Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins is a classic New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy, central figures of the Lost Generation social circle in 1920s France. F. Scott Fitzgerald created Dick and Nicole Diver, the central couple of Tender Is the Night, by merging himself and his wife Zelda, with the Murphys. Gerald was a
painter of note (examples:
1,
2,
3,
4), whose masterpiece
has been lost. After seven years of painting, Murphy stopped, and never restarted, for a
host of reasons, from the illness of his son to his
closeted gayness. But the Murphys are probably best known for "the special quality of their life." They hosted parties and
lived in a villa on the Mediterranean coast and were both painted by many artists,
including Pablo
Picasso. They were the subject of a
recent biography and an
essay collection.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 11, 2013 -
10 comments
In July 1915, a fresh-faced young man got off a train and presented himself at a working cattle-and-sheep ranch on the North Fork of the Smith River, a few miles outside of White Sulphur Springs,
Montana. He was slender—about 5'8," 150 pounds—and arrestingly handsome, with champagne-colored hair and blue-green eyes. He carried himself so lightly on the balls of his feet that his wife later wrote, "There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention." The ranch hands must have been astonished at the sight. F.
Scott Fitzgerald had arrived in Montana.
Fitzgerald
wrote but one story set in Montana,
The Diamond
as Big as the Ritz, but what a doozy of a story.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 24, 2008 -
15 comments
The greatest enigma of the US "war on terror": He was
an intelligence officer of the Egyptian army, a
CIA agent, a
drill seargent and instructor at Fort Bragg, an
FBI informant, and
Al Qaeda's number one man inside the US. He was directly or indirectly involved in
the assassination of Anwar Sadat,
the 1993 WTC bombing,
the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and
9/11. He
trained al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and Sudan and wrote manuals on intelligence, terrorism and asymmetric warfare
while living in Silicon Valley with his American wife. He plea bargained, never went to trial, and
may be free or in witness protection today. Incidentally, he is
barely mentioned in
the 9/11 Commission report. Is there some sort of
conspiracy or are officials simply afraid of
having their gross negligence exposed?
posted by inoculatedcities
on Mar 5, 2007 -
26 comments
"I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in 'Who's Who in America.'" Bob "Prince of Darkness" Novak comes clean (sort of) on his role in the Plame scandal. Novak asserts that Fitzgerald knew the identities of his source for Plame's identity. "That Fitzgerald did not indict any of these sources may indicate his conclusion that none of them violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act," Novak says. Further, he says that his source spilled the beans inadvertently: "After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part."
posted by Heminator
on Jul 11, 2006 -
48 comments
Why outing Plame mattered. If you wonder what's really at stake behind all the media buzz around the Fitzgerald indictments, read this lengthy and cogent analysis by
Stratfor's no-nonsense George Friedman. "Rove and Libby had top security clearances and were senior White House officials. It was their sworn duty, undertaken when they accepted their security clearance, to build a 'bodyguard of lies' -- in Churchill's phrase -- around the truth concerning U.S. intelligence capabilities... The minimal story -- that they talked about Plame with a reporter -- is the end of the matter."
posted by digaman
on Oct 18, 2005 -
89 comments
Searching for Bobby Fischer the Great Brain. "The Great Brain books are based on the true life stories of John D. and his family, in particular his older brother Tom, who is so clever he always seems to get his way... While we were reading the second in the series,
More Adventures of the Great Brain, we learned about a camping trip that J.D.'s family went on in Beaver Canyon, Utah. We recognized some landmarks described in the book, and decided to go on a field trip to try to find the town of Adenville where the Great Brain lived.
posted by weston
on Jun 4, 2004 -
37 comments
