Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, celebrated wife of F. Scott and definite entity in her own right, was born today in Montgomery, Alabama in 1900.

The life of the Fitzgeralds is well-known for its parallel to the 1920s, a decade of wild times and success followed by depression, loss, financial uncertainty. Both glorified and overshadowed by her famously talented husband, Zelda found the passing of youth--which had been so integral to her high spirits and charm--extremely difficult. Things did not end well for her, but that can be read about in an article that I wrote for suite101 or many other fine websites and features devoted to Zelda. I just wanted to show an example of her artwork here and quote her words, and let Zelda be Zelda today. And I was going to include her painting Mad Tea Party, which seems to illustrate her breakdown and failure at a professional ballet career all surrounded by the beautiful but eerie forest and buildings of an asylum, but that's going back to the madness and sadness again.

This Zelda painting is of the Great Smoky Mountains and seems to reflect a quieter time in her mind. More of her paintings, including Mad Tea Party, can be seen at this excellent site.

...she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

Zelda Fitzgerald

(photo courtesy of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park website)

Ernest Hemingway was born today, July 21, in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. It's something to think about, Hemingway's having a birthday so close to Hunter S. Thompson, both men being writers who broke through to new forms of prose expressions, who were focused on the male experience, and unfortunately who both committed suicide by gunshot in their sixties most likely due to depression and health problems. Maybe it's the shared Cancer zodiac sign, although Hemingway was between Cancer and Leo. Still, I've read that Cancers are often tough on the outside like the crab that represents them, but the hard shell covers a watery and tender sensitivity. (Hemingway of course would say that was a bunch of total b.s., especially the word tender! And crab! Crabs are for catching, killing, eating and dipping in melted butter, lady.)

If you're ever in Oak Park, Hemingway's birthplace is now a museum -- click here to make an on-line visit -- and maintained in the same turn of the century condition and style that Ernest himself would have found it as a child. Later, the family moved to a different home in Oak Park, which Hemingway complained was a place of "wide lawns and narrow minds" yet which he also seemed to enjoy growing up in, particularly during his high school years.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn.…

Ernest Hemingway

day of the hunter

Today would have been the birthday of writer and general iconoclast Hunter Stockton Thompson. Click here for a suite101 link about H.S.T. and his writings and legacy. Otherwise the basic facts are:

Born: July 18, 1937, Louisville, Kentucky

Died: February 20, 2005, Woody Creek, Colorado

Ashes Shot Out of a Cannon Into Eternity: August 20, 2005

A few web sites list him as being born in 1939, but I'm pretty sure 1937 is correct as he noted that he was 67 in his suicide note. He would have been 70 today, but he did not want to be 70 today, so therefore he took himself out of the game.

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When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

Hunter S. Thompson

$13.13

Unhappy fact for Friday the 13th: F. Scott Fitzgerald's total royalties for all his works in the last year of his life came to $13.13. However....

In the 1950s, Fitzgerald's work experienced a whole new wave of interest and of course he's been listed among the top ten American writers ever since.

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

(From The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

according to sherwood

From Malcolm Cowley's introduction to the 1960 edition of Winesburg, Ohio (Viking Press), about Sherwood Anderson's personal breakthrough:

Then came another of his incandescent moments, one that he called "the most absorbingly interesting and exciting moment in any writer's life...the moment when he, for the first time, knows that he is a real writer." Twenty years later he described the experience in a letter, probably changing the facts, as he had a weakness for doing, but remembering how he felt:

...I walked along a city street in the snow. I was working at work I hated. Already I had written several long novels. They were not really mine. I was ill, discouraged, broke. I was living in a cheap rooming house...It was very shabby. I had no relatives in the city and few enough friends. I remember how cold the room was. On that afternoon I had heard that I was to lose my job.

...I turned on a light and began to write. I wrote, without looking up--I never changed a word of it afterward--a story called "Hands." It was and is a very beautiful story.

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The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.

(From "Hands," one of the stories that makes up Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio collection -- click here to buy the $2.50 Dover Thrift Edition.)

born today

Marcel Proust - 10 July 1871

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

I first came across Foujita when I bought a postcard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was a self-portrait of him and one of his many cat muses. I always liked the gold earrings that he wore and would have loved to have seen him and all those other Montparnasse crazies running around in their heyday.

Phyllis Birnbaum's biography, Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita--the Artist Caught Between East and West, is nicely done and she's also translated and written about many other Japanese subjects, particularly women. Click here to read an excerpt from the Foujita book.

I was interested in seeing Louise Brooks in an American movie...I'd already seen Pandora's Box and Prix de Beaute, but they were foreign and had very different themes and tones than anything Hollywood would have produced back then. Netflix offers a double feature of 1925/1926 silents The Show-Off and The Plastic Age, starring Louise Brooks and Clara Bow respectively, and it's really interesting to see those two actresses on a double-bill. Brooks and Bow were definitely hot socks as the phrase went back then and known for their sex appeal, but Louise is cool and cat-like while Clara is wild and all over the place. She's running and pouting and rolling her big eyes, flinging her arms around men and practically pulsing with excitement. Louise Brooks, on the other hand, is more watchful and sly, very graceful--even just walking back and forth from one rowhouse to another in the Philadelphia setting of The Show-Off, she climbs each step with a dancer's poise. She has beautiful posture and wears her clothes like a model, while Clara seems to always want to throw her clothes off and run wild. They're each fascinating and you could still steal either one's look and look fine today, some eighty years later, but they're quite distinct. It's like Clara = vixen, Louise = temptress.