Warm Stretches

I have spent the week enjoying Tender Is The Night, the only Fitzgerald novel that remained for me to read as such. Nabokov loved it. I have been touched by range and feeling, its awareness of time, even as it has become timeless. U.S. Grant has an odd, unexpected, resonance in the novel. I spent a few minutes the other day imagining a public figure from the 1950s who could linger as a contemporary character's doppelganger.

Five years ago today I began this venture. The 2004 election pushed me towards Shelby Foote's Civil War: A Narrative and that and my friends led to this meandering notebook.