Book #48: The Great Gatsby

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"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."

This quote comes around the halfway point of The Great Gatsby, my third reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece of the "jazz age" which he coined. The reasons that prompted me to pick it up each time differed, as did the impact the novel had on me. The first two times I read it as a student, picked for its brevity in high school for a summer reading program, and as part of a college course focusing on American Literature of the 20th century or something capitalized to that effect.

This time it was an article on writing and language and, even though I was in the middle of another book, I decided to dust off my old copy and go through it one more time. Being sick and in bed for much of the weekend lended itself beautifully to reading uninterrupted (the only time I'm exempt from Dad duties is when I'm sick and possibly contagious, so I make the most of it), and over the course of a few hours I poured again through the novel.

On the surace The Great Gatsby is about the destructive love between Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire and Daisy Buchanan, the married woman who lives across the bay. It's also a look at the "jazz age" through the myriad of relationships on display - between friends, spouses, and lovers, all taken through the eyes of one innocent pair of eyes - Nick Carraway, who attempts to make his way in the city and falls under the charisma of Jay Gatsby. And you can read the novel at either of these levels and come away satisfied, because what Fitzgerald can do is write, write with a terse poetic lilt that's akin to Hemingway in its brevity, but has a flowering all its own.

And that language dives through both of the above readings of Gatsby and cuts to what I think is the heart of the novel, that we as people are composed of every action that has happened to us. We are the sum of our past as well as the present, and to deny that past is to open the door to our own destruction. We find out that Jay Gatsby is actually a carefully constructed persona, built to hide Jay's very humble origins in order to successfully win the heart and hand of a young Daisy, who moves in different social circles. Everything is a thin veil meant to obscure his origins, and when this sense of deception becomes more overt in his affair with Daisy and the tragic consequences due to mistaken identities and infidelities all around, Nick is left to consider the very famous last words we read in the novel:

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

Road Cows

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Small anecdote from the sick room:

Last night around 2:00 AM I was downstairs on the couch, wrapped in a quilt and sipping on some green tea while trying not to think about the fact that my head feels like it's 60 pounds and filled with expired whole milk.  Since sleep was out of the question, I was finishing up the second of two books I read this weekend, Haruki Murakami's memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  Late in the book he reprints an essay about the time he ran an ultrmarathon, 62 miles in a single day, which is where I came across the following line:

Beside the road cows are lazily chewing grass.

My sick-addled brain, however, read the sentence this way:

Besides, the road cows are lazily chewing grass.

And then I spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out what the heck a "road cow" was.

Sick and Tired

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Take each word individually, or collectively as a whole, it's been a rough week, so I've been lax on the updates.  Work has got me running in circles trying to coordinate a conference next week for our new vendor relationships, and Jack has been sick all week at home, which has taken its toll on both the Missus and myself.  She's rough and ragged with a fuse that's practically burnt down by the start of each day, and I'm progressively getting more and more sick to the point where I'm sure I hacked up 60% of my lung this morning.

Plus I'm boning up on movies and music for the annual Year End Round-up.  Which really isn't a chore at all, but is making me listen to Lil' Wayne's Tha Carter III.

The album cover is definitely giving me mixed signals here...

Back on 'The Wire'

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The adage "absence makes the heart grow fonder" was reinforced this past weekend when, after a self-imposed wait of three months, I began watching Season 2 of The Wire, quickly rising to the top of my "Greatest Television Shows of All Time" list.

McNulty's been shipped off to Harbor patrol (ha!  See how I did that?), Lieutenant Daniels is working in the basement, and drug lord Avon Barksdale is sitting in prison alongside sidemen Wee Bey and Dee.  Life is crummy, but then so's Baltimore.  By the end of the first episode we have a dead body in the water, a shipping crate with a false back and 13 dead women, and war between the police and the unionized dock workers over who gets the prime location for a donated stained-glass window at the church.

In other words, all the makings of another great season.

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Also while on the topic of television shows I been bugged about for so long I finally decided to cave in and watch, I'm starting the second season of 30 Rock.  My initial crush on Tina Fey has now evolved (or devolved, according to my wife) into full-blown worship.  I would probably stop watching except for the fact that everyone else on the cast is hysterical.  Tracy Morgan is funnier than he ever was on SNL, and Alec Baldwin has transformed into a God of comedic timing.

I have bouts of television overload which will turn on a dime and become television deprivation.  There are 3 seasons of Doctor Who, the second season of Burn Notice, and at least half of this season's House sitting lonely on my DVR right now.  And the deliciously evil Netflix has conspired with my XBOX 360 to stream Instant Streaming queue direct to my television, which means that I now have instant television access to  the entire run of Simon and Simon, Murder, She Wrote, and Magnum P.I.

Am I the only one who forget that Simon and Simon even existed in our universe?

Why yes, that is a scene from the memorable Simon and Simon/Magmun P.I. crossover.  Why do you ask?