Hunger Was Good Discipline

So said Ernest Hemingway in the eighth chapter of his autobiographical A Moveable Feast. The book, published posthumously in 1964, chronicles his early years in Paris as a member of the Lost Generation. He writes of trying to support himself and his wife while pursuing an unstable career that relies on the mercurial interests of faceless editors (some things never change).

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at the tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg Gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard.

So the name of this blog stems from that theory, which I intend to test. God knows I’m hungry. I don’t intend to do any original reporting here in the garden. Rather, I intend to write “nothing that anyone in America would buy”, so as to temporarily stave off the hunger while practicing the craft that originally seduced me. The bakeries will come soon enough.