And there it was, the word and world that captured all of my fantasies of escape, literature, community and a woman. Absinthe. Two literary moments in expatriotism, writing, drinking, fucking, and exploding our concepts of writing, photography, culture, publishing, criticism, all of it. Let me take a dose of the green elixir for your voyuristic enjoyment.
Hemingway, Pound, and Fitzgerald.
Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Brasai.
McElhenney, Jewell, and the rest of the post-novel expansion gang.
Here’s a dip from AI for each of these moments in history.
Hemingway’s Paris years (1921–1928) put him in the center of the Lost Generation—a loose, hard-drinking, hard-writing circle of expatriate artists. His regular “crew” included:
Core Literary Circle
-
Gertrude Stein – his mentor for a time; hosted a famous salon of writers and artists.
-
Ezra Pound – close friend and early champion of Hemingway’s work.
-
F. Scott Fitzgerald – drinking partner, rival, and friend (their adventures are legend).
-
John Dos Passos – novelist and political thinker, one of Hemingway’s closest early companions.
-
Ford Madox Ford – editor of The Transatlantic Review, occasional collaborator.
Artists & Cultural Figures Around the Same Orbit
-
James Joyce – they drank together more than they worked together; Joyce often dragged Hemingway into bar fights.
-
Sylvia Beach – owner of Shakespeare & Co., not a drinking buddy but a crucial supporter.
-
Robert McAlmon – writer/publisher who moved in the same cafés.
-
Harold Loeb – friend and rival (famously fictionalized in The Sun Also Rises).
-
Gerald & Sara Murphy – wealthy American patrons who hosted many of the group on the Riviera.
The Places They Drank, Argued, and Wrote
-
Café de Flore
-
Les Deux Magots
-
La Closerie des Lilas
-
Le Dôme
-
Shakespeare & Co. (bookshop/hangout)
It was at this point in my exploration that my mind fractured and jolted me onto a different timeline, like switching trains in the Manhattan subway system, but not remembering the station where you crossed over. The expansion of this ai-enhanced thread can be found in the MIT records of McElhenney’s work on hyperfiction theory.
on the spec: > next | index
