TJ ECKLEBURG IS WATCHING YOU DISSIPATE
blah blah, look at all the colorful shirts, blah blah, even little montenegro! blah blah where rich people play polo together, blah blah, not a careful driver, so what, you are blah blah, I tucked the old man in his underpants into bed.
I softened a man in Reno just to watch him dry.
I softenedmoistened a man in Reno just to watch him dry.
I don't even know why.
Because you're a big girl's blouse, Stanley.
2 is delightful.
The current flowing past-wards doesn't ring true to me these days. Maybe I've become more conservative.
My sister, who has never been much of a reader, recently asked me how I liked Anna Karenina. Apparently she just read it and is now on to Madame Bovary. She is thinking she'll read Gatsby next, because she doesn't think she got much out of it in high school. I am delighted.
Dammit, 6 means M/tch and I really are going to have to start renting The Wire. Unlike some people, we've been wanting to watch it forever, but we've been wary of the time commitment (and trips to the video store) it requires.
15: Good morning honey. Whatcha doin' up so early for?
I didn't want to miss out on any further discussion of clotted cream, of course.
Devonshire! I want to go to there!
The OQ reminds me of this one:
A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
"See that little stream - we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it - a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation."
"Why, they've only just quit over in Turkey," said Abe. "And in Morocco-"
"That's different. This western-front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and the Italians weren't any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his finacee, and little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, [stand mixers--ed.,] and your grandfather's whiskers."
"General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five."
"No, he didn't - he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurttemberg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle - there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle."
is one my favorite Fitzgerald passages (though every time I read it I think of Marlowe's remark to Amos in The Long Goodbye: "It doesn't mean a bloody thing. It just sounds good.")
beer gardens in Unter den Linden
Not really the best place to find beer gardens. If WWI was really fought over Berliner Weisse I'll be sort of sad for humanity.
Not really the best place to find beer gardens.
Scott was more of a vodka and gin man, anyway.
20: yes, it sounds nice, but it suffers from being utter rubbish. Less than twenty years later, young men from all over the world were doing exactly the same thing (modulo different technology) all over again, and the Russians that Fitzgerald maligns were as good at it as anyone. The death toll in Normandy was as high, proportionately, as on the Somme. The front lines at Leningrad or Cassino were as static as they were at Verdun.
You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his finacee, and little cafes in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, [stand mixers--ed.,] and your grandfather's whiskers."
I like the idea of Stuff Edwardian People Like.
24: If you're going to be familiar, why "Scott"? Why not "F."?
For the Victorians, though, it would have to be SVPDL or else there wouldn't be much to talk about.
25,28:It is also bullshit because the Edwardian Age was exactly what you would expect the age of Goldman and Joyce and Picasso and Freud and Einstein to be:an age of uncertainty and anxiety.
29: He's always told me to call him "Scooters".
'Round these parts he's Scottsy-Pottsy-Puddin'-n-Pie.
31: No. Everyone was calm and certain...and then WWI started, and everybody became uncertain and anxious.
Sometimes when he arrives, one of us shouts out "Great F. Scott!".
Sometimes "Great (Gatsby) Scott!" instead.
We are quite a witty and urbane bunch, let me tell you.
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 . . . .
WWI was a relief and an escape for Europe. They ran headlong to the trenches precisely because the pre-war world seemed unbearable and the heroic romanticism of war was appealing. This was/is mostly a male testosterone thing although some women went along. It is interesting the the post-war world misremembered the Edwardian age as a Golden Age of calm and clarity.
I tried to write the following up last night, but stopped.
The other night I re-watched Across the Universe (Beatles video movie) with the sound off. Eye-candy, wallpaper. But this time I was maddened by the degree with which that movie pushed the flash and glitter to the foreground.
On the other side, and much more accurate, is Mad Men. The assassinations, war, drugs, Woodstock and music, even the sexual revolution was very much background to our lives, which as always were about jobs and school and family. And those foreground events were not what changed us and changed the country. More likely it was demographics and technology and certain attitudes in the Greatest Generation.
What is changing Don & Peggy & Joan & Pete? This is what I think Weiner & the writers are trying to show, something about how social changes bubble up from the bottom with almost imperceptible causes and dynamics. Peggy takes chances, Don gives her a break. Ain't about Freidan and Greer.
