Triste

Hills Like White Elephants was maybe the saddest story I've ever read. Then Joe goes and tells me that it's about abortion. Does it have to be about abortion? Can I make it about something else in my own mind? I don't think that the point is to know what operation she's talking about, just that he wants her to have it, she wants to please him, he only wants her to please him if it means pleasing her too, the only way for her to be happy is if he's happy, he wants her to have a backbone and she can't, all she wants is comfort. I don't think we're supposed to know what specifically they are talking about, because leaving their argument in the general, theoretical form lets all of us relate to both the man and the woman, because we've all probably been on both sides of one of those vague, amorphous, but incredibly important arguments. Ugh abortion.

The Killers blew my mind because of the warped sense of time Hemingway has us running in. He really only gives us dialogue at the beginning when they're sitting at the counter, so it sounds like the whole conversation is taking place over a span of about five minutes, but as they talk about the clock on the wall you realize that almost an hour and a half has gone by. There must be so much physical action going on that we are not told about. There is no talk of struggle between Nick and Sam and their captors, but I'm sure it happened and we were just left in the dark about it. Otherwise they would have been complying with Max and Al's outrageous requests blindly and dumbly. Huh.