F. Scott Fitzgerald Tells His 11-Year-Old Daughter What to Worry About (and Not Worry About) in Life, 1933

in Letters, Literature | September 24th, 2013

Born 117 years ago today in St. Paul, Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that somewhat louche denizen—some might say inventor—of the “Jazz Age,” has been immortalized as the tender young man we see above: Princeton dropout, writer of The Great Gatsby, boozy companion to beautiful Southern belle flapper Zelda Sayre. Amidst all the glamorization of his best and worst qualities, it’s easy to forget that Fitzgerald was also the father of a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, who went on to have her own successful career as a writer. Unlike the children of some of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, Frances thrived, which must be some testament to her father’s parenting (and to Zelda’s as well, though she allegedly hoped, like Daisy Buchanan, that her daughter would become a “beautiful little fool”).

We get more than a hint of Fitzgerald’s fatherly character in a wonderful little letter that he sent to her in August of 1933, when Frances was away at summer camp. Fitzgerald, renowned for his extremes, counsels an almost Epicurean middle way—distilling, perhaps, hard lessons learned during his decline in the thirties (which he wrote of candidly in “The Crack Up”). He concludes with a list of things for his daughter to worry and not worry about. It’s a very touching missive that I look forward to sharing with my daughter some day. I’ll have my own advice and silly in-jokes for her, but Fitzgerald provides a very wise literary supplement. Below is the full letter, published in the New York Times in 1958. The typos, we might assume, are all sic, given Fitzgerald’s penchant for such errors:

AUGUST 8, 1933
LA PAIX RODGERS’ FORGE
TOWSON, MATYLAND

DEAR PIE:

I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy– but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds…

I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?…

Half-wit, I will conclude. Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship…
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
© Am I trying to make my body a useful intrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

“Nothing Good Gets Away”: John Steinbeck Offers Love Advice in a Letter to His Son (1958)

Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Story “May Day,” and Nearly All of His Other Work, Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

The Recipes of Iconic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Marquis de Sade & More

in Books, Food & Drink, K-12, Literature | September 24th, 2013

It comes as no surprise that Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, possessed a sweet tooth. Having dazzled young readers with visions of Cavity-Filling Caramels, Everlasting Gobstoppers, and snozzberry-flavored wallpaper, Dahl’s candy of choice was the more pedestrian Kit-Kat bar. In addition to savoring one daily (a luxury little Charlie Bucket could but dream of, prior to winning that most golden of tickets) he invented a frozen confection called “Kit-Kat Pudding.”

The original recipe is, appropriately, simple enough for a child to make. Stack as many Kit-Kats as you like into a tower, using whipped cream for mortar, then shove the entire thing into the freezer, and leave it there until solid.

Book publicist and self-described literary fangirl Nicole Villeneuve does him one better on Paper and Salt, a food blog devoted to the recipes of iconic authors. Her re-imagined and renamed Frozen Homemade Kit-Kat Cake adds bittersweet chocolate ganache, replacing Dahl’s beloved candy bars with high quality wafer cookies. It remains a pretty straight-forward preparation, not quite as decadent as the Marquis de Sade’s Molten Chocolate Espresso Cake with Pomegranate, but surely more to Dahl’s liking than Jane Austen’s Brown Butter Bread Pudding Tarts would have been. (The author once wrote that he preferred his chocolate straight.)

Villeneuve spices her entry with historical context and anecdotes regarding early 20th-century candy marketing, Dahl’s hatred of the Cadbury Crème Egg, and his dog’s hankering for Smarties. Details such as these make Paper and Salt, which features plenty of savories to go with the sweet, a delicious read even for non-cooks.

Meanwhile, dessert chefs unwilling to source their ingredients from Rite-Aid’s Halloween aisle might try Sylvia Plath’s Lemon Pudding Cakes (“Is it taboo to write about baking and Sylvia Plath?” Villeneuve wonders), C.S. Lewis’ Cinnamon Bourbon Rice Pudding, Willa Cather’s Spiced Plum Kolache or Wallace Stevens’ Coconut Caramel Graham Cookies.

