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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  January 19, 2013 12:00pm-12:15pm EST

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.. february 14th through seventeenth is the savannah book festival from georgia. evan thomas, dave barry and many more will speak at this annual festival. watch booktv for live coverage. during the second week of march booktv will be live from the tucson festival of books in arizona. among several lawyers featured
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activity begin, and kristin iverson. also in march the virginia festival of the book begins on wednesday the 20th through sunday, march 24th. this annual event features several authors including douglas brinkley, and congressman john lewis. please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your air and we will add them to our list. post on her wall at facebook.com/booktv or e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> for the next three hours booktv brings your a few panels and other presentations from the 2013 key west literary seminar in florida. first we hear from paul hendrickson, author of hemingway's -- "hemingway's boat". >> good morning, good morning, thank you.
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i moved up my flight, then go to the airport after, literally right after i spend ten minutes here reading and i am going to read something quite short on the theory that less is more which i try to tell my writing students. speaking of them, one of the reasons, hurtling back to philadelphia, i have to hold office hours with the lovely the 0 ivy brats. i bet get home and sleep well all the we haven't slept wilson's the jimmy carter administration. thank you, you holding up is the key. i bet i won't even have time to formally say thank you and goodbye.
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i will the say to miles how eloquent his little segway introduction has been and tell him goodbye and all rest of you for coming. i am supposed to read some things. i was fretting about that -- what that would be because i wanted to make it very short. i wanted to read from the end of the prologue. one of the things that i was trying to stress in the talk that i gave yesterday and the panel that i appeared on the day before is for all of the undeniable, appalling, dark side of ernest hemingway there was also the light, there was this bone of generosity. sometimes it came out best when a child was involved, and not
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his own child necessarily and especially an ill child who wouldn't respond to that. but he seemed to respond in a special way. so i was thinking of reading something of a key west passage and i said that would be like a piece of coal offering something to newcastle so i won't read that. i am just going to read this little moment from the end of the prologue and indeed it is the end of ernest hemingway's wife, when everything is lost. but there's still something there. backward, 17 days from his death to june 15th, 1961, at rochester, minnesota. man in the psychiatric ward of st. mary's hospital at the mayo
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clinic is writing a letter to a 9-year-old boy. the man right to done too -- two small sheets of notepaper and big round lead of hand with his trademark downhill slant and irreversible the damaged earning him this way -- ernest hemingway, his paranoid nightmare has found within himself at the end of his life the kindness and courage and momentary lucidity, not to say literary grace to right 210 beautiful words to a kid he likes very much. whenever i begin to feel revulsion at hemingway's ego and boorish behavior toward other human beings, and like to take out a copy of this letter. 210 words, with some much emotion tucked below the surface
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of the pros, the sentences piles driven by contain feeling and acute observation of the natural world would have been a half decent output for work day even in a master's crime. the boy whose name is frederick g. saviors although everyone including hemingway called him fritz has a congenital heart condition. he is the son of george savior, hemingway's small time dr. who was also one of hemingway's favorite duck hunting companions. in these last weeks hemingway has been brought once more from idaho for treatment to mayo. not long after this note, hemingway will fool his foolish doctors at the world-famous clinic into believing he is well enough to go home to idaho and
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almost immediately the shotgun will go off in the sunday quiet of the house that sits a couple hundred yards up the steep slope from the west bank of the big wood river. the patient on the work at st. mary's on june 15th, 1961, has just learned that dr. save your's son is in a denver hospital. in idaho, hemingway and fritz and fritz's father liked talking about the yankees and rainbow trout but none of that will never be the same again. st. mary's hospital, rochester, minn. june 15th, 1961. deer fritz, i was terribly sorry to hear this morning in a note from your father that you were
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laid up in denver for a few days more and speed off this note to tell you how much i hope you will be feeling better. it has been very hot and muggy here in rochester but the last two days it has turned cool and lovely with the night's wonderful for sleeping. the country is beautiful around here and i have had a chance to see some wonderful country along the mississippi where they used to drive the log is in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north, saw some good bass jumping in the river. i never knew anything about the upper mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall but not as many as in idaho and i hope we will both be back there shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences
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together. best always to you, old timer, from your good friend who misses you very much, mr. popov. ps, best to all the family. and feeling fine and very careful about things in general and hope to see you very soon. poppa. no one knows for sure, but these seem to be the last real sentences ernest hemingway set down on paper amid so much ruin, still a beauty. thank you very much. [applause] >> robert richardson is next from the 30th annual literary seminar in florida. he has written on henry david thoreau, william james and ralph
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waldo emerson delivered a speech titled in search of lost time, biography and fiction. "in search of lost time: biography and fiction". >> good morning. stacey shift was a wonderful biographer of among others cleopatra, recently observed biographers have all had two lives. okay in the back? can you hear? in one realm, she says, the biographers, they are moving forward in ignorance. in the other you are moving backward with something resembling omniscience. what she doesn't say is that along with the illusion of something like omniscience, the biographer usually has a lot of attitude on display. one can be washable, a
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geographic, feel pious, or the bunker, muckrakers, one can defend or defame, expos, sensationalized, sentimentalized, one can be a myth buster or a mythmaker. not many generalizations can cover that whole spectrum. but marcel proust could do it and did when he wrote in an early book before the big book, a little book called contraceptive, and there he says what intellect restores to us under the name of the past is not the past. in reality, in reality, as soon as each hour of one's wife has died, it embodies itself in some
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material object and remains captive forever unless we should happen on the object, recognizing what lies within, call it by its name and so set it free. as soon as each hour of your life has died it is embodied in or under some material object which explains why it is so hard to clean out the attic. it is not stuff, it is your life, piece by piece. it also suggests the power, the central role of the senses in connecting things. you have to see it and to know it is there to get it out and the idea that writing can restore something to us, that biography is an act of recovery as brendel lineapple says, is applicable to biography and fiction. here's another thing that two forms have in common that has been splendid be put by phyllis
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roads who wrote in parallel lives, we are desperate, it added the word, desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to give ourselves. for me that is true of biography, but it is also true of fiction. i want to give a single example. it is from dostoevsky's brothers karimov, a chapter called rebellion which is right before the grand inquisitor. ivan, the oldest brother, is giving his view on the christian idea that there is an all-powerful, all knowing benevolent god and that things will ultimately work out for the best and ivan makes his argument through stories and this is one of them. there was in those days a
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general of aristocratic connection, the owner of great estates. our general settled on his property of 2,000 souls, lives in palm and domineer over his poor neighbors as though they were defendants and buffoons. he has kennels of hundreds of towns and nearly a hundred dog boys all mounted and in uniform. sorry to put us all through this on a sunday morning, beautiful day in key west. i really am. one day, a serve boy, a child of 8, through a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general's favored held. why is my favorite dog lame? he is told that the boy threw a stone that heard the dog's pa. the general looked the child and down. take him. he was taken from his mother and

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