Daily Archives: September 24, 2013

A Brief Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald on His Birthday

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Dear Scott,

Another year has gone by, and I still find you as enigmatic and problematic as ever. You, who could write such beautiful words, ruffle my feathers like few others. You, who squandered such exemplary gifts, frustrate me to the point of madness. Although I’ve never loved you, not even a bit, I have spent some wonderful time in your company. At this point in the game, I realize that I will never stop questioning you and, in questioning you, relentlessly, learn more about myself than I ever cared to know. Happy birthday, you beautiful bastard.

Yours (but not really),

Maedez

F. Scott Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant. Shadowland, 1921.

F. Scott Fitzgerald by Gordon Bryant. Shadowland, 1921.

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”-This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Daily Diversion #161: Reading with George

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George Bellows Bookmark

Bookmark: Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909, by George Bellows Book: STILL, by David S. Shields

“Both of the inventors of the visual glamour, Eickemeyer and Genthe, came from the ranks of the art photographers, that cadre of aesthetically ambitious cameramen and-women who in the 1890s organized into an international community intent on fighting the slapdash amateurism of the mass of Kodak-wielding weekend shutterbugs, the routine posing and eclectic composition of the professional portrait studio, and the condescension of a fine arts critical establishment that denigrated photography as a mechanical craft.”-STILL American Silent Motion Picture Photography, by David S. Shields

A Selection of Quotes from Frequently Banned Books, Part One

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  • “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”-Candide, Voltaire
  • “He look’d a little disorder’d, when he said this, but I did not apprehend anything from it at the time, believing as it us’d to be said, that they who do those things never talk of them; or that they who talk of such things never do them.”-Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
  • “There ain’t so sin and their ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”-The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck