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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Sunday Fitzgerald Blogging

Went to St. Mary's Church in Rockville,
Maryland -- about four miles from my
Garrett Park house -- hoping to meet up
with a bunch of literary types from GW
who'd planned a pilgrimage to F. Scott
Fitzgerald's grave there.
























However, the event didn't come off, and I was
just sort of standing there at the grave, reading
his dates and Zelda's and Scottie's, when a young
man approached me.

He was a GW alum who'd heard about the planned
outing, and he'd brought along three boys from
the Catholic school where he teaches. "I was
hoping to talk about Fitzgerald with the
GW students. You're a professor. Would
you be willing to talk to the boys about him?"

So I talked about Gatsby, and the
way its last line was engraved on the stone at our
feet... How Fitzgerald had died a wreck in Los Angeles
and been brought back here, where he had family
(there are lots of Fitzgerald graves around his)...
His wild ride in Paris with Hemingway and Stein and
everybody...

"Is his body actually in there?" asked one of the
boys. Well, his remains. "How do they get a
body from L.A. all the way here?" I guess you dig up
the casket and put it on a plane, or put it in a train
or a car or something...

I liked the way their interest was mainly in
the macabre. Wonderfully thirteen-year-old of them.

"And what's the word 'Gatsby' mean in the title?"
Oh, that's his main character, Jay Gatsby... Though
his real name wasn't Jay Gatsby...

If you know UD, you know she enjoyed this unexpected
interlude very, very much.