Here's an excerpt from his 1932 elegy for the departed jazz age, "My Lost City" -
<snip>
It was too late or too soon. For us the city was inevitably linked up with Bacchic diversions, mild or fantastic. We could organize ourselves only on our return to Long Island and not always there. We had no incentive to meet the city half way. My first symbol was now a memory, for I knew that triumph is in oneself; my second one had grown commonplace two of the actresses whom I had worshiped from afar in 1913 had dined in our house. But it filled me with a certain fear that even the third symbol had grown dim the tranquility of Bunny's apartment was not to be found in the ever-quickening city. Bunny himself was married, and about to become a father, other friends had gone to Europe, and the bachelors had become cadets of houses larger and more social than ours. By this time we "knew everybody" which is to say most of those whom Ralph Barton would draw as in the orchestra on an opening night.
But we were no longer important. The flapper, upon whose activities the popularity of my first books was based, had become passé by 1923 anyhow in the East. I decided to crash Broadway with a play, but Broadway sent its scouts to Atlantic City and quashed the idea in advance, so I felt that, for the moment, the city and I had little to offer each other. I would take the Long Island atmosphere that I had familiarly breathed and materialize it beneath unfamiliar skies.
[...]
I'm fascinated by Fitzgerald's awareness -- very early on -- of the existence of an age, a new moment, in need of chronicling. He could have been a talented dope, writing pretty stories but instead he was, at times, a the best sort of field reporter.
Surely someone out there is looking at our world of security theater, computer guided 19th century-esque war, fossilized politics, slavery within freedom within slavery, relentlessly splintering ideas and writing/filming/podcasting/blogging reports from the satellite observed front.
I imagine this person to be the spiritual heir of JG Ballard, a writer who understands that modern life is, essentially, sci-fi: the flight of a JDAM's from an F/A-18E/F to the unhappy ground is a strange thing, unprecedented in human history. It has meanings we only barely understand.
I'm looking for these writers (hell, when I dream, which is less and less often of late, I want to be one of these writers).
Where are they?
.d.
Let us weep in somber contemplation of the scientific and brutal destiny of the Greek brothers.
...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/