Tag Archives: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Breaking The Bank & Busting a Myth

Posted on by

casino-de-monte-carlo-gambling(Image: http://www.vixendivorcee.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/casino-de-monte-carlo-gambling.jpg )

Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo is something we all dream of at least once in a while. It represents a wonderfully luxuriant fantasy that draws on the unmistakable glamour of the Principality along with the fairytale simplicity of a life transformed by nothing more than the turn of a card. The Azure allure of the Mediterranean, sweeping palm-lined boulevards, yachts and limousines, movies stars and beauty queens…. no wonder it is such a Hollywood staple; who would not want a champagne lifestyle like that?

Life can be every bit as remarkable as fairytales sometimes, and every once in a while someone does disappear into the night with a fortune. A massive casino win is one of those dreams that occasionally really does come true. The glitz and the romance of Monte Carlo itself may not always be part of the story but, for those who win big, such a picturesque destination quickly becomes a realistic option.
230800331_09562765c6_z(Image: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/79/230800331_09562765c6_z.jpg )

The Man who broke the bank…

The idea of actually breaking the bank at Monte Carlo all started in 1891 when English entrepreneur Charles Wells scooped an enormous roulette win in Monte Carlo’s Grand Casino to the tune of a million francs. Those were the days when a million francs represented a king’s ransom. His win became so renowned that a popular song was written in his honour. Whether it was the song itself or the dream it described, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” remained a music hall favourite from the 1890s well into the 1940s. Hollywood got in on the act as well in the form of a 1935 romantic comedy made to recreate Wells’ phenomenal win. That one in a million opportunity is one of those ideas that, it seems, no one can resist.

Wells is, indirectly at least, the most famous casino big winner, but he is not the only one. In 2000, humble cocktail waitress Cynthia Jay-Brennan enjoyed a return that was every bit as extraordinary. On a night out to celebrate her mother-in-law’s birthday, Jay-Brennan took a turn at the Megabucks slot machine, a state-wide lottery jackpot that had been rolling over for several weeks. On her ninth pull, she dropped the small matter of $34,959,458.56. At that point she was able to give up her waitressing job at – believe it or not – the Monte Carlo Casino in Las Vegas.

21st Century winners

Phil_Ivey_(WSOP_2009,_Event_25) (Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Phil_Ivey_%28WSOP_2009%2C_Event_25%29.jpg )

More recently, the online world has started producing a steady stream of gaming millionaires. In 2009, Finland’s Patrik Antonius won the (then) biggest ever online poker pot, pocketing a massive $1,356,947 in a single hand. And the world-renowned poker star Phil Ivey – ‘The Tiger Woods of Poker’ – was believed to have won close to $2million playing online – and that is in addition to the many millions the has picked up in person at some of the world’s most exclusive gaming rooms. And the roster of online winners keeps growing with popular weekly tournaments such as the PokerStars Sunday Millions

The Sunday Million has become one of the world’s biggest regular poker events. It is the online equivalent of the Monte Carlo Casino in your own front room. Every week, players from all around the world, including some of the biggest names in the professional game, are able to play together online for a guaranteed million dollar prize pool. It is a forum that allows everyone to turn that dream of a luxury lifestyle into reality. Low stakes qualifying tournaments are run throughout the week in the run up to the big event, with initial stakes as low as just one dollar. There is no bar to anyone with skill, judgement and knowledge of the game going all the way to that first prize. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Sunday Million attracts tens of thousands of players every week. And every week one of those players walks away with a massive first prize.

There are numerous other online tournaments, but none can match the scale of the Sunday Million. And, of course, there are gamblers who prefer alternatives to poker. Ivey is by no means the only high roller out there.

The world’s most famous ‘run’

Between 1992 and 1995, Archie “The Greek” Karas earned celebrity status in the US when he worked a meagre $50 up to a cool $40million. Karas’ feat was not achieved overnight. The one-time ship waiter’s win was the culmination of a series of increasingly extravagant bets that became famous as ‘The Run’. He combined betting on games of pool as well as a variety of more conventional casino games, but over the course of that incredible period he just kept winning bigger and bigger amounts. What was even more remarkable about Karas’ story is that he then went on to lose all of that money. He is, it goes without saying, an intriguing figure.

