JFK & Jackie O. / Cary Grant & Dyan Cannon

Letters to Jackie and Dear Cary are two very interesting books I've read lately/am in the midst of reading. 

The first is a collection of hundreds (out of more than 800,000)  letters written to Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of JFK. They are from the American people and range from long, elegantly written letters to a single line from a football player at the University of Massachusetts. It was a beautiful and touching read. Not to mention, it was a nice change of pace from a novel or biography, etc.

The second book, Dear Cary, (I'm about 150 pages in) is enthralling so far. It's a memoir written by Dyan Cannon, Grant's fourth wife (and the woman with whom he had a daughter) and just gives you a glimpse of Cary Grant the person, not the glamourous star on the silver screen. I've never read anything like it and it even includes letters written by Grant. So good.

More Gatsby Quotes

"As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative person, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

"There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn't been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with it's own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

 "'I wouldn't ask too much of her, ' I ventured. 'You can't repeat the past.'

'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. 

'I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,' he said, nodding determinedly. 'She'll see.'

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy."

"'I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.'

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight — watching over nothing."

"We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around. 

'They're a rotten crowd.' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.'

I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption — and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by."

"No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep until four o'clock — until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream."

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

"As I sat brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning ———

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

"He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole entire world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter III

Reading this makes me believe that Fitzgerald just understands people.

Required Reading: ARGO

This book was fascinating. Seriously. Did you know Mendez was an artist before he began working for the CIA? 

"Then there was the feel of Los Angeles itself. The town had this undeniable energy about it---it was a place where time seemed to stand still in the vortex of rapturous imagination. If you looked closely, you could spot the signs of it all around you. In the landmarks along Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard. In dive bars and back-alley clubs where the stars of the moment collided with those of the past. In the faces of the newly arrived, whose lives were full of earnest hope and promise, and in those whose dreams had come crashing down. I had traveled all over the world, but the city was like no other I had known. It was a place that twirled around you like a Russian ballerina, that caught you up in its spin and pulled you along until you found yourself wrapped in its spell. ...As I drove north along Hollywood Boulevard, I hoped we'd be able to tap into a little bit of this magic ourselves."

Read it! PS blogger is being lame and won't let me embed a video into this post. Do me a favor and click here to brighten your day. (Seriously, I'm telling you. Watch it!) Also. LOVED THE MOVIE. Won "Best Picture" at the Academy Awards, as it well deserved.