Another countdown! Today The Community Library in Ketchum sent out a full schedule to attendees ($95 in-person/$30 virtual-only) for its annual Ernest Hemingway Seminar with headline: “20 Days Away! ‘To Have and Have Not.’”

I have not read it. And so I am reading it.

Keynote speaker Dr. Kirk Curnutt published in 2017 Reading Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not: Glossary and Commentary.

And so I am also reading that.

Last night I dutifully read the front matter and before proceeding further also read the back matter to Curnutt’s book and what I notice from the index is not a single mention of the Jewish community in Key West.

Also published in 2017 by director of the Key West Literary Seminar is a book titled The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, and Revolutionaries (1823–1969), a beautifully typeset and designed volume by Sand Paper Press.

Now its index does not mention basements. Nor does Curnutt’s. But I vividly recall basements as a topic in the Haskell book and have yet to learn whether it is a topic in the one by Curnutt.

That it to say: one has. And yet to be determined: whether the other has or has not.

Countdown: 2/320