When fake bulls run amok in Florida

Every year, from July 18 to July 23, in Florida’s Key West, where Hemingway spent most of the 1930s, the Hemingway Days Festival celebrates the writing prowess of one of the greatest American writers.

Every year, from July 18 to July 23, in Florida’s Key West, where Hemingway spent most of the 1930s, the Hemingway Days Festival celebrates the writing prowess of one of the greatest American writers. The festival kicks off with literary readings, exhibitions, and contests with burly, thickset, bearded lookalikes of Ernest Hemingway taking part in a bull run with fake bulls.

The bull run, ‘For Whom the Bull Tolls’ is a spoof on the charging of bulls “enciro”, an annual festival held in a sleepy little Spanish city, Pamplona where bulls come thundering down the narrow cobblestone streets. The weeklong celebration that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors has been made famous outside Spain by the Hemingway classic “The Sun also Rises”.

The novel deals with a group of American and British expatriates who are in Pamplona to witness the bull fights. It also talks of a generation rendered decadent and dissolute by the World War I and the themes of love, death, renewal and hope and courage to face oneself. “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

Hemingway founded a school of writing known for his sparse writing style and retreat from emotion. In fact he begrudged every adjective, every redundant word. Thought reduced to its essence, omitting what is superfluous, is to tantalise the reader—a piece of writing shouldn’t be evident from the surface, rather the crux should be below the surface and be allowed to shine through. This was known as the iceberg theory or the theory of omission—“the style of eloquent repression”, to say so much by saying so little. He said the writer’s job was to tell the truth and truth required no embellishment.

When life is at the edge, when men and women are up against the wall and yet they exhibit an ability to face the odds without panic, Hemingway has a phrase: “grace under pressure”.
Hemingway was supposed to have written the shortest story in the world, a great example of flash fiction. His purported authorship was the result of a lunch table wager. And the story is “For sale. Baby shoes never worn” with sad implications.

About Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, all of 300 words, famous for its eloquence and precision, Hemingway said, “It wasn’t by accident the Gettysburg address was so short, the laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics”. Hemingway was a Nobel and a Pulitzer prize winner. As long as one loves English, his books will be read and honoured.

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