I feel like 2025 is my last chance (at everything)
Final post of the year + writing prompts, book list, etc.
Paris, 1925
The Dingo throbbed with a pulse that came not from any one source but from the smorgasbord of it all—conversation, jazz, and the heat of bodies pressed too close together under a low-slung ceiling that seemed to bow inward from the gravity of so much life. Smoke surged, alive and serpentine, pouring from lips and nostrils, mingling with the perfume of spilt brandy, crushed citrus, and the sweet rot of too many cigarettes stubbed out in crystal ashtrays.
The Fitzgeralds, twice evicted from The Biltmore in New York City, were found at the bar tonight, the mister and missus entertaining separate groups of friends: Scott was introducing himself to Ernest Hemingway, pressing him for an address where he could mail a copy of his latest, The Great Gatsby, while Zelda, in her usual state of blurriness, bragged half-true stories through dark red lips about this Italian soldier whom she had an affair with and how he had tried to kill himself when she refused to run away with him.
Hadley, a pianist from Chicago before becoming Mrs. Hemingway, watched a moustached waiter pour water over a sugar cube held by a perforated spoon as sweet droplets rained into a glass of absinthe. In Paris, absinthe was illegal, and so were cocaine and opium, but you could easily find all three if you knew where to look. Beside her sat Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, a proudly childless couple who talked in circles about avoiding the Midwest if they ever moved back to the States.
At another table, a bare-shouldered Vogue journalist with short black hair rambled on about how Chanel invented sunbathing and her friends nodded like it was gospel. These women were modern, professionally pretty, and a few of them dated each other.
On the dance floor were dresses that swished and swayed and bubbled to reveal flashes of thighs and garters. Men and women bounced wildly to the Charleston while others reignited old fights about mistresses made of silver.
Overheard from a French garage owner finger-wagging at the young workers, calling them “génération perdue” (lost generation) because they lacked discipline and direction, Gertrude Stein adopted this phrase to describe the broader mood of young people coming of age after WW1. With Hemingway’s popularization of the term in The Sun Also Rises, the Lost Generation became the official synonym for the expatriates who grappled with a sense of purposelessness in the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving jazz age of Paris.
Our friends at the Dingo, too, struggled to see where they fit in, explored their own alienation, and aimed for a certain bleeding-heart authenticity in their work. Yet, we kind of view them frozen in time, as if they were perfectly ‘made’ while they were alive, Wikipedia pages already written in invisible ink just waiting for them to live out some predestined legacy.
Exactly one century later, here we are, lost, again.
I’m at the age where many of those Greats produced their best. And it makes me panic thinking that I don’t have a novel of that literary success out yet. Not even a manuscript. (in a lower whisper) I don’t even have a synopsis.