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From The Atlantic:
F. Scott Fitzgerald never explicitly states Jay Gatsby’s race.
By Alonzo Vereen
Alonzo Vereen is the author of Historically Black: American Icons Who Attended HBCUs .
FEBRUARY 1, 2023
… My students fought Gatsby from the beginning. The teenagers in my classroom—all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala—simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. …
And I’d launch into a reading of Nick Carraway’s opening narration: “Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon.” Silence. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. “What’s ‘feigned’?” …
Personally, I have a hard time figuring out what “The Great Gatsby” is about.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this
blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Although Fitzgerald was already a huge celebrity in 1925, “The Great Gatsby” was a dud … until during WWII the government gave out hundreds of thousands of free copies of it to military men. For reasons that are still not well-understood, it galvanized young men worried about dying, and they came home to assign it to high school students.
The Atlantic article continues:
If the race of an American character is not specified, we assume the character is white. …
I turned to the secondary literature and found a chapter that offered an unexpected perspective on Gatsby’s race in a 2004 book titled The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. In it, Carlyle Van Thompson, a professor of African American and American literature at Medgar Evers College, argues that Fitzgerald “guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a ‘pale’ Black individual who passes for white.” I read this sentence twice, feeling like I had finally been granted license to enter the novel, to see myself in it, to make my way through the prose and develop my own interpretations. I was a 20-year-old English major, concentrating in African American literature at a historically Black college, and I still needed that permission.… If the race of an American character is not specified, we assume the character is white….
Stumbling on Thompson’s analysis of The Great Gatsby was like finding a door propped open, and I rushed through with questions. What if the novel’s focus on class and ethnic tensions obscures a racial drama that readers have read right over? … Preoccupied with the obvious clash between old money and new money, we just haven’t seen him, or the threat of miscegenation he represents. Fitzgerald was wrestling with the idea of America as a place of self-making, where radical reinvention is at once celebrated and feared. In doing so, according to Thompson, he struck upon the most illusory of American self-transformations—Black passing as white—revealing “how intrinsically American literature and the American Dream are racial.”
Thompson’s interpretation—picking up on Morrison’s call, in Playing in the Dark, to recognize an “Africanist presence” at the center of the nation’s 19th- and 20th-century literary canon, a presence that serves as a foil for ideas of whiteness, freedom, and more—sent me back to Gatsby, this time to meet with an intellectually charged experience. To read the novel without presupposing any character’s whiteness is to discover which characters are identified as white and which are not….
Thompson trains his focus on Jay Gatsby, flagging what he sees as telltale physical traits—his “brown, hardening body,”
It’s summer in 1922 on the ocean.
in Fitzgerald’s words, and hair that “looked as though it were trimmed every day.”
He’s rich and appearance-conscious.
Thompson also has his eye out for an array of culturally evocative signals that “Gatsby is racially counterfeit.” Nick, for example, is struck by his “graceful, conservative foxtrot,” a dance modeled on the slow drag, a Black dance sensation of the period. He also notes that Gatsby’s mansion sits on 40 acres of land in West Egg, an allotment that has a particular valence for Black Americans.
Thompson gathers less subtle pieces of evidence too. When, at the Plaza Hotel, Tom lets loose his suspicion that Daisy is having an affair with Gatsby, he frames it this way: “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife … Next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” To this, Jordan, the “incurably dishonest” one, responds, “We’re all white here.”
And what is one to make of the insinuation that Tom hurls at Gatsby in the heat of his anger upon learning of Daisy’s infidelity? “I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of [Daisy] unless you brought the groceries to the back door.” Throughout the scene, Fitzgerald emphasizes that Tom is “incredulous and insulting,” impatient, sharp, and explosive. To be sure, Tom’s fury might be expected, regardless of Gatsby’s identity. But, combined with Tom’s possibly veiled racial observations, could the outbursts suggest that something more is at stake than his marriage and social standing among the old-money elite? Could Tom here be venting his fears about miscegenation?
… Janet Savage, in Jay Gatsby: A Black Man in Whiteface (2017), explains that the initial title for the novel—Trimalchio in West Egg—refers to the former slave in Petronius’s novel, The Satyricon. …
… Thompson himself said, after delivering the paper that inspired The Tragic Black Buck, that his students weren’t all prompt converts to his view, and in the end, I couldn’t, and still can’t, endorse his confident assertion that Jay Gatsby is Black. What I do claim is that Jay Gatsby is unraced. And that seems to me more important, because it opens the door wider than stark revisionism does. The ambiguity of Gatsby’s race and ethnicity shatters the Black-and-white framework we reflexively impose on so many classic texts.
This reading of Gatsby, I went on to discover when I scratched my initial lesson plan and started over, certainly gave my diverse class a way in. Gatsby’s American identity is so ambiguous that the students could layer on top of it any ethnic or racial identity they brought to the novel. When they did, the text was freshly lit. … Suddenly they were invested. They began scouring the novel for evidence of Gatsby’s race.
You can’t get much more stereotypically black than being born James Gatz in rural North Dakota around 1890 to poor Lutheran farm folk.
I couldn’t find a figure for 1890, but the 1910 Census report on North Dakota stated:
The 6,486 Indians constitute 1.1 per cent of the population, and the 617 negroes, 0.1
per cent.
Seriously, the reality was that Fitzgerald was a son of the lower upper class of the upper Midwest. While attracted to the riches of the East Coast, he was suspicious of the character of the East, especially of its ethnic diversity, which does un-American things like fix the 1919 World Series. For example, Nick Carraway accompanies Gatsby on a drive into New York City:
A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their sombre holiday. As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all… .”
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
Roaring noon. In a well — fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.
“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfsheim.”
A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the halfdarkness.
That reminds me: Robert Heinlein played around with assumptions about race in his 1950s sci-fi novels for boys. For example, Rod Walker, the narrator of his 1955 interstellar Robin Crusoe story “Tunnel In the Sky” turns out to be black if you read the book closely enough. Heinlein more famously followed that up in his 1959 “Starship Troopers” in which the narrator, Johnny Rico, turns out on the next to last page to be a Tagalog-speaking Filipino. Other Heinlein novels assume explicitly that space colonization will lead to major race-mixing: e.g., in “Podkayne of Mars,” Uncle Tom is a rather fierce part-Maori elder statesman of Martian indepence.
On the other hand, Heinlein didn’t start writing for money until the peak of the Movie Age, 1939, so he was much less visually oriented than previous writers. That sounds weird, but it makes perfect sense. Once people could satisfy their craving for imagery with technologically-reproduced images, who’d pay for writers to generate images in their mind’s eye?
Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle, who was a protege-acolyte of Heinlein, made this point to me strongly: the writer’s job used to be to create mental pictures, but now people rely on actual pictures, so writers have moved on to other functions.
