When you ask someone old, tired questions, you are apt to receive old, tired answers.
— Hemingway, The Paris Review Interviews, replying to the question, “Would you suggest newspaper work for the young writer?” OK. Hemingway was a dick. But I also think this petulance reveals his limitations as a writer. His comments lack empathy and imagination, which are writerly qualities. The question isn’t uninteresting. As he points out, journalism enforces declarative sentences. But journalism is also almost ridiculously mediated, prone to self-congratulation and resistant to self-awareness: it reduces the world to poses, roles, constructs, templates–one of which is the tough guy adventurer.
