The Portable Feast

I was reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast this afternoon and came across the following: "I had heard complaining all my life. I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises, certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon."

Let's zoom in. "...certainly BETTER THAN EZRA learning to play the bassoon." Do you think this could be the origin of the band's name? I think it could. A quick Google shows us that there are myriad explanations for the name, none of which the band itself will confirm. Most involve another band or entity named Ezra, than which the band thought itself better. There is also a reference to another book with the phrase buried in it, Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land to (Ezra) Pound calling him "the better craftsman" in Italian, and I don't know what all else. I think I like not knowing.

Even better than that curiosity, I found in the Feast this little gem:
"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

The book is a side of Hemingway I did not expect, having only read The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises, and those a very long time ago. I guess The Sun... gives us a glimpse at the Paris Hem, not so burdened with machismo, drinking wine and not always whiskey, wandering and hunkering down in cafes to write, but the Feast really fleshes him out. It's a supremely appealing vision. There's something so rewarding about reading someone's oeuvre rather than just one book. I'm finding that with Thurber as I hunt down (well, more like come across) everything he did. It's the same as having a friend and getting to know them better as you see them in different moods and contexts. Not such a rich experience if you don't bother to do that, if you let your idea of them stay static.