In particular, Heinlein appeared to be agreeable to the idea that moviemakers might cast anybody they wanted to play his characters, so why bother describing them in detail?
I imagine Heinlein noted in 1941 Dashiell Hammett had devoted two pages in his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon to describing Sam Spade’s looks based on Hammett’s own extraordinary looks — 6’3″, glam rock star cheekbones, silver hair and a dark mustache.
But Warner Brothers had cast Humphrey Bogart, who didn’t look much at all like Hammett’s conception of Spade.
If Warner Brothers wanted to cast Humphrey Bogart in a Heinlein story, Heinlein would be A-OK with that, so why bother describing what the hero looks like when that might cause fans to be disappointed in the movie version?
Ironically, during his lifetime, Heinlein could never quite get Hollywood to make one of his books into a movie, although the film Destination: Moon is clearly based on Rocket Ship Galileo while Invasion of the Body Snatchers draws upon his Puppet Masters. In later generations, the great last scene of James Cameron’s Aliens is inspired by Starship Troopers and Avatar by the second half of Space Cadet.
In turn, that agnosticism over characters’ looks allowed Heinlein to play games with readers’ expectations years later.
But there is zero evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald was thinking along the same lines in 1925, before the talkie movie era.
But that raises the question: why torment 2-digit IQ BIPOC kids with the difficult prose style of “The Great Gatsby?” Why not have them read Heinlein’s more accessible “Tunnel in the Sky?” If they really are fascinated by decoding books for clues about the race of the narrator, as The Atlantic author alleges, why not assign them a book where the author is on their side and has constructed a puzzle for them to successfully decode?
Personally, I think it’s a good thing to encourage kids to enjoy reading. There are a huge number of books more fun to read than The Great Gatsby.
Of course, Heinlein is Controversial (due to his last wife being a Goldwaterite), while Fitzgerald is not, presumably due to his leftism in the 1930s, although during his 1920s golden age he was something of a racist snob.
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I thought Jay Gatsby identified as a non binary transsexual Jewish activist. He was totally misunderstood.
Garbage.
Frequently, characters appearing in novels & who are at least assumed to be part-black are not. Or we never know. Take, for example, Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s “Light in August”
Even in sci fi literature, like in Matheson’s “I am Legend”, I never thought of the chief character to be other than white. So I didn’t bother to see the movie & consider it a crap because normative American, if not explicitly stated otherwise, is White.
At least before the 21st C.
And the constant attribution of " white male psychology " to a black character . Somewhere in the movie, Will Smith tries to rescue a little white blond girl who is drowing , fails, and has a nervous breakdown,
First of all, a black man taking the risk of diving underwater seems not very credible to me, then I couldn't help but to be full of racist prejudices, and think that the first thought of this black would be to rape the little blond girl.
Dear black people,
Write your own f-ing books.
Sincerely,
Whites
These constant attempts at blackwasing are just too tiresome.
There’s a reason white girls are increasingly having Children of Color.Replies: @ATate, @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymouseperson, @tyrone
I read that book years ago, and agree with many critics that Gatsby might be the perfect American novel.
As a young man who moved to nyc in my early twenties, and had a number of interesting experiences with ridiculously rich people, I heavily identified with Nick as a tagalong/observer of a world he would never really be a part of.
That said, Nick had a keen eye for detail, was an unusually honest and judicious fellow, and had a lot of integrity in the crazy world he was observing. If Nick had the suspicion that Gatsby was even slightly Mulatto, he would have told us, directly.
The character of Nick makes a secret black Gatsby absolutely impossible.
Season’s Beatings.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/number-foreign-workers-japan-reaches-record-high
— Adolf Hipster
A lot of the foreign workers are Asian from developing countries such as Vietnam. I have the feeling that they will be a relatively good fit in Japanese society or at least better than Africans are anywhere.Replies: @Johann Ricke
Ultimately in Japan--as in every nation--the struggle is to hold off the "muh immigration!" bleaters and allow your own "breeder" types to lead the fertility recovery. And as you hold off immigration, the conditions on the ground--jobs and affordable housing--before better and better for "affordable family formation".Those nations that do this successfully will survive, those nations that do not will die off--their territory conquered by foreign breeders.
A major part of Gatsby is that he has enemies who would give anything to ruin him, to prove once and for all that he’s not one of their kind. Did Mr Vereen and his special valence shells get to the climax?
——-
OT — A story which will probably not go national, which would be unknown but for a certain fed-plagued Mongolian throat singing enthusiast discussion forum. Someone in Maine hung a banner claiming that it’s okay to be white. The authorities castigated them. But this time, people pushed back, including a black podcaster who asked on Twitter why exactly it would not be okay, and was blocked. Several layers of authorities attempted to control the situation and they all failed amid enthusiastic pubic pushback.
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/415283633
This is what the God of Internet has wrought.
"fed-plagued" no less. Our tax dollars at work?
Meanwhile, in the real world:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-has-most-expensive-healthcare-world
Insulin prices for my daughter with type 1 diabetes are like an order of magnitude higher than in a normal developed country. One of the many benefits of our scrupulously free-market medical system!
Gatsby is an incredibly short book, a little over a hundred pages. You can sit down and read it in one sitting over the course of an afternoon. Something doable for the average high school kid as opposed to boring, unreadable dreck like "The House of Seven Gables" that my eyes ran across the words but it was so boring I couldn't actually get my brain to read the thing when in High School.Replies: @Art Deco
And if he had, guess what we’d be calling him now? Aww hell let’s call him that anyway. He white rite?
Meanwhile, implacable competitor not sleep!!
Frequently, characters appearing in novels & who are at least assumed to be part-black are not. Or we never know. Take, for example, Joe Christmas in Faulkner's "Light in August"
Even in sci fi literature, like in Matheson's "I am Legend", I never thought of the chief character to be other than white. So I didn't bother to see the movie & consider it a crap because normative American, if not explicitly stated otherwise, is White.
At least before the 21st C.Replies: @J.Ross, @Steve Sailer, @Dragoslav, @Ray P
You’re right but for another reason: Akiva Goldsman’s mistreatment of the Legend story totally butchers the entire point, ham-fistedly shoving a much cruder message about the pointlessness of tolerance and the unchanging nature of goy inferiority. The climax of the original story is the protagonist realizing that he’s the monster and the vampires are the new normal people. It’s like Mountains of Madness, a story about recognizing the self in the other. Goldsman closes a huge metal citadel wall gate on that, after a self-serving platitude involving reggae music.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-has-most-expensive-healthcare-world
The new Meyer Wolfsheim.
Interesting choice of ethnicity.
