Pauline, Patrick, Ernest, John, and Gregory Hemingway with four marlins on the dock in Bimini, 20 July 1935. Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.

Ernest Hemingway’s grandson John Hemingway will be trolling for wahoo off the coast of Bimini, the island Hemingway made famous in his novel Islands in the Stream.

The Bahamas Weekly reports that John Hemingway, son of Gregory Hemingway, will be participating in the Wahoo Smackdown II hosted by the Bimini Big Game Club Resort & Marina, scheduled for February 21-23.

“This is a real coup for us,” tournament director Paul Cameron told the Bahamas Weekly. “Imagine being able to brag that you actually fished with a Hemingway, and in Bimini, of all places.”

John Hemingway, who wrote a well-received memoir of his family, Strange Tribe, is on assignment at the tournament for Sport Fishing Magazine.

He’s been a frequent visitor to Bimini, the island where his uncle Leicester lived and ran a newspaper before he committed suicide, like his brother Ernest. Ernest frequented Bimini, too, and helped establish the island as a sport fishing destination.

The documentary Running From Crazy details the tragedies that have come to define the Hemingway family, and Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon is said to play a strong thematic role.

Mariel, Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter, counts seven suicides in the family, including her sister Margaux, who killed herself 35 years to the day after the author’s suicide. Another sister, Muffet, suffers from schizophrenia. Mariel Hemingway works in suicide prevention with the group Out of the Darkness and has been a crusader for awareness of depression.

The most startling revelation is Mariel’s assertion that her father Jack, the author’s first son who died of heart problems in 2000, sexually abused her sisters.

In a scene from the film, she wades into an icy mountain river and into her family’s chilling history. ”Looking up at a mountain, listening to a river was the only time I felt sane,” she tells viewers. “In the house, everything felt dead. I would often crack ice to jump into cold water. I liked anything that made me feel alive.”

“Mariel herself didn’t really know what the family legacy was all about,” director Barbara Kopple tells Entertainment Weekly’s Inside Movies blog. “Nobody ever talked about [Ernest]. Nobody ever read his books. It’s such a personal story. It’s so raw and it’s still really unfolding.”

She tells Sundance: “What I do with a film is struggle to get under the surface to see the story behind the story and see what makes people tick and why they make the decisions they make. As I got to know Mariel a bit I realized that that’s what she’s doing in her life. She’s struggling to dig beneath the surface of her own family history. I was thrilled to be on this journey with her.”

The Guardian calls the film ”one of the bleakest snapshots of the human soul” at Sundance.

That’s saying a lot.

One of the main

But now, the cats are in federal court.

“At some point several years ago, a museum visitor expressed concern about the cats’ care,” reports the Christian Science Monitor. “The visitor took that concern all the way to the US Department of Agriculture and, literally, made a federal case out of it.”

The USDA insisted the museum needed to better confine the cats at night, give them more elevated resting spaces and get an exhibitor’s license. The museum countered that the cats were a local issue, not a federal one. A judge sided with the feds, though, and when the museum appealed, the appeals court panel did, too. With a bit of a caveat.

“Notwithstanding our holding, we appreciate the Museum’s somewhat unique situation, and we sympathize with its frustration,” wrote Chief Judge Joel Dubina. “Nevertheless, it is not the court’s role to evaluate the wisdom of federal regulations implemented according to the powers constitutionally vested in Congress.”

The decision is ironic, notes the Monitor, given Key West’s iconoclastic reputation.

“The locals don’t even consider themselves part of the United States of America,” writes Warren Richey. ”They refer to the place as the Conch Republic.”

At last, the perfect gift

Simon & Schuster Audio is releasing The Ernest Hemingway Audiobook Library — all of Hemingway’s novels, short stories and nonfiction on 15 CDs. The set also includes a conversation with Patrick Hemingway, the author’s last surviving son, who talks about growing up in Key West and the life and legacy of his famous father. That’s 133 hours of pure Hemingway.

For the past decade, Simon & Schuster has been re-releasing the author’s work to appeal new generations of book listeners and readers. The collections Hemingway on War, Hemingway on Hunting and Hemingway on Fishing are all being released in hardcover and eBook for the holidays, too.

