The title of this column, A Situation Report, is stolen from a selection of Ernest Hemingway's journalism.
It's a rambling little piece without much of an obvious point, but although it was written late in his career it is nevertheless Hemingway to a tee.
Despite my feminist preoccupations and sentimental vegetarianism I am a big fan of whisky-drinking, bar-brawling, womanising, big game-hunting and bull-fighting Ernest Hemingway. In my mind he's somewhat of a hero.
At the close of every stark sentence you feel as though you have achieved something. As a reader you can nod, pat yourself on the back and say, ''Yes. That was good.''
As an English major this quality is particularly appealing. No matter how convoluted everything else might be you can always rely on Hemingway to get straight to the point.
Now, I'm going to draw an analogy between Ernest Hemingway and 21st-century pop music.
I'm trying to bridge the gap between my modernist sensibilities and my passion for ''low'' culture.
Even though it took me a long time to come to terms with it, pop music is something I unashamedly enjoy as much as eating food or taking a shower.
Is it too much to claim that the likes of One Direction and Rihanna (or at least their songwriters) are modern-day equivalents to Papa Hemingway?
Pop music, in all its glory, is formulaic. Listen to anything floating around the top 40 and you will find verses, choruses and swelling bridges.
Whoever is writing these songs is quite deliberately crafting the most streamlined of earworms.
But how, the people cry, could Hemingway possibly be formulaic?
Well, I'm not sure. But I do know that brothers Adam and Ben Long created an application last year that assesses how Hemingway-esque your writing is.
The app judges the ''reading level'' of a piece of writing and lets you know if you're being too dense.
If that isn't formulaic then I really don't know what is. Like any pop song, every sentence Hemingway ever wrote was carefully constructed to enter the human brain with clarity and immediacy.
Hemingway's writing is accessible and so is pop music and according to me, that's what makes it great.
It's all well and good to twist myself into knots trying to justify my interests, but in the end humans are susceptible to well-structured, universal works of art.
On some fundamental level we want to hear young men and women singing about broken hearts, and we want to hear them sing about it in simple, unadulterated terms.
There's something quite lovely about sitting down to write an essay and putting on the most inane music you can find.
If nothing else it's a lot harder to swing off on an angst-driven tangent when every third word is ''baby'' and every fifth is ''love''.
Reading Hemingway provides a similar level of comfort. The chances of your stumbling across something you don't understand are slim, and sometimes it's nice to take a break and enjoy something without having to think too hard.
Though it might be pertinent to consider that in terms of angst Hemingway might be related a little more closely to Sonic Youth than Taylor Swift.
All theorising aside, I have listened to the new One Direction song at least 50 times today and I intend to listen to it a good deal more.
But I've also spent a couple of hours with Hemingway and a couple more with post-modern devil Georges Perec, so all in all I think the damage to my intellect hasn't been too great. ?
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin university student.