And Indians are not a "real" race, when we think in racial terms. They are a very, very diverse bunch.Replies: @Known Fact
Interesting overarching trend: these people tend to erase the actual racism of the past, flattening history into an eternal present, where sometimes ignorant whites act rude or crazy, but for the most part life is okay for the blacks of nineteenth-century Norway or medieval Iceland.
Frequently, characters appearing in novels & who are at least assumed to be part-black are not. Or we never know. Take, for example, Joe Christmas in Faulkner's "Light in August"
Even in sci fi literature, like in Matheson's "I am Legend", I never thought of the chief character to be other than white. So I didn't bother to see the movie & consider it a crap because normative American, if not explicitly stated otherwise, is White.
At least before the 21st C.Replies: @J.Ross, @Steve Sailer, @Dragoslav, @Ray P
Robert Heinlein played around with assumptions about race in his 1950s sci-fi novels for boys. For example, Rod Walker, the narrator of his 1955 interstellar Robin Crusoe story “Tunnel In the Sky” turns out to be black if you read the book closely. Heinlein more famously followed that up in his 1959 “Starship Troopers” in which the narrator, Johnny Rico, turns out on the next to last page to be Filipino.
On the other hand, Heinlein didn’t start writing for money until the peak of the Movie Age, 1939, so he was much less visually oriented than previous writers. That sounds weird, but it makes perfect sense: once people could satisfy their craving for imagery with technologically-reproduced images, who’d pay for writers to generate images in their mind’s eye?
In particular, Heinlein appeared to be agreeable to the idea that moviemakers might cast anybody they wanted to play his characters, so why bother describing them in detail? I imagine Heinlein noted in 1941 Dashiell Hammett had devoted two pages in The Maltese Falcon to describing Sam Spade’s looks based on Hammett’s own extraordinary looks — 6’3″, glam rock star cheekbones, silver hair and a dark mustache — but Warner Brothers had cast Humphrey Bogart. If Warner Brothers wanted to cast Humphrey Bogart in a Heinlein story, he would be fine with that, so why bother describing what the hero looks like?
In turn, that agnosticism over characters’ looks allowed Heinlein to play games with readers’ expectations years later.
But there is zero evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald was thinking along the same lines in 1925, before the talkie movie era.
But that raises the question: why torment 2-digit IQ BIPOC kids with the difficult prose style of “The Great Gatsby?” Why not have them read Heinlein’s more accessible “Tunnel in the Sky?” If they really are fascinated by decoding books for clues about the race of the narrator, why not assign them one where the author is on their side?
Of course, Heinlein is Controversial (due to his last wife being a Goldwaterite), while Fitzgerald is not, presumably due to his leftism in the 1930s, although during his 1920s golden age he was something of a racist snob.
Frequently, characters appearing in novels & who are at least assumed to be part-black are not. Or we never know. Take, for example, Joe Christmas in Faulkner's "Light in August"
Even in sci fi literature, like in Matheson's "I am Legend", I never thought of the chief character to be other than white. So I didn't bother to see the movie & consider it a crap because normative American, if not explicitly stated otherwise, is White.
At least before the 21st C.Replies: @J.Ross, @Steve Sailer, @Dragoslav, @Ray P
Same for ” I, Robot ” ( Asimov )
I didn’t watch ” I am a legend ” for the same reason, but I had the misfortune to see I Robot. It was ludicrous. They tried so hard to make Will Smith the Uber sex-symbol ( hint : the shower scene ) like a Steve McQueen or whatever white sex icon in their prime,
And the constant attribution of ” white male psychology ” to a black character . Somewhere in the movie, Will Smith tries to rescue a little white blond girl who is drowing , fails, and has a nervous breakdown,
First of all, a black man taking the risk of diving underwater seems not very credible to me, then I couldn’t help but to be full of racist prejudices, and think that the first thought of this black would be to rape the little blond girl.
Write your own f-ing books.
Sincerely,
Whites
These constant attempts at blackwasing are just too tiresome.Replies: @Anon, @International Jew, @Ebony Obelisk, @Thoughts
The BBC have the absolute bloody nerve to cast a negress as Ann Bolyn, Henry the 8th’s wife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Ane_Blak-MoirLang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt,
That landet furth of the last schippis,
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
Quhou schou is tute mowitt lyk an aep,
And lyk a gangarall onto gaep,
And quhou hir schort catt nois up skippis,
And quhou schou schynes lyk ony saep,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
So she's got muckle (big) lips, is wide-mouthed, has a short upturned nose like a cat's, and her skin shines like soap. Snub noses were apparently not the thing in those days.Replies: @J.Ross, @mc23
Yes, and Americans liked watching him on TV because Americans like watching black people on TV.
https://worldstar.com/videos/wshh56s6llnO372hZDz3/got-dealt-with-dude-puts-hands-on-another-guy-for-touching-his-girlfriend039s-cheeks-during-a-house-party
Heinlein is too difficult for them. Not because of style, but- as far as I know, blacks don’t care for hard sci fiction. I may be guessing, but this can be verified, statistically. BIPOC kids & young adults, if they read, would prefer some kind of ethnic fantasy & not real sci fi (nor huwhite Northern fantasy like Tolkien).
Sci fi, as a genre, allows authors to play with ideas about anything- but only if stated explicitly, one way or another. Sci fi, as a genre, is, I’d say, 98% written in English. And we should assume that if the author is white, characters are also white- if not stated otherwise.This is different from a realist novel, depicting a particular social situation. We would not expect Fitzgerald, or Henry James or Frank Norris … to write about American millionaires from the Gilded Age or bootleggers from the Jazz Age as BIPOC people.
But, to try to reason with BIPOC ideologues is futile ….
Anyone who tries to be reasonable need not apply.
Was Jay Gatsby Black?
In the realm of iSteve, it depends.
Per one set of Steve’s articles and Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, no. There are no mass shootings at any of Gatsby’s parties.
Per another set of Steve’s articles lately, yes. Gatsby is in a car that causes a fatal traffic accident and it speeds away from the scene.
Depends on which iSteve posts you read. If you read them all, he’s half. 😏
I am very depressed this appeared in The Atlantic. I know this isn’t the first Woke thing they have published and it won’t be the last. I remember the Atlantic back when it it still had a strong editorial connection to its earlier days when it was a literary and cultural magazine. It still published short stories and poems in addition to nonfiction.
The idea that Jay Gatsby was black is not just willingly, not just eagerly but is sickeningly and determinedly wrongheaded. That this teacher ended up getting his students to turn their struggles with the novel into a treasure hunt in which they focused on looking for clues about Gatsby’s race is depressing too. How many literary novels will these kids ever read and begin to understand? The answer for most will be zero, I’m afraid. Let us hope they don’t turn every book into a hunt for unidentified black characters.