Readers on the audiobook set include Donald Sutherland reading The Old Man and the Sea, William Hurt reading The Sun Also Rises and Stacy Keach reading his short stories. Other actors featured in the collection include Brian Dennehy, Boyd Gaines, Bruce Greenwood, John Bedford Lloyd, Josh Lucas, Will Patton, Campbell Scott, and Patrick Wilson.

How did we live

Finally, author Philip Greene gives us To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion. The book explores the words of Hemingway through drink. Or does it explore the drinks of Hemingway through his words? Either way, well-read drinkers or well-drunk readers can find recipes and references for fifty Hemingway beverages, from the Negroni (Across the River and Into the Trees) to the Vermouth Cassis (A Moveable Feast, et al).

But the mojito? Drink carefully, literary imbibers. Writes the Washington Post:

Greene, however, has a particular bone to pick with one Cuban drink linked to Hemingway: the mojito. After all, a famous handwritten note hangs in a touristy Havana bar and reads, “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita.”

Allegedly the handwriting is Hemingway’s. Greene — whose day job at the Pentagon is as a trademark attorney for the U.S. Marine Corps — is not buying it.

“It annoys me that the mojito is the drink most associated with Hemingway. Yet you will not find the mojito in his prose nor in his letters,” he says.

The book is a biography of sorts, that focuses on Hemingway’s time aboard his beloved fishing boat the Pilar. It was “the material possession he valued most — through three wives, a Nobel Prize and all his ruin,” Hendrickson says.

The Chicago Tribune writes a thoughtful account of Hendrickson’s acceptance speech, in which he discusses the former Washington Post reporter and seminary student discusses how the idea was born after a chance encounter with Hemingway’s brother on a seaplane ramp en route to the Bahamas.

“My theory on book-writing,” Hendrickson says, “is that we don’t find our books — they find us.”

Good thing they have gondolas. David Frey photo.

Venice is all about water. Just not quite this much water.

It seems high winds and high tides have conspired to raise the water level nearly five feet above sea level, further submerging the city of water.

It’s called acqua alta, and, say the folks at Grist, it’s happening more than it used to. This latest event is a near record.

“There is one advantage that Venice has in the event that its fate mirrors that of Atlantis,” writes Philip Bump, “an advantage over many other low-lying and ocean-adjacent locales as sea levels rise: It’s already outfitted with a full complement of boats.”

“After all his travels,

Leithauser writes a compelling piece that explores the geography of Hemingway’s world and his literature. From Michigan to Paris, Africa to Cuba, Leithauser found himself following in Hemingway’s footsteps and being captivated by his writing.

“And has any writer, ever, made such comprehensive geographic claims?” Leithauser asks. Here’s a bit from his visit to Cuba:

This summer, now in my late fifties, I finally made it to Cuba. Boy, was I in Hemingway country! For nearly half his life this steamy island was his primary residence. Havana provided the opening scenes for “To Have and Have Not,” his novel about rum- and people-smuggling, and, more significantly, supplied the genius loci for the last novel published in his lifetime, the heartbreaking “Old Man and the Sea.” This valedictory story represented an extraordinary feat of discipline, a display of rigorous lyricism at a time when, his physical and mental health in grave decline, he’d turned into something of a prisoner in a morass of his own immense, unfinished, unfinishable manuscripts. I visited Hemingway’s house, Finca Vigía, its grounds now an outdoor museum, and stood on its hilltop and surveyed the skyline of Havana, glittering some nine miles in the distance. I’ve seen Hemingway described as the most famous writer in the world during his lifetime; surely, in terms of fame, there was no plausible contemporary competitor to this indomitably competitive man.

Congratulations and thanks

Check it out …

I find myself feeling more for Plimpton in this testy interview at Hemingway’s Finca Vigia in Cuba. Hemingway made no secret he was bored of the young writer’s questions. Poor Plimpton had to endure the wrath of the old master.

Thank God he did. For posterity’s sake. This interview unearths some of Hemingway’s tips for young writers, tips he didn’t give out too freely.

There are, of course, lots of great Hem gems in here. This is just one of them, but it sounds oh so very Hemingway.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.