Karas has some justification when he claims to have played with more money than anyone else alive, but he attributes his success to a paradoxical relationship with his wealth. Famously, he has declared, “Money means nothing to me. I don’t value it… The things I want, money can’t buy: health, freedom, love, happiness. I don’t care about money, so I have no fear.”

cards(Image: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2633/5810485956_723ca96d33_z.jpg )

Following in the footsteps of Wells, Karas’ story is set to be given the Hollywood treatment. Hollywood just cannot resist the extravagant allure of someone breaking the bank. But as Karas’ example shows, a big win is not an end in itself; it is merely one part of a wider story. Living happily ever after is all well and good in fairy stories and it makes perfect sense for Hollywood scriptwriters, but real life is invariably a little more complicated. What we say we want and what we really want may not be the same thing.

An unromantic observation

F Scott Fitzgerald, author of the Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night – both books that deal with the romantic allure of the rich – famously took the Hollywood view of wealth. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the phenomenal success of Gatsby in the 1920s had turned Fitzgerald into an overnight millionaire. He was the jazz age equivalent of a modern star like Benedict Cumberbatch.
3009099385_4f0cc26241_z(Image: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3036/3009099385_4f0cc26241_z.jpg?zz=1 )

During a summer sojourn in the South of France, he once shared a famous exchange with his contemporary and friend Ernest Hemingway. It is a conversation that offers a telling backdrop to that fantasy idea of breaking the bank. “The rich are different from the rest of us” Fitzgerald had whimsically suggested. “No,” was Hemingway’s pithy reply, “They just have more money.”

Hemingway’s characteristically sharp put-down casts the whole Monte Carlo fantasy into a very different light. Hemingway, it is fair to say, would have had some time for the unsentimental and objective way that Karas appears to deal with his changing fortunes. Like Karas, Wells’ Monte Carlo millions did not last long. When Wells returned to England the money he had won stayed with the casino. He had played it all away. It is the sort of story Hemingway would have relished.

The poker lesson

As wise – or as cynical – as Hemingway was in his exchange with the starry-eyed Fitzgerald, he was clearly on the same page as the likes of Phil Ivey. Within the cold-eyed world of professional poker, money is divorced from its day-to-day utility. Instead, it becomes merely a part of the game, a means to play for bigger stakes and even greater wins. Building a bankroll is not about living the Monte Carlo lifestyle, it is simply a matter of demonstrating the quality of a person’s skill at the game.

And that wholly practical logic is the antidote to the ‘happy ever after’ sentimentality that is the stuff of music hall songs and Hollywood happy endings. We may all fantasise about breaking the bank at Monte Carlo but whilst the tangible reality of a mountain of cash is wholly achievable, realising the glamorous fantasy of a life of ease and enduring good health and happiness is something else altogether. Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo or picking up the Sunday Million will not make any of us a different person. It will just mean we have more money.

 

 

 

Famous People Who Didn’t Go To University

Posted on by

Zac GoldsmithI have a confession to make. I find the whole snobbish going to university thing stupid. If you want to actually study something or be a doctor, then obviously go and reach your potential, but one of the things I find most stupid about social pressure is that everyone should go to university. At least if they want to be middle class.

Tuition fees are now appallingly expensive, and the most annoying thing I found about the recent BBC class calculator is that they still put going to university and owning a home as an indicator of class. Even though people buying homes they could not afford was one of the factors in the recession, and a recent study said that most students would never be able to pay of the debts they had incurred.

I recently saw an interesting meme on Facebook. It said, “Modern education: creating people who are smart enough to accurately repeat what they are told and follow orders.”

You don’t have to agree with me. I know it is a controversial thing to think. However, have a look at just a few of the famous people who did not go to university.

Apple founder Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College.

TV host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres dropped out of the University of New Orleans after one semester.

The creator of Tumblr David Karp never even graduated from high school.

Walt Disney left school at 16 to join the Army. He couldn’t get in because of his age so he joined the Red Cross and left for Europe.

Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard but later got an honorary degree.

Paul Thomas Anderson dropped out of NYU film school.

