News
Breaking news from our Facebook feed:
We've updated our website with more images of next summer's conference site, including a video tour of Växjö!
First question we've been asked: how to pronounce Växjö? [ˈvɛ̂kːɧœ]
(Happy to help!)
fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/conferences/8116-2/
Växjö Sweden 2023 – F. Scott Fitzgerald Society
fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society will (finally!) hold its 16th international conference in Växjö in 2023 with Niklas Salmose serving as conference director and Helen M. Turner as program director.
We apologize for leaving folks hanging yesterday ... but anticipation is exhilarating!
So without further ado...
The Fitzgerald Society is excited to announce that our 16th International Conference will be held at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, from 26 June to 2 July 2023. One year from today we'll be wrapping up!
As you know, last summer we announced plans to congregate in Montenegro. However, owing to uncertainty in eastern and Central Europe, the board decided instead to go to Sweden, thanks in a large part to the generosity and diligence of Niklas Salmose, who will serve as conference director. Helen Humphrays (aka Helen M. Turner) will serve as program director. So get your proposals ready to send to fitzgeraldsociety@gmail.com. Due date is 1 Jan 2023, but you won't want to procrastinate once you see the photos below.
This conference will not only reunite the Society for the first time since our wonderful Toulouse conference in 2019 but offer a once-in-a-lifetime adventure for Fitzgerald fans! (We'll meet in Copenhagen and ride the train in together!)
This conference will be otherworldly...
The city of lakes ... we foresee a panel on lakes in Fitzgerald...
(Where the closing banquet shall be held... have we sold you on it yet?)
Our program and conference director, already planning
Yes exciting when will details and sign up happen😊
I’m excited. What a beautiful setting. I wish nearly every topic wasn’t a woke re-interpretation of the allegedly “problematic” Scott.
Paul McCartney, shown here fifty-nine years ago today on his 21st birthday, is now 80!
What does a Beatle (and, let's not forget, a Wing man) have to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald? Well, first there's curious coincidence that the late Linda McCartney was born on September 24, 1941, on what *should* have been F. Scott Fitzgerald's forty-fifth birthday (and sadly, she died prematurely too at only fifty-six in 1998)...
But more importantly, in their earliest years, the Beatles used to cover a certain song by Harry B. Smith, Francis Wheeler, and Ted Snyder that, you may remember, makes a cameo in The Great Gatsby:
When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a Victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:
I'm the Sheik of Araby,
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you're asleep,
Into your tent I'll creep—
"It was a strange coincidence," I said.
"But it wasn't a coincidence at all."
Had Fitzgerald lived to the early 1960s (in his mid-sixties) he probably wouldn't have cared much for the Fab Four's version of the song, which is more rock than jazz (with George Harrison singing). It's still sorta fun and gives an idea of how rooted they were in the American pop songbook:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UolI98Va73s
If you know any more connections between FSF and Sir Paul, we'll say yeah! yeah! yeah! to you posting them here.
That link is mentioned in a footnote of the first critical edition of Gatsby in...Spain. Oh, yeah!! 👍👍👏👏🕺🕺
Both visionaries of the craziness of the wild ages they lived in.
Though Scott coined the term “the Jazz Age,” his own musical tastes towards classical (like Hemingway). Of course, had he been a teenager in the Sixties or even Fifties, who knows what he would have listened to?
They were both real lookers. Each in his own way...
Happy Birthday Sir Paul
Happy birthday
This is a bit of a stretch. Why not just say they had a lot in common because they both had skin?
50 years ago today five burglars were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. If they weren't Meyer Wolfshiem's men, what does this have to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald? Well, nothing ... except that...
The Great Gatsby makes several interesting and frankly weird appearances in the Richard M. Nixon story as a way of explaining his downfall. No, Gatsby didn't jump up at the Plaza Hotel and tell Tom Buchanan "I am not a crook!" but...
Many people wanted to romanticize Nixon as a Gatsby-esque figure (granted, without the good looks. Or the pink suit). There is evidence he identified with Gatsby too: in the spring of 1974, only a few months before he resigned, he asked for a screening of the then-hit version of the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow film version. He did not say, "Too bad they just can't erase that 18-1/2 minute car wreck." But he probably thought it.
Here's a typical Nixon-as-Gatsby editorial from 1973. Who made that trope so commonplace? Probably no less than Nixon antagonist Hunter S. Thompson, who referred to Tricky Dick as a twisted Gatsby figure. (He also called him a lot worse).
If Nixon can be Gatsby, anybody can be Gatsby!
I hate when non-political groups get political. Most people turn to the arts and sports as a respite from all of that nonsense.
Fascinating
Anyway to make this less blurry and readable?
Birds Of A Feather #Watergate
Greetings from our president, Jackson Bryer!
Board member Erin Templeton during the summer of 2019 in the room in which Scott and Zelda stayed in 1926 in Salies-de-Béarn, France:
Two of our members from Brasil, Marcela Lanius and Roberta Fabbri Viscardi, also in Salies-de-Béarn in 2019 (the last time we could all be together!):