Allen Ginsberg’s Personal Recipe for Cold Summer Borscht

How to Make Instant Ramen Compliments of Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyzaki

Ayun Halliday documented her own sweet tooth in Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste. Follow her @AyunHallliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife (1909)

in Letters, Life, Literature | September 23rd, 2013

Writer and artist Alistair Gentry once proposed a lecture series he called “One Eyed Monster.” Central to the project is what Gentry calls “the cult of James Joyce,” an exemplar of a larger phenomenon: “the vulture-like picking over of the creative and material legacies of dead artists.” “Untalented and noncreative people,” writes Gentry, “are able to build lasting careers from what one might call the Talented Dead.” Gentry’s judgment may seem harsh, but the questions he asks are incisive and should give pause to scholars (and bloggers) who make their livings combing through the personal effects of dead artists, and to everyone who takes a special interest, prurient or otherwise, in such artifacts. Just what is it we hope to find in artists’ personal letters that we can’t find in their public work? I’m not sure I have an answer to that question, especially in reference to James Joyce’s “dirty letters” to his wife and chief muse, Nora.

The letters are by turns scandalous, titillating, romantic, poetic, and often downright funny, and they were written for Nora’s eyes alone in a correspondence initiated by her in November of 1909, while Joyce was in Dublin and she was in Trieste raising their two children in very straitened circumstances. Nora hoped to keep Joyce away from courtesans by feeding his fantasies in writing, and Joyce needed to woo Nora again—she had threatened to leave him for his lack of financial support. In the letters, they remind each other of their first date on June 16, 1904 (subsequently memorialized as “Bloomsday,” the date on which all of Ulysses is set). We learn quite a lot about Joyce’s predilections, much less about Nora’s, whose side of the correspondence seems to have disappeared. Declared lost for some time, Joyce’s first reply letter to Nora in the “dirty letters” sequence was recently discovered and auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 2004.

I do not excerpt here any of the language from Joyce’s subsequent letters, not for modesty’s sake but because there is far too much of it to choose from. If those prudish censors of Ulysses had read this exchange, they might have dropped dead from grave wounds to their sense of decorum. As far as I can ascertain, the letters exist in publication only in the out-of-print Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by pre-eminent Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, and in a somewhat truncated form on this site. Alistair Gentry has done us the favor of transcribing the letters as they appear in Ellmann’s Selected Letters on his site here. Of our interest in them, he asks:

Does anyone have the right to read things that were clearly meant only for two specific people…? Now that they have been exposed to the world’s gaze, albeit in a fairly limited fashion, does anybody except these two (who are dead) have any right to make objections about or exercise control over the manner in which these private documents and records of intimacy are used?

Questions worth considering, if not answered easily. Nevertheless, despite his critical misgivings, Gentry writes: “These letters stand on their own as brilliant and, dare I say, arousing Joycean writing. In my opinion they’re definitely worth reading.” I must say I agree. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus once wrote in a diary entry: “Jim is thought to be very frank about himself but his style is such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign language—an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue.” In the “dirty letters,” we get to see the great alchemist of ordinary language and experience practically revel in the most vulgar confessions.

Related Content:

James Joyce Plays the Guitar, 1915

On Bloomsday, Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings

in Art, Literature, Science | September 19th, 2013

We don’t often talk about the hobbies (other than drinking, anyway) of respected twentieth-century writers. But do you know a single Nabokov reader, or even an aspiring Nabokov reader, ignorant of the lepidopterist leanings of the author of Lolita, The Gift, and Pale Fire? The man liked butterflies, as any of the widely seen photographs of him wielding his comically oversized net can attest. But when his eyes turned toward these striking, delicate insects, he didn’t necessarily put down his pen. Nabokov’s wife Vera, according to a Booktryst post on the sale of his book and manuscript collections, “treasured nature, art, and life’s other intangibles more highly than material possessions, and Vladimir knew that for Christmas, birthdays and anniversaries” — in Montreux in 1971, Ithaca in 1957, Los Angeles in 1960, or anywhere at any time in their life together — “Vera appreciated his thoughtful and delicate butterfly drawings much more than some trinket. She delighted in these drawings in a way she never did for the landscapes he used to paint for her in earlier days.” For the woman closest to his heart, Nabokov drew the creatures closest to his heart.

