modernism modernism modernism modernism
reminds me of the german expressionist painting with the elongated purple people
i’m thinking about my assignment now but maybe people don't like these stories because the endings are kind of a let down. like an anti-drop in a song, perhaps.

Maybe this story about how people will act immorally to gain riches would be more shocking if we weren't living through late-stage capitalism

Definitely worth a read. Felt a little like The Great Gatsby meets Get Out.

"The present was the thing—work to do and someone to love" (25).

3.5 stars. I have read many Fitzgerald short stories over the years, but these are uniquely placed at the end of his career. Ranging from "The Cut-Glass Bowl" (Jan. 1928) to some of his final contributions in "Babylon Revisited" (Feb. 1931) and "The Lost Decade" (Dec. 1939).

Here, Fitzgerald reckons with lost time: the ghostlike allure of the budding, carefree 1920s lingering after the financial crash of 1929. For a reader with any knowledge of Fitzgerald's life, "Babylon Revisited" is strikingly autobiographical, reflecting a sense of distance balanced with yearning regarding his own daughter, Scottie, and estrangement from Zelda, his wife, and her erratic behavior. Fitzgerald also ruminates on the damaging effects of alchoholism. His own father was an alcoholic, and he came to repeat the same pattern under duress. Between 1933 and 1937, Scott was hospitalized for alcoholism eight times and served time in jail on multiple occasions.

"The Cut-Glass Bowl" offers a very different sensibility than most of his other works, bringing in elements of Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." He combines his characteristic grasp of human psychology with a Gothic emphasis on a "cursed" object that haunts.

"The Lost Decade" and its sense of dazed passage, a decade lost to drink, then spurs on a newfound gratitude in its protagonist for the daily sensations and rhythm of living—balancing melancholy and hope. It seems a fitting swan song for Fitzgerald to pen before his death in 1940.

"I've been in it—lots of times. But I've never seen it. And now it isn't what I want to see. I wouldn't ever be able to see it now. I simply want to see how people walk and what their clothes and shoes and hats are made of. And their eyes and hands. Would you mind shaking hands with me?" (76).

In 1939, Fitzgerald wrote a brief letter to his daughter: "Anyhow I am alive again—getting by that October did something—with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don’t drink. I am not a great man, but sometimes, I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent, and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort."

This is the second time I've read these stories.
I just love "Bernice Bobs Her Hair".

No disrespect intended to F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I hated these stories. I appreciate the skill they were written with, but they were miserable and depressing to read and it felt like they lacked any positive or hopeful notes at all.

3.5 stars. Another great short story I read for my modern literature class. A brief tale of how alcoholism can have a ripple effect on life. A story of how one's actions can have dire consequences--even after you've sobered up.

A favorite quote:
"The present was the thing—work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life."