Tag Archives: Reading

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

Blogging and Grief

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As some of you know, my dog, Crosley, and my step-dad, Charlie, were both ill last week. I would like to thank everyone who sent their prayers, good wishes, and happy thoughts our way. We lost both of them on Friday the Thirteenth, just 6 hours apart. I was there for the one, but not the other. My husband held strong 100 miles away, as he cuddled Crosley during his final moments.

Since then, I’ve been reading a lot of Ibsen, drinking too much strong tea, and helping plan the funeral for the man who raised me. Yesterday, in a few short hours, I finished a short story that I started a year ago. Thank goodness that my words have not failed me. Blogging will be hit or miss for the next week or so, but it will not cease. I love my little A Small Press Life community too much for that. Some day, when I am up to the challenge, I will share with you what Crosley and Charlie meant to me.

“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer…and everything collapses.”-Colette