“From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender.” This he declares in his autobiography Speak, Memory. “I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts.” Despite the passion with which Nabokov pursued lepidoptery, it seemed, in his lifetime, his accomplishments in the field would remain mostly non-professional; he began one book called Butterflies of Europe and another called Butterflies in Art, but finished neither.

But in 2000, out came the 782-page Nabokov’s Butterflies, which collects, as its co-editor Brian Boyd writes in the Atlantic, “his astonishingly diverse writing about butterflies, whether scientific or artistic, published or unpublished, carefully finished or roughly sketched, in poems, stories, novels, memoirs, scientific papers, lectures, notes, diaries, letters, interviews, dreams.” And in 2011, a hypothesis he had about butterfly evolution had its vindication under the Royal Society of London. But to understand how much butterflies meant to him, we need look no further than the title pages of the volumes he gave his wife.

via Book Tryst

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different Lolita Book Covers

Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Edward Said Speaks Candidly about Politics, His Illness, and His Legacy in His Final Interview (2003)

in Life, Literature, Politics | September 18th, 2013

In an excerpt from her memoir published in Salon last month, Najla Said—daughter of literary critic and Palestinian-American political activist Edward Said—recalls her father’s legacy:

To very smart people who study a lot, Edward Said is the “father of postcolonial studies” or, as he told me once when he insisted I was wasting my college education by taking a course on postmodernism and I told him he didn’t even know what it was:

“Know what it is, Najla? I invented it!!!”

I still don’t know if he was joking or serious.

Most likely Said was only half serious, but it’s impossible to overstate the impact of his 1978 book Orientalism on the generations of students and activists that followed. As Najla writes, it’s “the book that everyone reads at some point in college, whether in history, politics, Buddhism, or literature class.” Said’s “postmodernism,” unlike that of Francois Lyotard or many others, avoided the pejorative baggage that came to attach to the term, largely because while he called into doubt certain ossified and pernicious categorical distinctions, he never stopped believing in the positive intellectual enterprise that gave him the tools and the position to make his critiques. He stubbornly called himself a humanist, “despite,” as he writes in the preface to the 2003 edition of his most famous book, “the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics”:

It isn’t at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.

In that same preface Said also writes of his aging, of the recent death of two mentors, and of “the necessary diminutions in expectations and pedagogic zeal which usually frame the road to seniority.” He does not write about the leukemia that would take his life that same year at the age of 67, ten years ago this month.

For the interview above, however, Said’s last, he speaks candidly about his illness. Fittingly, the video opens with a quote from Roland Barthes: “The only sort of interview that one could, if forced to, defend would be where the author is asked to articulate what he cannot write.” Said tells interviewer Charles Glass that his main preoccupation in the past few months had been his illness, something he thought he had “mastered” but which had forced him to confront the incontrovertible fact of his mortality and sapped him of his will to work.

Said, as always, is articulate and engaging, and the conversation soon turns to his other preoccupations: the situation of the Palestinian people and the politics and personal toll of living “between worlds.” He also expresses his disappointment in friends who had become “mouthpieces of the status quo,” banging the drums for war and Western Imperialism in this, the first year of the war in Iraq. One suspects that he refers to Christopher Hitchens, among others, though he is too discreet to name names. Said has a tremendous amount to say on not only the current events of the time but on his entire career as a writer and thinker. Though he’s given dozens of impassioned interviews over the decades, this may be the most honest and unguarded, as he unburdens himself during his final days of those things, perhaps, he could not bring himself to write.

Thanks to Stephanos for sending this video our way.

