“I made lists of cavalry leaders, football players, cities, popular tunes, pitchers, happy times, hobbies, houses I have lived in, suits since I left the army (not counting the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrank, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried for years without wearing because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted), women I like, times I was snubbed by people that were not my better in character...and then I was better. ”
Football Players
This is a take on Fitgerald’s healing list of football players from the 1930’s.
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Popular Tunes
This is a take on Fitzgerald’s healing list of popular tunes from the mid 1930’s.
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Cities
This is a take on Fitzgerald's healing list of the cities he would write about in his lifetime.
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Shattered
This is a poem by a member of our group about Fitzgerald's mental depreciation which he discusses in The Crack-Up.
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Process
We created this text portion of the project to reflect a more specific part of Fitzgerald’s breakdown; this also happened to be the moment that he finally found a way to make himself feel better. He wrote lists. We took a few of these list ideas and did research on the trends and popular items that Fitzgerald would probably be familiar with in that era. For example, we researched the great football players during the time of the crackup and even the players that were in Fitzgerald’s hometown, the city he would probably root for. We took this research and wrote short poems in an early 1900’s freehand style; this style mostly rhymed and had no guidelines for length of the lines or use of devices. It seemed to us that he would write his lists in such a way that was playful and would naturally produce a better personal feeling overall after the process. We repeated this for a few of the lists he claimed to have written and presented them next to wads of paper. Fitzgerald wrote that he would write lists, crumple them up, and throw them away; he would repeat this process with all sorts of various lists as a tactic to relieve whatever was eating at him on the inside.