That The Atlantic betrayed its own traditions and history by endorsing such stupidity and presents ignoring the actual book before you to concentrate on deliberate misreadings and nonreadings of the text is sad beyond words.
Lord have mercy on the great books of Western civilization. Who will their future readers and interpreters be?
It will get worse.
And the Africans are coming.
I haven't read anything from The New Yorker in years, but I sense it has had the same fate. It's hard to be an elitist cultural institution when your religion is to hate the culture and play to the lowest "inclusive" denominator. They went from pretensions of High Culture to retarded rantings about Orange Man Bad.Replies: @Meretricious
Write your own f-ing books.
Sincerely,
Whites
These constant attempts at blackwasing are just too tiresome.Replies: @Anon, @International Jew, @Ebony Obelisk, @Thoughts
Agree. And “PS: everything doesn’t have to be about you.”
On the other hand, in an effort to assemble a voting coalition, their political sponsors have shamelessly flogged a massively dishonest narrative of their significance in America's rise to power, which was obviously eagerly adopted and embellished further. Throw in academia and its antipathy to our history and culture, and these lies have been spread under the guise of scholarship and a 'true account' of our history. Black culture produces almost no iconoclasts - unlike Euros - so there is a widespread belief in a largely hidden but very real centrality of people of African descent in the greatness of the American economy and culture.
Unfortunately, whites across the spectrum are all too willing to indulge this ethno-narcissism. But as America's demographics change I expect blacks and their demands for their rightful place in society to be increasingly ignored.Replies: @Art Deco
Oh, Heinlein did worse than marry a Republican. He practiced open marriage and had the effrontery to get outside action as well as his wife (early polyamorists in the sixties would cite Stranger in a Strange Land as a model), and his women are all ridiculously competent (he was, in fact, a feminist for his era) but still want to sleep with the male leads. It’s the old female nerd fantasy you’re always telling us about. He seems to have picked up the open marriage during his earlier incarnation as a socialist.
The wife seems to have been a libertarian polyamorist with an engineering background who dragged Heinlein right on economics. She would have been very popular with Scott Alexander’s crew.
Jay Gatsby was whacked before he could realize his ultimate fantasy- to become Daisy.
Maybe she was based on this Scots poem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Ane_Blak-Moir
Lang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt,
That landet furth of the last schippis,
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
Quhou schou is tute mowitt lyk an aep,
And lyk a gangarall onto gaep,
And quhou hir schort catt nois up skippis,
And quhou schou schynes lyk ony saep,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
So she’s got muckle (big) lips, is wide-mouthed, has a short upturned nose like a cat’s, and her skin shines like soap. Snub noses were apparently not the thing in those days.
I guess this is interesting because it tries to explain Buchanan’s based ranting about Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant while the glamourous crew are being served luncheon by a black domestic staff.
Gatsby though? He just seems to be a Goy Frontman for a Jewish bootlegger. Buchanan sniffs him out in grand style looking into who Gatz’s business partner really is.
As a young man who moved to nyc in my early twenties, and had a number of interesting experiences with ridiculously rich people, I heavily identified with Nick as a tagalong/observer of a world he would never really be a part of.
That said, Nick had a keen eye for detail, was an unusually honest and judicious fellow, and had a lot of integrity in the crazy world he was observing. If Nick had the suspicion that Gatsby was even slightly Mulatto, he would have told us, directly.
The character of Nick makes a secret black Gatsby absolutely impossible.Replies: @Dr. DoomnGloom
I’d bet this is what Vereen is really going after, the central figures as moving within a world they could never really enter. Everything else is just marketing to the local crowd who find the literal interpretation more accessible than the conceptual.
Don't forget that Scott Fitzgerald's chief influences were Joseph Conrad and Henry James, whose fictions are full of observers-narrators who, generally, are substitutes for aspects of authors' psyches. Narrators want to gain insight, not social status.
This piece (and the recent one about Black Women Meteorologists) makes me appreciate that I know the word “ethnonarcissism” so I don’t have to fumble around repeatedly trying to figure out how some people can have such an utterly ridiculous constellation of beliefs.
OT – Zelensky is in the UK today, he may address the EU tomorrow. Still in his “combat gear”.
Sounds like a plan!
But for Poland it doesn’t go far enough.
The Poles sure can’t wait to have Warsaw look like London.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/bond-street-tube-robbery-appeal-british-transport-police-b1058353.html
Write your own f-ing books.
Sincerely,
Whites
These constant attempts at blackwasing are just too tiresome.Replies: @Anon, @International Jew, @Ebony Obelisk, @Thoughts
But whites taking credit for items by Inventors of Color is ok?
There’s a reason white girls are increasingly having Children of Color.
You guys (always Men innit?) got Peanut Butter, Super Soaker, and….Rap, one of the most instructive mediums on how to treat wimmin courtesy of all you kangs.
Way to go it’s a great legacy….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zce7hUqxSjM
Interesting choice of ethnicity.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Mr. Anon
This Indians playing Jews stuff is weird. Even with half-Indians like Ben Kingsley.
And Indians are not a “real” race, when we think in racial terms. They are a very, very diverse bunch.
But seriously, this is a very meaty post from Steve. Along with my wife's adventures trying to teach it I know two people who call Gatsby their very favorite novel, plus radio host Mark Simone -- another huge fan who found a research work that claimed to pin down the actual sites for each scene, including powerful images like the Valley of Ashes and the TJ Eckleburg billboard
At this rate, George Washington will be determined to be “light-skinned black” and will be played by a black actor – “a black man was the father of the country!”
It isn’t just the ethnic diversity of the East Coast that’s questioned. Whites in the Midwest (esp. rural ones) still seem to evince the suspicion that even the WASP elites of the East Coast (all five of them left) are decadent and unrestrained.
If I could summarize the ethos of my wife’s people, it is hard work and sobriety.
(Pause)
Nah, it'll never catch on.
Race-mixing, anybody? Try “Farnham’s Freehold,” a book which shocked me as a kid because of its brutality and frank depiction of what it is like to be a slave. I doubt that it is on the shelves in any public school library these days.
I found The Great Gatsby quite engaging. And there is nothing obscure about the narrative. There’s no need to have a secure understanding of the author’s underlying message and one can readily imagine the author’s point of view wasn’t clear to the author himself. High school English teachers trade in opinion and fake it a certain portion of the time. (The critical exercise which inspires this post is blatantly onanistic, of course).
What next? Let’s see this yo-yo apply his method to Moby Dick, the Great White Whale.
I love The Great Gatsby and consider it to be a perfect novel. The people and the world described in it are utterly foreign to me but Fitzgerald’s descriptions draw me in and let me experience their illusions, hopes and dreams. His prose is exquisite.
