My experience with Burns docs is probably similar to many of you-- I thought the Civil War series was fantastic at the time (though I understand it didn’t age well), then had diminishing returns of little or no interest in many of the others (‘National Parks: America’s Greatest idea’ and ‘The Vietnam War’ were good; Jazz, baseball, etc. …meh).
I went through a Hemingway phase when I was younger, reading most of his work (I especially liked his short stories). I also kind of got caught up in the Hemingway myth to an extent, although even at a young age I realized he was a deeply flawed human being and a raging alcoholic, so not exactly a great role model for an aspiring writer or for anybody.
But Hemingway did have a hell of a life, while it lasted. He spent time in Michigan’s U.P., which I love to visit (and he wrote the ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ stories based in the U.P.). I took a trip to Key West in my late 20s and visited the Hemingway house, where he did some of his most prolific writing, while partying his brains out at the same time. Here’s what the guide said Hemingway’s daily schedule was back then: Wake up 6am; 6am-noon: write diligently; noon-6pm: take his boat out and go deep sea fishing; 6pm-?: hit the bars, like Sloppy Joes, and drink. At the time, still young, not yet married or seriously attached, working a boring office job in the frozen north, I admit the thought of a similar lifestyle was fun to imagine. I talked to a bartender who used to be an accountant in a northern state and gave it all up after a vacation to live in semi-poverty in the Keys; he called it “Keys Disease”.
Anyway, it looks like the Hemingway doc will only be streaming on a paid PBS subscription service or Amazon Prime video, which is an extra $3.99/mo on top of a Prime subscription, which I don’t want to pay for. So it looks like my only option is to watch it by appointment at 8pm on April 5-7. Watching something at the exact date and time the network tells me to, like the grim olden days? Horrors (shudder).
