JAZZ AND COCKTAILS AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD: an essay

-
From the November 2006 edition of Fringe Magazine:

During a trip to New York City several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It happened this way. I was visiting my friends, Kevin and Kathlene, who like thousands of other ambitious twenty-somethings had moved to the city to seek out their fortune, and even though fortune was a little slow in arriving, had in fact been delayed indefinitely, they nevertheless assumed an air of sophistication and decadence. From a distance and in silhouette Kevin and Kathlene looked like those svelte, stiffly posed figures you see in Jazz Age advertisements, all sharp angles and long lines, a man and woman sipping martinis while standing at a penthouse window; a flapper in a sequined dress, a dandy in a tux, templates used by graphic artists who designed the programs for the latest Gershwin or Cole Porter musical. Girl Crazy, Oh, Kay!, Anything Goes. Whenever they were nearby I heard, or at any rate imagined I heard, muted trumpets, saxophones, syncopated rhythms, Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” Ellington at the Cotton Club... 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957: a novella

-
Image
For Purchase (or free with ads) Available Now from Lost Colony :   On a dusty country lane, leaning toward an otherwise unremarkable farmhouse of indeterminate age, stands a solitary historical marker that, at least in theory, is meant to attract the attention of passing motorists. With its easily forgotten names and dates, the marker may soon vanish beneath a sea of tall grass, and no one will be any the wiser, including a few of the committee members who helped raise funds to have it placed there. If, by chance, a few lost travelers, trying to find their way back to the interstate after a day of antiquing in town or a weekend of camping in the nearby state park, do stop to read the succinct paragraph inscribed on its bronze plaque, they will learn of a girl who, many years ago, lived in this house and made a sacrifice to human progress, though I’m not sure she would have appreciated my use of the word “progress.” READ MORE HERE
Read more

PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE: author's page

-
Image
  After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, KEVIN P. KEATING became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first novel,   The Natural Order of Things ,  was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second novel,  The Captive Condition ,  will be released by Pantheon Books in July of 2015. He lives in Cleveland. VISIT PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE AUTHOR'S PAGE
Read more

THE MIRACLES AND MINDLESS PURSUITS OF HILDA WHITBY: a short story

-
Image
From the February 2023 edition of Belle Ombre : One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a final time the scorched two-acre parcel where the house, barn, and lumber mill once stood. Despite the warm weather, she wore a heavy cotton dress that reached to her ankles, one of the few garments that had survived the explosion and the one she wore to the funeral held in the Methodist churchyard overlooking the valley. To a leather leg strap under her skirt, she fastened a dissection knife salvaged from the smoldering pile of debris that once served as her private laboratory. The seven-inch blade might prove useful should she happen upon one of the desperate highwaymen known to roam the locks after sundown. While the
Read more