I fucking need more post-structuralism.
If you're going to be familiar, why "Scott"? Why not "F."?
Because it's not nice to confuse Ford Maddox Ford.
For the Victorians, though, it would have to be SVPDL or else there wouldn't be much to talk about.
Progress, large families, Free Trade, cast iron things, railways, evangelical Christianity, empire, music hall, big skirts, starch, big hats, big hats for men, big hats with fruit on them, light opera, steam power, vaccination, missionaries, parliamentary reform, three-volume novels, abolition, temperance, the Rise of the Middle Classes, Meissen ware, electro-plated nickel silver, stuffed animals, breech-loading firearms, family life, slightly emancipated ethnic minorities, the gold standard, rivets, three per cent consols, gunboats, daguerrotypes, tunnelling shields, public demonstrations of science, anthropology, over-the-counter hard drugs, clockwork, close-order drill, universal education and ginger.
antimacassars, cataloging things.
Hooray for SVPL! And for SVPDL!
['Nice one, ajay.']
40, 41: But other than that . . . .
I mean really, it proves my point. Two comments and we're done with SVPL.
museums, Egypt, occultism ...
I can keep going!
I call him Skip.
And then Henry Louis Gates tries to break into his house.
I think to keep things straight we're going to need to use "SEdPL" and "SElPL" to avoid unpleasantness like being called a dumbass for saying that Edwardians liked big ruffly collars and caked on makeup.
Dinosaurs, anaglypta, Gothic architecture, curry, the Navy, stamps, gas mantles, serialised novels, sulphur baths, gutta-percha and Lyme Regis.
Don in the last episode says something about how Betty's late father and Don hated each other. This statement has been studied around the webs, and there are a lot of reasons, but there was a scene in which Don & Gene show opposite attitudes toward war. Don is not going to be a Vietnam hawk.
Why this difference between generations or the two men? Well, Don's Don, with Don's history, and it is very particular and contingent, but also willed, chosen, and what, metonymy? Or actual historical social change?
I really think Mad Men is that good, very very political, informed by the best feminist and contemporaneous social and cultural theory.
"This is how the world is changed," they say, one by one, two by two, flawed people taking small chances.
48: yo, Edwardian people be all like this [plays cricket, goes yachting, puts on straw boater] and Elizabethans be like this [discovers potato, writes tragedy, fights duel].
46: SHUT YOUR MOUTH, CHILD! ANY MORE IMPUDENCE FROM YOU AND YOU'LL BE PUNISHED MOST SEVERELY!
... absinthe, the Jewish Question, trusts, suffrage ...
51: DISCOVERED THE POTATO MY EYE!
corsets, lobster as food for the lower classes, nice handwriting, pale and chubby sexiness, forgery
53: I don't think they actually liked the Jewish Question all that much...
54: you don't count. Do you have a flag? Well then.
The other night I re-watched Across the Universe (Beatles video movie) with the sound off. Eye-candy, wallpaper. But this time I was maddened by the degree with which that movie pushed the flash and glitter to the foreground.
Worth noting that Julie Taymor previous directed both the Lion King on Broadway and Titus which was one of the most emotionally brutal movies I've seen.
In fact, I heard a rumor that she was attracted to Titus because she was tired of the schmaltz from the Lion King.
So, she's certainly capable of a range of moods (or, at least, a range of extremes).
I really think Mad Men is that good, very very political, informed by the best feminist and contemporaneous social and cultural theory.
"This is how the world is changed," they say, one by one, two by two, flawed people taking small chances.
I'm glad you're around, Bob.
BTW, have you all seen Stuff Christian People Like? I haven't seen it discussed here, but I missed a lot of threads. Very much in the Slacktivist vein, in that the writer is from the (sub)culture, and so is criticizing from the inside, but is very aware of the blindspots of the culture.
Less funny than SWPL*, but a lot more informative.
* I went over there for the first time since it originally blew up over here, and it was funnier than what I recall. I suspect that working with an editor for the book helped a lot - it was more tightly written, with a more defined angle (specifically, it pushes the "if you find yourself among White People, this information will help," which was always the funniest bit**, but often got lost)
** By far the funniest thing I recall from the first batch was the bit about recycling and tricking White People into going through the trash to get their bottle back out