I read it as a junior in our advanced English class* but it’s not a novel I would assign to teenagers whose reading comprehension is average or below.
In any case, my objection to Vereen’s method of making it accessible to young readers is that it lowers the novel to their level instead of helping them to ascend to its level (and yes, I think that’s possible, at least somewhat).
Twisting literature into something that it’s not so readers can read about characters who look like them (in defiance not only of the author’s intentions but of common sense) only encourages the narcissistic tendencies of the young. Why not try to find things in the novel that its characters experience that its readers might experience, too? Like having the girl you love being with someone else. Or not having a lot of money yourself but having a rich neighbor. How do those things make you feel about yourself? About the girl? About your neighbor? So how do you think Gatsby feels? Or Nick?
(But The Great Gatsby’s prose style is not really suitable for impoverished students of another culture even though the emotions of its characters are universally felt. I think it does a disservice to the novel and such students to assign it to them.)
What makes a novel resonate with readers is not some silliness about sharing their appearance with the appearance of the characters but about experiencing some of the same thoughts, feelings, motivations. It’s the job of a teacher to help his students make those connections that further their understanding of the novel and of themselves. It’s not the job of a teacher to make white characters wear blackface.
*Physicist Dave, yes at Parkway West. Polly Kennedy, best teacher I ever had.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-has-most-expensive-healthcare-worldReplies: @slumber_j, @Sebastian Hawks, @Anon, @Liza
USA! USA! USA!
Insulin prices for my daughter with type 1 diabetes are like an order of magnitude higher than in a normal developed country. One of the many benefits of our scrupulously free-market medical system!
Great article, Steve. Lots to chew on. First off, I’m reminded of John Dos Passos re: Hemingway, “no one ever had to pick up a dictionary while reading Hemingway.” Reading challenging work is not to be shied away from in high school; expanding the vocabulary of students is what education is all about. And besides which, The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.
Of Gatsby’s identity, I have no problem with a new generation seeing themselves, of whatever race, in the titular hero, even as a tagalog speaking North Dakotan, however improbable that may seem. One of the Big Ideas in the book is the fact that Jay is the American Adam character, ala Natty Bumpo (aka, Deerstalker, aka Hawkeye, from Last of the Mohicans), the man outside of history, full-grown emerging from the wilderness. He is the Primordial Man of America, a mysterious figure without a past. Anybody.
What’s it about? Well, that’s why it is such a great story. Endless arguments can be had on the topic. Is it a gothic tale, how Gatsby can’t escape his past? Is it a story of re-invention and self-determination, in spite of Jay’s (tragic?) ending? Or is Nick Carraway really the hero, his own fascination with Gatsby and Daisy being the theme, not their lives, but Carraway’s own; like Fitzgerald himself, Nick feels like an imposter among the elite and he wishes he had Gatsby’s ability to shed his past and become one of the beautiful people, too.
In the final analysis, it is this very ambiguity of theme, of the meaning of life itself, that makes the book great.
With all due respect, have you spent much time around young people and/or non-whites?
It is shocking to an older person like me how ignorant they are. Even worse, by pandering to them as this moron does, any sense of curiosity they have about others unlike themselves or the past (i.e. pre-2000) is deadened or stunted. Making students feel good about themselves as the unformed and uninformed little ignoramuses that they are is the focus of education today. That and hating whites of accomplishment.Replies: @Known Fact, @Woodsie
There’s a reason white girls are increasingly having Children of Color.Replies: @ATate, @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymouseperson, @tyrone
Oh please we give credit where none is due…
You guys (always Men innit?) got Peanut Butter, Super Soaker, and….Rap, one of the most instructive mediums on how to treat wimmin courtesy of all you kangs.
Way to go it’s a great legacy….
It’s a similar logic to “fatphobia is racism” from black women who have difficulty meeting white beauty standards. Instead of taking it as evidence that white people were getting along perfectly well for thousands of years without blacks, the reasoning is: black people are the prototype outsiders to whites, the origin of the mental schema of “otherness”; blacks have the copyright on being the outsider or underdog among whites; any other kind of outsider or weirdo or scapegoat is conceived of, consciously or unconsciously, by white people by analogy to the black outsider; white girls who look down on the white fat girl may not know it but they’re being racist; the literature of the West can be mined for outsider/underdog characters who through this interpretative lens can be seen as crypto-blacks.
Oh, but it does! In a way it’s understandable – any original sense of self or history was lost long ago when their ancestors were conquered and sold off, and their history in America is one of consistently being at the bottom and largely through deliberate policy. This is a group that has also seen a variety of other ethnicities arrive and quickly surpass them, and are accorded more respect by society at large as a result.
On the other hand, in an effort to assemble a voting coalition, their political sponsors have shamelessly flogged a massively dishonest narrative of their significance in America’s rise to power, which was obviously eagerly adopted and embellished further. Throw in academia and its antipathy to our history and culture, and these lies have been spread under the guise of scholarship and a ‘true account’ of our history. Black culture produces almost no iconoclasts – unlike Euros – so there is a widespread belief in a largely hidden but very real centrality of people of African descent in the greatness of the American economy and culture.
Unfortunately, whites across the spectrum are all too willing to indulge this ethno-narcissism. But as America’s demographics change I expect blacks and their demands for their rightful place in society to be increasingly ignored.
==
Bayard Rustin is dead and ceased to be an influential figure among black politicians around about 1965. It has been some time since black politicians made a habit of demanding a 'rightful place' in American society. Equal liberty and careers-open-to-talents (qualified in some measure by common provision in certain sectors) is not a program that has in the last 50-odd years interested black politicians. What interests them practically is fodder to build patron-client relationships (the mode for Democratic politicians generally) and job opportunities for social workers and school administrators. What interests them viscerally would be instances of blacks being held accountable by people they deem to be of low status, e.g. police officers, prison guards, and (white) school district employees. Standardized tests are also 'disrespectful'.
.Replies: @Arclight
-------
OT -- A story which will probably not go national, which would be unknown but for a certain fed-plagued Mongolian throat singing enthusiast discussion forum. Someone in Maine hung a banner claiming that it's okay to be white. The authorities castigated them. But this time, people pushed back, including a black podcaster who asked on Twitter why exactly it would not be okay, and was blocked. Several layers of authorities attempted to control the situation and they all failed amid enthusiastic pubic pushback.
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/415283633Replies: @J.Ross, @Muggles, @JimDandy
Follow-up to this. PUBLIC. ENTHUSIASTIC PUBLIC PUSHBACK. WITH AN L.
Curious. Here in England, UK, we would call these Second Generation.
I guess becoming American is somehow more challenging.
THE CORRECT MEANING OF “FIRST GENERATION,” “SECOND GENERATION”Replies: @Gandydancer
OT again but this is YUGE.
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.
Highly important article about a not-so-secret "mystery" now revealed.
We will hear a lot more about this, despite MSM coverups.
This was terrorism, plain and simple. An act of war in other circumstances.
Does Biden have to hand Putin a valid "talking point" on this?
C4? That's ancient technology. I'm not an explosives expert or enthusiast. But the personnel suspected to be involved -- Polish, British, American, naval special units -- would be equipped with advanced ordnance, especially for this job. Although explosives leave behind a signature, and C4 is in use everywhere. It could be the perps didn't want it to be too obvious, even though just about everyone knows the Poles, Brits, and Yanks are agents of globohomo.
So that's one error, or lie.Replies: @Wokechoke
Read “Gatsby” decades ago and didn’t care for it.
Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise is a very close approximation of Starship Troopers’ drop suits.
There’s a reason white girls are increasingly having Children of Color.Replies: @ATate, @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymouseperson, @tyrone
I don’t know, but I think that way too many blacks/African-Americans, men, are obsessed with the idea that non-black females (mostly white, but also other races like East and South Asians, females) find them irresistible, at least physically.
The very mindset is weird. Why would males of any race care so much about their-supposed- physical attractiveness for other races’ females?
I don’t see whites, East and South Asians, Mestizo Hispanics (not white Hispanics who are, let’s be frank, just another variety of whites), American Indians/Native Americans, central Asians, Middle Eastern Caucasians, … musing about such questions. These groups, who form the vast majority of mankind, have enough self-reliance & dignity not to fuss around such infantile nonsense.
Blacks have, I’d say, issues with self-respect & dignity. They, even in the Arab world, are obsessing about their racial identity & its “worth”. They’re delusional about their masculinity, which is actually rather fragile.
Not men like Thomas Sowell or the late R.W. Ellison, but the average black who is much more insecure in all matters in comparison with average men of other races.
But, let’s expand on the topic a bit more.
To me, it seems perfectly natural that race is one the primary elements in physical/romantic attraction. Race is looks & it indicates belonging to a specific group. It is simply normal that, various fetishists aside, men or women prefer their own kind, whichever race. It is just as normal as heterosexuality is normal compared to homosexuality (gays are 1–3% of a society, so they are not the norm).
The most erotic human organ is brain. So, it is what one thinks about others, and in the erotic area included, is “real”. Black males have, through history, in whites’ mind, came to symbolize unbridled, “hormonal” sexuality, as well as endowment in “equipment” department. It doesn’t matter that various measures have shown that whites & blacks don’t basically differ in penis size (https://www.drelist.com/blog/penis-size-race/); it is what those sexually interested think about it.
So- is it of importance? It is difficult to say- it seems that no more than 10% of women of any race are “size queens”, while most want something average. It may be that a big dick is more important as a symbol of male power that it is anatomically – experientially of any importance. What is, physically, attractive to most women is athleticism, good figure (although some prefer fat or skinny guys, but they are in the minority), as in classic Greek sculptures.
That said, it boils down to- what women want? Do females of all cultures, races, …want the same? I think it is evident that modern females, since they can choose (and could not 100, 200, 300,…. years ago) want, more or less: romance & love, their man (basically, monogamy), children & family…plus some kind of financial stability & independence if their marriage/relationship turns sour. They want, to put it that way, “soft patriarchy”. Which role plays sexuality in modern woman’s life? Impossible to answer. It seems that it is, statistically, mostly connected to emotion & romance.
As far as erotic attraction goes, one must be deaf, blind & mute not to see one thing: media influence on female erotic fantasy. That’s why many women have been attracted to Sinatra, Di Caprio, ..or Clark Gable in olden days. Too many women (men?) begin to desire what TV & movies & music industry imply or suggest they should desire. So, the “natural” attraction is vastly skewed in favor of what popular culture says they want.
Here in Europe, central & eastern, blacks are not present, nor are they of much interest. Also, women are no as “easy” as in the US; they are more feminine in the traditional sense. And, they are more financially independent & less obese. They are not as infatuated by pop-stars as in the US; not as swayed by the media; and, despite some stereotypes, less “gold-digging” or materialist than in the US of affluent Western Europe.
So- what about race, eroticism & the US? Liberal college white females are “curious” about blacks (men) due to many elements (sports influence, popular culture, media,..); traditional Christian women generally – not as much. Also, class-wise, way too many Americans seem to follow what their media tells them to want & urban career females are more money-wealth oriented than other whites outside of Anglosphere. Then, Americans (and British), on average, drink too much & those who are wasted may engage into casual sex more frequently (I’ve seen this in northern parts of Europe, too)..
Also- I know this is exaggeration, but still…- “modern Western women & men” seem to be erotically dull, especially liberal white females, ready for quickies. They are not erotic gourmands, so to speak. They don’t know how to enjoy erotic life. It is like cheap whisky compared to exquisite wine. And again -media rules. White male stars are principal womanizers, from Flynn, Gable, Sinatra..to Brando, Elvis, Beatty, Eastwood, Di Caprio.
As regards black men: for many blacks, white woman, any white woman, is the gold standard & the prize; for black intellectuals or educated black men, there are two types of behavior: one type is normal men who want women, children, family…and while race factor is present, the central one is are they in love & what do they want in life; for “professional blacks”, or educated blacks with chip on shoulder, they prefer attractive white women just to get back at “da man” who see such liaisons as some kind of defilement of white women. Alright, let’s end this with stats. Stats don’t lie, generally. And here you have about female sex fantasies (percentages are in the right column):
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-women-fantasize-about-2014-11
Here’s What Women Fantasize About The Most
https://www.sexandpsychology.com/blog/2019/7/22/do-peoples-sexual-fantasies-differ-depending-on-their-race-or-ethnicity/
Do People’s Sexual Fantasies Differ Depending on Their Race or Ethnicity?
Holden Caulfield, you’re next.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-has-most-expensive-healthcare-worldReplies: @slumber_j, @Sebastian Hawks, @Anon, @Liza
Well, I have a feeling that one of the reasons the US healthcare system is so expensive is that after the globalists shipped all our industries off to China, the healthcare system morphed into a giant, bloated employment racket to fill in the gap.
Gatsby is an incredibly short book, a little over a hundred pages. You can sit down and read it in one sitting over the course of an afternoon. Something doable for the average high school kid as opposed to boring, unreadable dreck like “The House of Seven Gables” that my eyes ran across the words but it was so boring I couldn’t actually get my brain to read the thing when in High School.
