I ♥ Hemingway (in the 1920s)

I remember the first time I discovered the Decemberists: I was reading the arts section of the Sunday Oregonian (which we buy on our Saturday trips into town), and the review of Her Majesty, The Decemberists jumped off the page, grabbed me by the throat, and shouted, "Your life will never be the same again!" Most intriguing was the review's mention of their song "The Legionnaire's Lament" on Castaways and Cutouts. Anyone who sings about legionnaires, I decided, must be the most brilliant songwright in the world since Joachim Neander. And I was right.

In other news, I am now reading A Movable Feast, about Ernest Hemingway's adventures in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Shakespeare and Company, the descendant of which the Artiste One visited this summer. What happened to him? He started out with such wide-eyed promise, producing the beautifully sparse, yet heartwrenching, The Sun also Rises and other masterpieces, and then he just turned into a drunk, womanizing, hypermasculine, killing-obsessed misanthrope who wrote about old men battling mackerels. And then he killed himself. Sad.