I'm living across the street from Scott and Zelda. William Burroughs evoked the spirit of Scott's words when he wrote in Kim Like The Great Gatsby: "Kim believes in the green light, the orgiastic future. He believes in a magical universe: unpredictable, spontaneous, alive. A universe where anything is possible. A universe of many gods, often in conflict." (You can hear Burroughs read this bit on the CD Smack My Crack from Giorno Poetry Systems, released back around 1987 or so. RIP, Bill.)


Being so close at the moment, I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to acquaint myself a bit more with Scott's jazz-age writing. As it happened, I already had a collection of his short stories sitting unread in a box, which I'd gotten for free just ages ago when it was left behind at my brother Dan's after a roommate of his moved out. If I'd known how much I was going to like it, I would have read it long before now.


In the story Bernice Bobs Her Hair (published in the Saturday Evening Post, May 1, 1920, when he was 23), F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."

Fitzgerald died at 44 of a heart attack, spared the fate of hiding in the caves of his convictions. In his last year of life, he wrote in a letter to his wife Zelda, who was hospitalized in an asylum: "It's odd that my talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me - the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past."