slick scott

 

The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school, always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries, managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully concealed.

From This Side of Paradise -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Pictured:  F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, hair definitely slicked]

magnificent murakami

Happy birthday to Haruki Murakami (b. January 12, 1949), one of Japan's premier authors and known, read, and loved by many others outside of his native country. Per Wikipedia, Murakami has also done Japanese translations of American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger, and it's always a fine combination of talents when a translator has an intuitive sense of fiction the way Murakami does.  The titles of Murakami's own works tend to be evocatively quirky and memorable, as is the book cover art that graces his novels and memoirs.

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. **  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

dog days of gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a summer novel that begins with the exciting promise of a glamorous season for Nick yet ends with disillusion and tragedy, a thirtieth birthday, and leaves from "yellowing trees" about to turn and start dropping downward into Gatsby's fateful swimming pool.  There's the longest day of the year that Daisy always forgets to remember, Gatsby's lavish weekend parties on endless warm nights, gin rickeys and mint juleps, and lilac trees in the July rain.  But in the middle of another sticky August heatwave, even summer-loving people might start to agree with Jordan Baker's comment that "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."  Or we can just take Tom's bullying advice to just forget about the heat:  "You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it."

Pictured:  Beach Scene with Lavender Sky -- William Glackens, 1914 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

the great summer solstice

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy frowning.  She snapped them out with her fingers.  "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year."  She looked at us all radiantly.  "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?  I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

things that people do in books

There are many swanky editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 breakthrough novel, This Side of Paradise, but one of my favorites is the Dover Thrift paperback, still a bargain at just $3.50.

Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather 

resumed its place in his attention. It was composed not 

of two voices, but of one, which acted alike as 

questioner and answerer:

Question.--Well--what's the situation?

Answer.--That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name....

Q.--Can you live?

A.--I can't imagine not being able to. People make money in books and
I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books.
Really they are the only things I can do. 

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald