June | 2013 | Subliminal Spaces

The Magic of Memory, encouraging thoughts from Social Bridge blog.

SOCIAL BRIDGE ~ Jean Tubridy connecting with you from Ireland

It’s almost a week now since I read an excellent article by Julia Molony entitled ‘ Breaking Bragg’ in last week’s Life Supplement of the Sunday Independent here in Ireland.

It relates to Melvyn Bragg whose stunning book, The Adventure of English, had totally engaged me a few years ago. I confess that I knew little or nothing about Melvyn Bragg’s life until I read the article last weekend and one particular point that he made in the interview has been rattling around in my head all week.

He was talking about the death of his mother at the age of 95, almost a year ago, and the article ends as follows:

“And, of course, there is great future in memory, he goes on. ” My mother is secure, in the future, in my memory. And she’ll be secure in my children’s memories. And although she might fade in…

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Finding the Lost Generation

Paris in the 1920s was home for a group of American writers nicknamed ‘The Lost Generation’ by Gertrude Stein, herself a Parisian-based ex-pat author and art collector. They were lost because they had suffered and survived the terrible First World War and were considered to have been in some sense ruined by it and in need of something totally new and life affirming. Though Irish author in self-imposed exile J ames Joyce fraternised with the group, he seemed to be more of an elder statesman to the youthful Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T. S. Elliot who comprised the core of the group. Though feeding off each others’ imagination and company, tensions were also at times high and the relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was particularly close, yet at the same time troublesome. An interesting post by Daniel Dalton presents an intriguing photograph of the pair

How dapper they both look and you can imagine the buzz on the streets of Paris during the era – both freshly published and hailed as the new modernist writers of the day. While on something of a Hemingway bender of late, reading biographies as well as some early novels, I had read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby years ago and recently attended the cinema to watch the movie with my daughter. Baz Lurmann has captured something of the facile veneer of Daisy and company through amazing sets, full of glitz and streams of champagne, that cover up an almost total selfishness and lack of empathy. I felt Toby Maguire did an equally marvellous job as Nick, well matched by Leonardo di Caprio’s Jay Gatsby. Their sadness stayed with me for ages after, and in a weird way reminded me of the underlying depression of the nineteen eighties with its similar undercurrents (or reaction formations) of glamour and excess.