Thinly veiled allegories.

Of ourselves.

Some of us do that. Some of us pile a lot of baggage on the thin.

And. Some of us. Most of us fail.

God, a novel is a horrible beast to write.

I have written twenty. Only half of them were published. Perhaps Hemingway should have changed his name.

I burned the other half, and have had a thousand names.

I lived next door to his house on Whitehead in Key West. The best thing about the place were the cats. Great cats.

We are all entrapped not in time but by time. There has probably been a lost generation for every era. But it was coming off such repressed culture — everything was repressed back then — I’m not sure we can pass judgement on those people. Hemingway would be seriously shocked to read about sex today.

Sex and death.

What else is there to write about.

Perhaps loss.

Hemingway blew his head off because he had lost everything including his mind.

The constant travel, the drinking, the manly hunting parties, the women, even driving the ambulance was all related to keeping the depression at bay.

Suicide is supposed to be this great evil thing. I admire the way he took control when enough was enough.

How many of us have the balls to say enough is enough. There isn’t a single novel that was written in a nursing home.

The man was larger than life. The Pilar is the most extraordinary boat I have ever seen.

Those books are all about personas and places and situations that have been gone for a very long time.

Taste. You really needed to mention taste, and you might have juxtaposed that by explaining what taste is.

That would have given the piece more gravitas and would have tamed the whine.

The boxes we put writers in are all ridiculous. I know of no one who is the persona.

You like the setting of the cocktail party. I prefer writing in any of my second selves. The operant word is IN.

I find the Great Scott as frivolous as reading books to groups in bookstores. Who invented that horrible ritual anyway.

A cocktail party aboard the Pilar at sunset.

It must have been grand.

Publishing needs to be shaken up by something just as grand.

Books will die. They are dying now. I don’t care what some idiot from Random House says about how great they are doing. Publishing lies through its teeth. In a hundred years, no one will recognize the lot of us.