Do I need to say that 2020 was an awful year? Must I? Let’s watch a Carl Sagan video before I get to my annual review of the first post of each month. This is not the “Pale Blue Dot” video I was looking for. I went through my blog archives, I went through my … Continue reading 2020: The Year In Review
Tag: F.-Scott-Fitzgerald
Some recent thinking on Twitter… F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby enters the public domain at the beginning of 2021. Header photo: “Gatsby,” by Larry Yeiser, licensed CC BY-ND 2.0
Saturday I drove down to Baltimore to visit Loudon Park Cemetery. I hadn’t been since the end of January, it was a nice day, and a cemetery is a place where one can socially distance without much difficulty. I had no idea if I would be able to get into the cemetery; some cemeteries are … Continue reading Questionnare!
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
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