I wish you had been with us longer.
Month: July 2025
Silly but Fun: Annual Hemingway Look-alike contest in Key West!
David ‘Bat’ Masterson, center, celebrates his victory with past winners of the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest on July 20, 2024, outside Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West. Masterson, a 71-year-old retired helicopter pilot from Daytona Beach, bested 121 other contestants to take the look-alike title on his 10th attempt. The contest is a highlight of the island’s annual Hemingway Days festival that honors Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, who lived and wrote in Key West during most of the 1930s.
Will Hemingway “survive Trump’s Crackdown on Cuba?” Your thoughts? Test your Spanish a little bit. If you deferred going to Cuba, you may have to wait a while. Best, Christine (A few photos added by me.)
When visiting Cuba, Ernest Hemingway used to stay in Hotel Ambos Mundos, in Havana. EFE/Ernesto Mastrascusa
Will Hemingway survive to Trump’s Crack Down on Cuba?
Donald Trump is expected to put an end to the rapprochement with Cuba initiated by former president Barack Obama two years ago. Trump’s White House plans to clamp down the emerging travel and business ties between the US and the communist island, in order to pressure the government of Raul Castro on human rights.
The restrictive measures, however, are going to affect both countries. For Cubans, basically, it will mean to loose potential of business opportunities brought by an increasing American tourism. And for Americans, it will mean that business and travel relations will be harder and more costly. For all those Americans who planned a visit to Havana and enjoy a mojito in La Bodeguita de el Medio, Ernest Hemingway favourite bar, it may be more complicated in the near future.
If US and Cuba make a step backwards in their diplomatic relations, Hemingway’s legacy can be “in danger” , alerted this week some of the speakers at the 16th International Colloquium Ernest Hemingway in Havana, as reported in EFE.
From June 15 to 18, Havana is hosting the 16h International Colloquium Ernest Hemingway, a biannual encounter of academics and experts on the American author. It takes place in the Ernest Hemingway House Museum, in the “Finca Vigía”, located in the neighborhood of San Francisco de Paula, where the author wrote one of his most famous novels, “The old man and the Sea” , winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. A year later, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Hemingway had a long affective relationship with Cuba, ever since he first arrived in 1928.
CONTENIDO RELACIONADO
“I think if President Trump reverses US-Cuba relations, he will really be disadvantaging his own country fellows,” said Valerie Hemingway, the American author’s daughter in law, and a guest speaker at the Colloquium, as reported in EFE. ” A setback in the thaw (between US and Cuba) is “a tragedy” because it would prevent other Americans from knowing “this wonderful paradise “and his” friendly and intelligent “people”, she said, as cited by EFE.
Valerie also said that since the reestablishment of bilateral relations two and a half years ago the University of Montana, where she resides, sends students to the island every year.
In case traveling to Cuba becomes really complicated, there are other ways to get closer with America’s famous author and Cuba lover. This Saturday, for example, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in Oak Park (Chicago) is hosting a soiree to celebrate 100 years since the writer’s 1917 graduation from Oak Park and River Forest High School.
If you are in the Chicago area: July 19 Hemingway Lecture!
Hemingway Birthday Lecture with Prof. J. Gerald Kennedy
- Jul 19 at 3:00PM – 4:30PM
-
834 Lake Street
Oak Park
60301 - Free
It is fitting that we welcome the editor of Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time, Professor J. Gerald Kennedy for this year’s Hemingway Birthday Lecture titled, The Rough Edges of In Our Time.
This year is the 100th anniversary of a strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway’s American debut, called In Our Time. It is fitting that we welcome the editor of Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time, Professor J. Gerald Kennedy for this year’s Hemingway Birthday Lecture titled, The Rough Edges of In Our Time. J. Gerald Kennedy, Boyd Professor of English Emeritus, is a former chair of the Department of English. His Hemingway related books are Imagining Paris (Yale 1993), French Connections (St Martins 1998) co-edited with Jackson Bryer, and the Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time (2022). I was advisory editor for Vols 1-3 of the Cambridge Letters of Ernest Hemingway, and a co-editor of the final volumes of the letters, 1957-59, and 1959-61. This is a free event, but please register so we can plan accordingly.
MISTAKEN DEATH ANNOUNCEMENTS: NOT SURE HOW “FUNNY” THEY WERE. Hemingway after 2 bad plane crashes–Not funny. Photo added by Me
The Funniest Times News of a Celebrity’s Death Was Greatly Exaggerated
Sometimes, it pays to be cautious
Mark Twain
Of course, preeminent American humorist Mark Twain most famously announced that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” but he actually had to do it twice. The first time, his cousin’s illness resulted in a game of telephone that led to his notorious quip, but 10 years later, after The New York Times reported that his boat was lost at sea, he wrote an article for the same newspaper investigating his own possible death. At least, after both mistakes, we got some great writing out of it.
Gabriel García Márquez
Alice CooperUnlike most such mistakes, Melody Maker knew exactly what they were doing when they published a satirical obituary of Alice Cooper in 1973. They were talking about the death of his career, but so many fans reached out to them in confused anguish that they had to publish a retraction, quoting the man himself as saying, “I lost $4,000 … at blackjack last night. I could have died!” and “Am I alive? Well, I’m alive and drunk as usual.”
Ernest Hemingway
To be fair, it wasn’t that big of a leap to assume that Hemingway had died in a plane crash in Africa in 1954. He was hurt very badly, and he’d actually been involved in two plane crashes, and it’s not like the mid-1950s were a great time for surviving such incidents. But survive, he did, and he was so amused by his own obituaries that he collected them in a scrapbook to read every morning over a glass of champagne. We like Twitter and cold brew, but you do you, Ernie.
Like, All of CNN’s Pre-Written Obituaries
As morbid as it might seem, a lot of famous people’s obituaries are written ahead of time. People are on deadlines, and you know, sometimes the writing’s on the wall, so it might as well be in the CMS. That practice came back to bite CNN in 2003, however, when trolls found out they could access the news organization’s stockpile of unpublished obituaries, which didn’t remain unpublished for long. The best part is that they appeared to be placeholders full of wildly inaccurate filler, mostly based on the obituary of the Queen Mother, who had died the previous year. For example, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was described as “the U.K.’s favorite grandmother.” Cheney has been called a lot of things, but definitely never that.
Sad day: July 2, 1961. Hemingway dies in Home in Idaho.