We have ample manufacturing capacity and Chinese industry was built with local capital. Manufacturing in this country does not employ more than about 10% of the working population, of course. No clue why you fancy hospital administrators were making decisions according to Chinese production and employment statistics. About 6-7% of the working population is in the medical sector and allied areas.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Guest007
The Atlantic is (as the Germans might say) “echt” Woke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Ane_Blak-MoirLang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt,
That landet furth of the last schippis,
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
Quhou schou is tute mowitt lyk an aep,
And lyk a gangarall onto gaep,
And quhou hir schort catt nois up skippis,
And quhou schou schynes lyk ony saep,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
So she's got muckle (big) lips, is wide-mouthed, has a short upturned nose like a cat's, and her skin shines like soap. Snub noses were apparently not the thing in those days.Replies: @J.Ross, @mc23
I once met a black guy at a Scottish cultural thing in Michigan, in costume, who had a highly improbable but wonderfully entertaining story for how he could claim to be Scottish: a shipful of slaves revolted during their exercise hour, successfully taking the ship but then realizing that they didn’t have any idea how to pilot it. They stumbled across clan warfare era Scotland, where there was not enough agriculture to call for uncompensated field labor, but where the locals were happy to have six foot tall offensive linemen with an explosive initial bonus and pre-applied war paint on their team. There’s a lot wrong here, I think the years don’t line up, and Scotland is a very northern place to wind up if you had been going to Virginia, but it would make a better movie than Hidden Figures.
Sci fi, as a genre, allows authors to play with ideas about anything- but only if stated explicitly, one way or another. Sci fi, as a genre, is, I'd say, 98% written in English. And we should assume that if the author is white, characters are also white- if not stated otherwise.This is different from a realist novel, depicting a particular social situation. We would not expect Fitzgerald, or Henry James or Frank Norris ... to write about American millionaires from the Gilded Age or bootleggers from the Jazz Age as BIPOC people.
But, to try to reason with BIPOC ideologues is futile ....Replies: @Prester John
“But, to try to reason with BIPOC ideologues is futile ….”
Anyone who tries to be reasonable need not apply.
I’ve always felt that Gatsby could be summed up in less that 5 seconds by having the cartoon character Droopy Dog saying: “Boo hoo, I drank my fortune away and now I want another one.”
The context of it being issued to soldiers is interesting, though. One can see it shifting the American Dream from Horatio Alger’s middle class prosperity through virtue to mega bling via alcohol smuggling.
==
Kind of an idiosyncratic take on the plot. No clue which character you have in mind.
What if the novel’s focus on class and ethnic tensions obscures a racial drama that readers have read right over?
OT, but I only recently rewatched The Matrix and saw many hints it was really about transitioning. Neo’s initial meeting with Trinity:
And this, which sounds like a metaphor for gender dysphoria:
> during WWII the government gave out hundreds of thousands of free copies of it to military men. For reasons that are still not well-understood, it galvanized young men worried about dying
Clearly someone understood the reasons. It’s hard to make a case for printing and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel to troops in wartime. What other examples of that do we have?
Nick Carroway is an exquisite observer of everything in the novel, so Gatsby being a black guy passing for white is just ridiculous on that aspect alone.
You’ve been watching “Vikings Valhalla”, too? How about that Kamala of Kattegat? lol
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-has-most-expensive-healthcare-worldReplies: @slumber_j, @Sebastian Hawks, @Anon, @Liza
Something close to 200 million Americans are getting their healthcare for free or almost free. Turns out free healthcare is super expensive! Good thing our fed gov can create all the new $$ it wants.
What is the alternative? 75 million people without any healthcare? The elderly being bankrupted by healthcare?
Other countries give free healthcare to everybody. And there's is a lot cheaper.
But the US's healthcare, which is only free to some, costs more.
That's logical. To a retard.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Liza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zce7hUqxSjM
Interesting choice of ethnicity.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Mr. Anon
It looks awful. The 1974 version wasn’t very good either. It seemed miscast. I could maybe buy Robert Redford as Gatsby, although he seemed too confident for the role. I never bought Bruce Dern as an upper-class American snob.
Redford, a movie star rather than actor, just exudes that American mid-century confidence. I didn't read the novel but wasn't Gatsby a bootlegger who bought his way into the society set? Successful criminals are usually confident characters.
I never bought Bruce Dern as an upper-class American snob
Dern comes from a politically-connected and wealthy family in the Midwest somewhere but it's difficult picturing him as a snob. Dern's a good actor and I've enjoyed many of his performances. He's a guy who can go from mainstream to weirdo pretty quickly -- it's his teeth and eyes.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Brad Pitt would have played him well I think.
We like watching them cavorting in the wild, too.
https://worldstar.com/videos/wshh56s6llnO372hZDz3/got-dealt-with-dude-puts-hands-on-another-guy-for-touching-his-girlfriend039s-cheeks-during-a-house-party
It wasn’t clear from the formatting whether these are the words of Fitzgerald or those of Alonzo Vereen. But the proper distinction between farther and further tips us off.
FSG spent about ten of the fourteen rememberable years of his youth along the Erie Canal, in Syracuse and Buffalo, returning to Saint Paul for high school. Western New York is kind of a “hinge” between the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, with touches of both. The area was hit with “Michigan fever” in the 19th century, huge waves moving to that territory as well as to Wisconsin Territory, which included most of Saint Paul.
He had the same publisher as The Rising Tide of Color, which he alludes to in Gatsby.
Is Vereen a chemist now? Oxford gives a second, linguistic use of the word:
the number of grammatical elements with which a particular word, especially a verb, combines in a sentence.
Still doesn’t make sense.
Gatsby is one of two books I bought on the author’s 100th birthday in the author’s home state, the other being Rivers of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She was born ext door in Minneapolis, but grew up in Massachusetts, and went to Florida at 25, where she spent the next 83 years. I bought her book at an Eckerd’s Drug in Fort Myers– Florida is proud of her– and Fitzgerald’s a few blocks from his birthplace, during his birth hour.
iSteve: “Personally, I have a hard time figuring out what “The Great Gatsby” is about.”
You’re not wrong, and you’re also not crazy. All you’re guilty of, is looking at it from the wrong angle.
The Great Gatsby is not an American novel, in the novelistic sense. It is a species of epic poetry. Same thing with Moby-Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, Leaves of Grass, Rootabaga Stories, and a few others. Also, for surplus negro grifters: definitely not blackety-blakk. Go work the other side of the street.
Every single sentence in The Great Gatsby is a kind of poetry. Forget what the meaning is; just read it out loud. I did it, and I know lots of people who did it. You’d be surprised.
Meantime, for all you monkeys round here who STILL haven’t figured out how art works, here’s a little treat…
Mebbe you’ll all sleep a wee bit cozier tonite…
The Atlantic has been taken over by people who are inveterately hostile to the old America that Fitzgerald was writing about.