Zac Goldsmith MP for Richmond Park and North Kingston did not go to university, instead deciding to travel the world. He told the Financial Times: “I think university is hugely overrated for most people,” he says, insisting that a wide range of good apprenticeships is more useful than three years of light work and heavy drinking. “I would not encourage my children to go to university.”

Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to work full time on Facebook.

Yoko Ono dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College

Woody Allen was thrown out of New York University after one semester and later dropped out of the City College of New York.

James Cameron studied physics at Fullerton College. He dropped out to become a truck driver.

Thomas Edison left school to work on the railroad at the age of 12.

F. Scott Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton.

Coco Chanel dropped out of school to become a cabaret singer when she was 18.

Whole Foods founder John Mackey dropped out of the University of Texas.

Pablo Picasso dropped out of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

The founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg dropped out of the University of Houston in 2004.

What do you think? Is going to university important?

Read Up On The Great Gatsby: Great Gatsby Reading List

Posted on by

The Great Gatsby has been released and the roaring 1920s are back in fashion in a big way. We have a reading list for you from the lovely people at Kobo

 

Has Baz Luhrmann stayed true to the book?  To find out if he has captured the essence of the novel it might be time to revisit the classic.

 

Kobo has provided a handful of reads for inspiration and the best bit is you can get them all for under £10.00. All eBooks are available online at www.kobobooks.com and can be read on any mobile, laptop, tablet or eReading device.

 

FICTION

 great Gatsby

 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Price: 0.98p

 

The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, The New York Times remarked, “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth. A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

This is the definitive, textually accurate edition of The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and authorised by the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

image015

The Waste Land and other Poems by T.S. Eliot

Price: £4.19

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain . . . Published in 1922, The Waste Land was the most revolutionary poem of its time, offering a devastating vision of modern civilisation which has lost none of its power as we enter a new century.

 

image016

 

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Price: £5.99

 

Published in 1926 to explosive acclaim, The Sun Also Rises stands as perhaps the most impressive first novel ever written by an American writer. A roman à clef about a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris’s Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the centre of a civilization spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and honour have yet to lose their currency, the novel captured for the generation that would come to be called “Lost” the spirit of its age, and marked Ernest Hemingway as the preeminent writer of his time.

 

NON FICTION

image017

 

 

Critical Studies:  The Great Gatsby by Kathleen Parkinson

Price:  £4.99

 

Kathleen Parkinson places this brilliant and bitter satire on the moral failure of the Jazz Age firmly in the context of Scott Fitzgerald’s life and times. She explores the intricate patterns of the novel, its chronology, locations, imagery and use of colour, and how these contribute to a seamless interplay of social comedy and symbolic landscape. She devotes a perceptive chapter to Fitzgerald’s controversial portrayal of women and goes on to discuss how the central characters, Gatsby and Nick Carraway, embody and confront the dualism inherent in the American dream.

 

image018

 

Only Yesterday:   An Informal History Of The Nineteen Twenties by Frederick Lewis Allen

Price:  £7.91

 

Hailed as a classic even when it was first published in 1931, Only Yesterday remains one of the most vivid and precise accounts of the volatile stock market and the heady boom years of the 1920’s. A vibrant social history that is unparalleled in scope and accuracy, it artfully depicts the rise of post – World War I prosperity, the catalytic incidents that led to the Crash of 1929, and the devastating economic decline that ensued–all set before a colourful backdrop of flappers, Al Capone, the first radio, and the “scandalous” rise of skirt hemlines. Now, this mesmerizing chronicle is reintroduced to offer readers of today an unforgettable look at one of the most dynamic periods of America’s past.

 

image019

 

The Roaring 20’s And The Wall Street Crash by Nick Shepley

Price:  £2.27

 

The Wall Street Crash was an epic failure of the financial system at the start of the 20th Century, but it alone did not cause the Great Depression. This edition of Explaining Modern History looks at the deeper causes of the crisis. Ideal for GCSE and A Level.

 

This historical book describes Americas entry into the first world war -leaving it the most affluent country the world had ever seen, through the fantasy of American capitalism in the 1920s culminating in an examination of the causes of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression and finishing with an assessment of the effectiveness of the government’s economic remedies. All whilst busting myths of the crash of 1929, explaining in very clear terms how it actually happened, and drawing enlightening parallels to today’s economic woes.