Christopher Hitchens: No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask

Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Handwritten Manuscripts for The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise & More

in Literature | September 16th, 2013

We rarely think about where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hard-living, often tragic generation of American writers went to school. This year, however, Fitzgerald’s own almost-alma mater merits a note: the novelist began his studies at Princeton exactly one hundred years ago this fall, beginning classes on his birthday, September 24, 1913. To mark the occasion, that Ivy League institution has digitized their The Great Gatsby-writing alumnus’ manuscripts. Earlier this year, in fact, they completed the process on Fitzgerald’s manuscript, or manuscripts, of Gatsby itself. “We can see Fitzgerald at work on his third novel over a four-year period,” says the announcement from Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC), which offers “Ur-Gatsby (2‑page fragment), the author’s abandoned effort, conceived in 1922 and written in 1923; The Great Gatsby autograph manuscript (302 pages), which he largely wrote in France and completed by September 1924;” and “corrected galleys of ‘Trimalchio,’ the novel’s working title when it was typeset by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1924, only to be much reworked by the author early in 1925.”

You can find these online in the Princeton University Digital Library. There you can also, naturally, find papers associated with This Side of Paradise, the novel Fitzgerald began, under the working title The Romantic Egoist, while still at Princeton. The book, says the RBSC, “still stands as the most famous literary work about Princeton University. While Fitzgerald was not a good student and never graduated, dropping out in 1917 to join the U.S. Army during World War I, he began learning the craft of writing as an undergraduate and befriended other students who were aspiring authors, Edmund Wilson, Class of 1916, and John Peale Bishop, Class of 1917. Fitzgerald came to form a deep affection for Princeton that lasted until his untimely death in Hollywood.” They’ve digitized the corrected 1918 typescript of The Romantic Egoist, and the manuscript of This Side of Paradise. You can peruse all of these online in the PUDL’s Fitzgerald collection. Some regard Gatsby as a perfect novel; Edmund Wilson called Paradise “one of the most illiterate books of any merit every published.” (“Hastily written” and “somewhat disjointed,” says the RBSC itself.) But seeing how either became the Fitzgerald books we know today will prove instructive to readers and writers, academics and (like Fitzgerald, evidently) non-academics alike.

You can find Gatsby and This Side of Paradise in our collection of 500 Free eBooks.

via Paris Review

Seven Tips From F. Scott Fitzgerald on How to Write Fiction

The Evolution of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Signature: From 5 Years Old to 21

Gertrude Stein Sends a “Review” of The Great Gatsby to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a List of 22 Essential Books, 1936

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Kiss My Ass”

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Shakespeare’s Handwriting Looked Like

in History, Literature | September 16th, 2013

Last week, we posted on how scholars have tried to recover the original pronunciations of Shakespeare’s plays and poems when performed on the stage. Today, we bring you the bard’s original handwriting. Shakespeare’s handwriting has recently become the focus of a new article by Professor Douglas Bruster at UT Austin, who is using an analysis of the playwright’s quirky spellings and penmanship to solve a very old question of authorship. The page of handwriting you see above is a fragment of a lost play called Sir Thomas More and it goes by the name of “Hand D” (click the image above, and then the image that appears — for a much larger version).

Bruster’s short essay, published this month in the Oxford journal Notes & Queries, is far too inside baseball for anyone but hardcore textual scholars to make much sense of, but this New York Times article does a good job of distilling the finer points. Suffice it to say that thanks to Bruster’s painstaking analysis of Shakespeare’s distinctive handwriting, we can be fairly certain that a 1602 revision of Thomas Kyd’s enormously popular Renaissance play The Spanish Tragedy—in the words of Shakespeare scholar Eric Rasmussen—has the bard’s “fingerprints all over it.”

A Survey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course)

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Shakespeare’s Satirical Sonnet 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Read 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the 5th Anniversary of His Death

in e-books, Literature | September 12th, 2013

Let me start with the first lines that appeared in The New York Times five years ago: “David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.” It’s not your conventional obituary. No, it has a literary style befitting the writer we lost on September 12, 2008. And five years after DFW’s death, we might want to pause and revisit his many stories and essays still available on the web. To mark this mournful occasion, we’ve updated and expanded our list, 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web, which features some timely and memorable pieces — “9/11: The View From the Midwest,” “Consider the Lobster,” and Federer as Religious Experience,” just to name just a few. Below we’ve also highlighted some of our favorite David Foster Wallace posts published over the years. Hope you enjoy visiting or revisiting this material as much as I have.