Monday, October 10, 2016

October 10: Hot Spell, Ingmar Bergman, Ernest Hemingway

The creek's water was still warm from the hot spell . . .

It's September at Tinker Creek, and summer is still holding on.  Warming the creek water and driving nature crazy.  Ants swarm.  Dillard notes that the woods are "restless as birds."  Like all early autumn warm snaps, it will soon pass.  Ants will go underground.  Birds will wing south.  Killing frost will appear.

It was close to 70 degrees in my neck of the woods today.  I drove around all day with my windows down and sunroof open.  Even now, 9:30 at night, it hasn't cooled down all that much.  I'm sitting in my living room, watching Psycho with my daughter.  Another entry in our private film appreciation class.

The Swedish Academy announced this morning that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced early Thursday.  I'm not sure what the weather's like in Sweden these days.  Maybe it's just as warm.  Swans gliding down a river.  People sitting in outside cafes, sipping strong coffee and eating meatballs with tiny forks.  Maybe talking about Ingmar Bergman movies.  Or Hitchcock.

At least, that's what I imagine.  Stockholm just a Scandinavian version of my home town, with some snooty academics thrown in to keep things interesting.  I watched a video biography about Ernest Hemingway this morning.  Hemingway's publisher said in an interview that the Nobel Prize is the closest a writer can come to canonization.  When Hemingway won it, he climbed into bed with his wife and said, "I won it.  The Swedish thing."

Canonization.  Saint Marty knows a few things about that.  And he loves Swedish meatballs, too.  It's fate.

Ernie becoming a saint

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