Words seemed for the first time in his life to run at him, shrieking to be used, gathering in carefully arranged squads and platoons and being presented to him by punctilious adjutants and paragraphs.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Britten
If I had gotten this quote from the internet, I would provide a link but I recently found it taped to the wall in my shoe closet, mixed into a mischmasch of quotes from a variety of sources. They were all typewritten on strips of multi-colored index cards. They were all written in Burbank prior to 2005. Somehow the strip quotes survived transcontinental moves to Virginia and then back here to Long Beach. There is a lot of stuff in that closet, not necessarily with lots of mileage. But also taped to the door is a single photo fan collage of Miss Cutler's 1955 Kindergarten class. The school was PS 193 in Whitestone, New York.
The FSF quote is from his first novel, This Side of Paradise. His 1920 income from its initial publication was monumentally greater than the money earned from writing The Great Gatsby in 1925. If Scott Fitzgerald hadn't listened to Zelda Fitzerald, the story of Jay Gatsby would have been entitled Trimalchio or On The Road To West Egg.
If FSF had opted for the title "On The Road..." what would Jack Keruoac have done?
If you were a student at the Lewis Carroll School of Logic, you might have been
presented with the following dilemma:
Given the following:
(a) Scott & Zelda.
(b) The "F" in F. Scott Fitzgerald is for Francis.
How many rounds of Word Golf would it take to get from "Francis & Zelda" to "Franny & Zooey."
FYI: More than thirty years before the fabled British band, The Who, sang its most famous–and most important–song, Scott Fitzgerald wrote an essay entitled
My Generation.
FYeyes:
I am seated in the second row (3rd from right). Miss Cutler is standing directly behind me and in the fanned copies, I re-appear directly above her head. Miss Cutler taught at PS 193 for more than thirty years. All her kindergarten kids loved her more than numbers can count and Miss Cutler knew a whole lot of numbers.
During nap time, she would awaken me while all the other kids were sound asleep. That's when Miss Cutler would show me a whole lot of number tricks, some of which I would re-learn at the Lewis Carroll School of logic.
After reading this post, feel free to scroll down to the 2-DIE-4 PHOTO GALLERY to see an enlargement of the class picture.
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