an elephant in the room.

            When they are apart the view follows him rather than her.

            She says that everything tastes like licorice. Scott wondered why she would say that since everything doesn’t taste like licorice. I pointed out that in Europe the flavour of anise is in everything, such as candy and drinks. I added that many people say that men taste like licorice. He said, “None of the men I’ve tasted taste like licorice!” He’d never heard of that.

            The man in the story says for the girl to be reasonable, meaning do what you are told.
            Did he change trains when he put their bags on the platform?

            She is vulnerable because she does not speak Spanish.

            The story is about absences, silences and the unspeakable.

            Her name is Jig. The jig is up?

            During the break, Scott came over to ask me more about men tasting like licorice. I told him that I’d first heard about it from translating the Serge Gainsbourg song, “Les Sucettes”. The lollipops are really penises that taste like aniseed or at least their semen does. I think he was flirting with me. We discussed the various drinks that are made from anise and that have the flavour of licorice. I mentioned Calvados but he corrected me that Calvados is a Norman apple brandy. I see now that he’s right.

            After the break we moved on to F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wrote 178 short stories and he was a master of the medium. He’s interested in substance and character. “Babylon Revisited”, about the relation between morality and money is from 1930, just after the killer crash. People are not well. His wife died and he had a breakdown. This is perfect for modernism, which thrives on things being off or not right. Babylon Revisited is in the aftermath of decadence. But Modernism also strives to make things new.

            The Snowbird is a coke addict.

            Scott sees the story as a modern telling of Orpheus and Eurydice.

            It’s a story of global loss brought to the personal. Charlie is selling short.

            What counts as knowledge? What caused his wife to die?

            His wife’s sister did not even like her but she can’t own her own grief.

            What is the meaning of Charlie’s one drink a day ritual? I seemed to be the only one that saw it as a show of strength. Showing that he’s changed but keeps the past as a conquered trophy.

            He gave out his sister in law’s address but denied it when the two drunks show up.

            This story somewhat parallels Fitzgerald’s own life.

            The past is mythologized.

            Scott thinks Charlie will never get custody of his daughter.

            Women don’t do very well in Fitzgerald’s works.

            Class ended later than usual

            I finished watching David Byrne’s ”True Stories”. John Goodman’s character ended up marrying the woman that never gets out of bed, in bed. I liked the film but I guess critics didn’t. He never directed another one, though he’s done a lot of scores for theatre, ballets and movies.