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Posts Tagged ‘F Scott Fitzgerald’

Life in the Fast Lane

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , on June 11, 2013| 2 Comments »

I’m on the road again. It’s a brutal ride in one day to Nashville, filled with trucks, billboards, country music, and this time I brought an audiobook along for fun. Inspired by our trip to see Gatsby at our newest cineplex, I’m listening to Z : a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler. Zelda Sayre was nearly 18 years old in Montgomery, AL when she first met the author, masquerading as a soldier in 1918.

The book takes Zelda’s point of view since really all we’ve ever heard about her was that she was crazy and institutionalized. Her father was a judge in their Southern town and marrying the Northern carpetbagger, against her parents advice, seemed like a good idea at the time. And that’s where I am now, in a wi-fi free zone somewhere in TN, when she gets off the train for the first time in NYC. She’s going to meet Scott at St Patrick’s Cathedral, with a priest.

Excitement is building, I can’t wait for them to meet  Pablo Picasso, the Hemingways and Gertrude Stein! And to find out if she was really mentally ill, or just another smart woman not willing to compromise or subsume her life to align it with her husband. The Flapper once told me about an aunt who stopped cleaning the house, and stopped cooking after one or two too many babies. She was sent away to an asylum, and never returned.

When I left this morning, I heard that Richmond Airport had been evacuated because of a “serious threat.” The Rocker was flying but not through this VA airport, so I just kept packing the car. Then I heard on an NPR station that Princeton University was evacuated:

“Please evacuate the campus and all university offices immediately and go home unless otherwise directed by your supervisor,” the school’s website message said. “Do not return to campus for any reason until advised otherwise.” http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/11/us/new-jersey-princeton-evacuation/index.html?iref=allsearch

Fitzgerald attended Princeton and Joyce Carol Oates, a Princeton Prof, tweeted: “At some schools, like Princeton, there is a formal honor code. But “honor” shouldn’t be just for undergraduates.”  I wonder if Fitzgerald, who just missed serving in WWI, could have imagined a world where bomb threats are called in to his alma mater. Where newspaper reporters, a nearly extinct breed who would rather risk jail than give up their sources, have no choice when their emails are hacked. Where buttons are pushed in New Mexico and people are killed in Pakistan? Unknown

 

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Word for the Day

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 14, 2013| 2 Comments »

The word for today on Dictionary.com is “Quacksalver.” I love it when I’m unfamiliar with a word so I eagerly clicked on its meaning:

Noun  1. a charlatan. 2. a quack doctor.
Origin: 
1570–80;  < early Dutch  (now kwakzalver )
Of course, quacksalver is onomatopoeic. Someone who is hawking his snake oil cure-all from the back of a pioneer wagon, someone who’s home made salve promises to do everything. Someone who is not who he appears to be, like Jay Gatsby.
Bob scooped me up on Mother’s Day from my self-induced TCM mom/alone/coma, and deposited me in our town’s newest movie theatre symposium. We didn’t see Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D version of The Great Gatsby, which was screening later in the evening, but we sat through 20 minutes of previews until F Scott Fitzgerald’s characters materialized onscreen in all their digitized glory. I’m so glad I waited until the next day, on the bike at the gym, to read one critic’s take on this classic American novel turned screenplay.
Fitzgerald coined the phrase, “The rich are very different from you and me,” and this was his most subtle way of proving the point. It was the Jazz Age, skirt lengths were going up while the price of bootleg liquor was going down. The reason the love story of Daisy and Jay has lasted so long is because it’s a pretty universal one. Boy meets girl, boy can’t have girl for a myriad of reasons (like class or clan differences) and chaos ensues. But more than a romance, it’s a morality play. Fitzgerald’s genius is in his elegiac prose:
“It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Gatsby creates an empire and holds lavish parties at his Long Island mansion with one thing in mind, winning Daisy back. But he didn’t go to Yale with Nick and Tom, and he didn’t graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. He will never fit in with this polo-playing crowd; Gatsby created an image of himself built on his shadow world of respectability – a precursor to the celebrity culture of today. Old money vs new money. Like Juliet or Zelda or Anna Karenina, Daisy Buchanan could never be his happy ending.
I was 23 in 1972, attending SUNY College at Purchase when I drove to one of those “cottages” in Rhode Island with a friend from the Dance Department to audition for the ballroom scene in The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. My friend Nadjia made the cut, they told me I “…didn’t look the part.” Little did they know that I was the daughter of a real Flapper, a Dime a Dance girl, who shimmied with Cab Calloway at a speakeasy. But then again, I didn’t know that either. My Mother kept a few secrets too.
When the Flapper was in her 80s, my brother Michael arranged for Cab Calloway to surprise her at a party on Lake Minnetonka. And I realized that my Mother must have felt very much the same way I did my whole life, the way Fitzgerald felt:
i.2.s-great-gatsby-farrow-redford-dicaprio-mulligan
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

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