Since it’s a rainy, gross morning in Pennsylvania, I’ve spent the morning going through photographs on my phone, culling them. And that brings me to this photo. This is a painting that hung in my room in the intensive care ward at St. Joseph’s earlier this month. It’s an autumn painting, a blanket of leaves … Continue reading A Gatsby Party
Tag: F.-Scott-Fitzgerald
Tonight, Garrison Keillor is recording his final A Prairie Home Companion, to be broadcast tomorrow night in its regular time slot. There’s a certain sadness to this. My parents have listened to A Prairie Home Companion for decades, and I seem to recall that they went to a live show in the early 90s. I … Continue reading On the Eve of Garrison Keillor’s Final Prairie Home Companion
About a year ago I had to edit some copy a colleague had written for the catalog. It was a thoughtful, well-written piece, and it also happened to run over five hundred words, which was about two and a half times the number of words that would fit into the space we had on the … Continue reading The Semi-Colon Is Never Not Stylish
Last week I reread The Great Gatsby. In writing a few days ago about the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming 3-D film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan, I wrote that “it’s inspired me to reread Gatsby for the first time in a few years.” This also prompted me to check my … Continue reading On Rereading The Great Gatsby
Come Christmas time, there’s a new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby coming to theaters, directed by Moulin Rouge‘s Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the mysterious Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan. I’ve read Gatsby a half-dozen times over the years, drawn as much to … Continue reading On the Great Gatsby Trailer — and Mutant Healing Factors
At times, I think of myself as an amateur historian. It's unsurprising that I think of myself in that way; I was a history student in college, after all, and my library is filled with history books, from general histories of the world to histories of specific periods to histories of specific ideas. Among the … Continue reading On Fascinating Periods of History
To my chagrin, I made it through college without ever having to read F. Scott Fitzgerald in an English course. I did, however, read Fitzgerald for my American history course. I had to write a paper on "Echoes of the Jazz Age," an essay where Fitzgerald used this memorable phrase to describe the 1920s — … Continue reading On Favorite Characters In a Book
Here we are, nearly a month past Bloomsday, and what do I discover? I write likeJames Joyce I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing! James Joyce! Except that it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald I really try and emulate… :-/ Thanks to David McIntee for the link…
I love reading Slate. It’s an online magazine with eclectic content. Politics to video games, pop music to the ethics of cloning, columnists from Christopher Hitchens to Timothy Noah, Slate has insight into almost everything. Here are my two finds of today. First, a 45-minute audio discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. One … Continue reading On Fun With Slate
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in American lives. Kelsey Grammer is one of the great actors of our time. Frasier is one of the great television programs of all time. Unfortunately, Kelsey Grammer’s second act blows chunks. FOX debuted tonight Kelsey Grammer Presents: The Sketch Show. Half an hour of … Continue reading On Kelsey Grammer's Second Act
Little known fact. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and coiner of the term “The Jazz Age,” wrote heroic fantasy. Why bring this up? On a mailing list I subscribe to the question was asked, “It’s interesring to note that though Hemingway and Fitzgerald did make it big, they still were miserable and … Continue reading On F. Scott Fitzgerald and Heroic Fantasy