The Fitzgeralds: Weathering the Storm

I think most of us have an historical period that particularly resonates for us. For me, that decade is the 1920's. I am kind of fascinated by all of it - flappers, prohibition, censorship, women's rights, jazz, art deco, modernism, Freud, the Charleston, the speakeasy, talkies...I'm hoping that at least part of my dissertation will be focused on burlesque and circus in the 20's. There is something about this era of photography and music that totally gives me goosebumps. It's ghostly and almost frightening in its intensity. There is a kind of wild forgotten-ness about the period that I really like.

And my favorite couple of the decade...F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though F. S. is the famous one for his many novels (esp. The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise), Zelda was also an artist and a novelist. F and Z were definitely the "it" couple at the time and their passionate but tumultuous relationship was well-documented. And even though I'm pretty sure Kyle and I have a healthier relationship than the Fitzgeralds, I sort of relate to them as two people who were very much in love and yet faced a great deal of sorrow and pain and fear. I guess it's not the storm but how you weather it.

"I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder." - Zelda Fitzgerald

"I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

F and Z were buried together and the epitaph on their grave is from The Great Gatsby:

"So we beat on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Stay tuned everyone! Tomorrow I will be announcing my VERY FIRST GIVEAWAY!!!

So Much She Loved the Man…

 

"So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes. She felt the lines of his neck and his chipped profile like segments of the wind blowing about her consciousness. She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.”

- Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Last Waltz