Do you read in the bathroom? I do. I read TIME and the latest catalog from Jamestown Distributors. I find them relaxing. I always keep a third source in the little green stand we have set up in the corner and lately I’ve been reading Ernest Hemingway – Selected Letters 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker. Its 948 pages. At four pages per day (average two letters) I should be done sometime next April. That’s a hell of a lot of shit. I think about things like that.
I also think about why I would want to read those letters. Hem wrote something like 6000 of them over 40 years and I studied him back when I was in school so part of me wants to read about the background stuff and also about his relationships with people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. But there’s something else. I’m guessing because I once wanted to be a writer and famous. I had an idea for a novel in which a fictitious editor collects and publishes all the letters and anecdotes about a fictitious famous person and by doing so becomes famous himself which would then make me famous but it really wouldn't be me because I'd publish under a Pseudonym and so on, kind of a contemporary Boswell and I actually did start it but ran out of things to talk about. Unlike Johnson, I couldn't write the life of a broomstick. But I still think about it now and then.
Anyway, the thing I really wanted to say was the new phrase for going to the bathroom in our house is I’m going to read a few letters the way some people say I’m going to see a man about a horse (which I still don’t get) or It’s time for my morning constitutional which I do get even though I’ve no clue where it came from. Now my wife and I can say things like I always read a few letters before going out for a sail in front of our stuffy New England neighbors or Let me get back, I’m in the middle of a few letters since we both work out of our home and wear wireless headsets and sometimes these things happen. It’s like out own private joke. We seem to be gathering more and more jokes these days, but that’s for another day.
So have a good week, as always.
Yours truly,
Iko Ward
