A Good Illusion

"Leaving the studio he was still tense but the open car pulled the summer evening close and he looked at it. There was a moon down at the end of the boulevard and it was a good illusion that it was a different moon every evening, every year. Other lights shone in Hollywood since Minna's death: in the open markets lemons and grapefruit and green apples slanted a misty glare into the street. Ahead of him the stop-signal of a car winked violet and at another crossing he watched it wink again. Everywhere floodlights raked the sky. On an empty corner two mysterious men moved a gleaming drum in pointless arcs over the heavens." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON. I thought that was a pretty good paragraph and I showed it to Melissa Ginsburg at the City Grocery Bar tonight and she thought it was a pretty good paragraph too. Then I went to Lee Durkee's, where we watched a movie of RICHARD III and liked the lines about "wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, inestimable stones, unvaluèd jewels, all scatt'red in the bottom of the sea: some lay in dead men's skulls, and in the holes where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept - as 'twere in scorn of eyes - reflecting gems, that wooed the slimy bottom of the deep and mocked the dead bones that lay scatt'red by."