Agree on Hemingway. “The Old Man and the Sea” was the first German translated novel I read.

It makes sense that Hemingway would be easy to read in translation. His prose is so direct and straightforward.

I found that it is also the case that reading Borges in Spanish is relatively easy. I’m not good at foreign languages and my Spanish is pretty bad, but I found that when I tried to read a Borges story in Spanish, it didn’t seem all that hard. It helped, of course, that I was already familiar with the story in English.

Hemingway, Porter, Fitzgerald, Stein, Eliot, Steinbeck…

Rufus T.:

That rings a bell!

Currently I’ve graduated from reading Harry Potter in French to Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” in French — Hemingway’s post WWI novel about the Lost Generation recovering from the Great War. Or something like that….

Interestingly, I find “Sun” is easier to read than Harry Potter. JK Rowling is a master storyteller, but she is not a prose stylist. So many clumsy clauses stacked together bric-a-brac.

Hemingway, on the other hand, was magic. He seemed to bypass the verbal brain and input directly into the reader’s own experience. Technically he accomplished this by stripped-down prose, simple present tense declarative sentences and bare dialog.

Hemingway was an SOB, which I often found annoying, but It’s never hard to read Hemingway, even in French. His writing was flat hypnotic.

I must interject that James Whale is not just some Hollywood guy, whatever his politics or sexuality, but the director of:
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“Frankenstein” (1931)
“The Invisible Man” (1933)
“Bride of Frankenstein” (1935)
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Which makes Whale arguably the most seminal Hollywood director of horror. “Bride of Frankenstein” is a particularly remarkable achievement.

Offshoring of non-manufacturing jobs–Telemigration
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59860.html

Challenging Art Laffer’s assertion that broad-based US prosperity depends on China
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58984.html

The question of ***whether it is possible, in a world with cheap transportation and telecommunications, to maintain a significant wage premium over other countries*** is of extreme importance for the US, and it does not only apply to manufacturing jobs. Partly, the premium can be justified by better worker education and motivation (not doing too brilliantly at the first of these, at least), partly by rational regulations, partly by low energy costs (current policies seek the opposite), partly by appropriate tax policy (capital investment expensing, R&D cost expensing)…and partly by proper cost analysis of offshoring decisions to consider not just transportation costs but inventory costs and supply-chain-driven shortages (which a lot of companies did a pretty bad job of)….but I suspect that tariffs will also prove necessary if we want to accomplish this goal.

yes they were spectators, to the fight, dos passos had been against Wilson’s war from the outset, it colored his view of the current scene for a generation,

Richard Aubrey: since we’re on WWI literature, contemporary British novelist Pat Barker wrote a couple of novels about plastic surgery and facial reconstruction in WWI: “Life Class” (2007) and “Toby’s Room” (2012). She also wrote the Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995). The legacy of WWI casts a long shadow in England.