The plot of Robert Heinlein’s book Farnham’s Freehold has some real similarities with the 1963 French novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Bouelle. It makes me wonder if in turn Michael Wilson and Rod Serling may have borrowed from both books in writing the script for the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes starring Charlton Heston.
A description of the plot of Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold from Wiki:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnham%27s_Freehold
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes_(novel)
Hello —
Never posted here before, but I teach Gatsby a lot. The clearer suggestion is that Daisy is mulatto. In the opening dinner scene, when Tom cites the “Rise of the Colored Nations” he looks around the dinner table. He notes that Nick is white, and that Jordan is white. But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can’t outright say she’s white. As a childhood friend of Daisy, Jordan is also hiding this secret. That’s why she says the “We’re all white here” line at the Plaza. Jordan is protecting Daisy. Just a theory.
There’s a terrific nonfiction book, “Careless People,” that completely dissects every inspiration for the novel. Now that Gatsby is in the public domain it will probably blow up even bigger.
P.s. Gatsby’s first resurrection was when Fitzgerald died. His friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wanted to publish the unfinished “Loves of the Last Tycoon.” But that book was too short to fill the last folio. Gatsby was tagged on in that same volume, simply because of its short length. It filled the folio. Ah, the sometimes arbitrary nature of success.
Maybe Daisy is Jewish. She seems the type.Replies: @Guest1962
What is a “short upper lip”?
I guess back when writers were describing characters looks more this would have been obvious but I am mystified. In which direction is it short? If vertically I would think “thin upper lip”. If horizontal…does this mean the top lip is somehow shorter than the bottom?
The continual attempts by TPTB to blacken everything (when they’re not “queering” everything”) is so freaking tiresome.
Gatsby is one of two books I bought on the author’s 100th birthday in the author’s home state, the other being Rivers of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She was born ext door in Minneapolis, but grew up in Massachusetts, and went to Florida at 25, where she spent the next 83 years. I bought her book at an Eckerd’s Drug in Fort Myers– Florida is proud of her– and Fitzgerald’s a few blocks from his birthplace, during his birth hour.
If you want to continue the tradition you can buy a copy of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 on May 1 in Brooklyn. You’ve just missed Norman Mailer and James Dickey.
Did Reg wait for the hour? I'll never attain full literacy. Though I did photograph my English prof friend's face as he gazed upward for a time after finishing the last line of all of Proust.
Sounds German Lutheran. He attended St Olaf, which (in a review of crosstown Carleton) the Yale Daily News called exactly what you’d expect a Minnesota college to be. Note that he took his new name while on Nordic Lake Superior. The suffix -by, meaning village or farmstead, is of Scadinavian origin and all over the Danelaw (e.g., Derbyshire), but today less common in the native Nordic lands (e.g., Visby, Norresundby).
Here is the weird original cover of the book, revived for the Fitzgerald-centennial edition:
The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-f-scott-fitzgerald-judged-gatsby-by-its-cover-61925763/
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/essay-charles-scribner-iii-73-f-scott-fitzgerald-17
If I could summarize the ethos of my wife’s people, it is hard work and sobriety.Replies: @njguy73
Maybe there’ll be a retelling of the founding of America, with all BIPOC actors. Done with hip-hop music.
(Pause)
Nah, it’ll never catch on.
What does it say about blacks that they spend so much time lying about their history (pyramids, really?) and accomplishments (no, a black guy didn’t invent the light bulb)? I suppose its hard to be part of a culture with such overwhelming ethno-narcissism, yet so few actual accomplishments.
“The children in my class..all people of color… impoverished…first generation Americans”
Why are we importing poverty?
On the other hand, in an effort to assemble a voting coalition, their political sponsors have shamelessly flogged a massively dishonest narrative of their significance in America's rise to power, which was obviously eagerly adopted and embellished further. Throw in academia and its antipathy to our history and culture, and these lies have been spread under the guise of scholarship and a 'true account' of our history. Black culture produces almost no iconoclasts - unlike Euros - so there is a widespread belief in a largely hidden but very real centrality of people of African descent in the greatness of the American economy and culture.
Unfortunately, whites across the spectrum are all too willing to indulge this ethno-narcissism. But as America's demographics change I expect blacks and their demands for their rightful place in society to be increasingly ignored.Replies: @Art Deco
I expect blacks and their demands for their rightful place in society to be increasingly ignored.
==
Bayard Rustin is dead and ceased to be an influential figure among black politicians around about 1965. It has been some time since black politicians made a habit of demanding a ‘rightful place’ in American society. Equal liberty and careers-open-to-talents (qualified in some measure by common provision in certain sectors) is not a program that has in the last 50-odd years interested black politicians. What interests them practically is fodder to build patron-client relationships (the mode for Democratic politicians generally) and job opportunities for social workers and school administrators. What interests them viscerally would be instances of blacks being held accountable by people they deem to be of low status, e.g. police officers, prison guards, and (white) school district employees. Standardized tests are also ‘disrespectful’.
.
I think that a substantial share of Latinos and Asians recognize that blacks expect to be taken care of in perpetuity, and in the years ahead as they grow in numbers and power they will not indulge these demands the way whites have.
That’s what Gutta Mane has been saying.
Here is the weird original cover of the book, revived for the Fitzgerald-centennial edition:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/cdn-cgi/mirage/6846fc7af16e252b3a2cb9dc2b51d4e64a8e01c6cb3b8e9b5c698316b3d63da3/1440/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/files/2013/05/gatsby-cover.jpgReplies: @Art Deco, @Anonymous, @Bardon Kaldian, @Jenner Ickham Errican
The cover was in use when I was in high school, which was a while ago but not a century ago.
But for Poland it doesn't go far enough.The Poles sure can't wait to have Warsaw look like London.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/bond-street-tube-robbery-appeal-british-transport-police-b1058353.htmlReplies: @anonymouseperson
As an ally the Poles have historically tended to be more trouble then they are worth, The UK should never have made the pledge to Poland.
If this website is to be believed, Chamberlain abandoned appeasement after Roosevelt told him that unless he moved from appeasement to confrontation, Britain would get no help from the US should war break out.
https://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__president-roosevelts-campaign-to-incite-war-in-europe/
There’s a reason white girls are increasingly having Children of Color.Replies: @ATate, @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymouseperson, @tyrone
For example? Please provide numerous examples with authenticated sources.
A guy uses his ostentatious and ill-gotten wealth to score a pretty white girl? There may be something to this, guys.
“I am very depressed this appeared in The Atlantic.”
It will get worse.
And the Africans are coming.
There’s a reason white girls are increasingly having Children of Color.Replies: @ATate, @Bardon Kaldian, @anonymouseperson, @tyrone
….Close , except you are 180 degrees off ……
Now in my middle years, I have endured a number of ‘social interactions’ where quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald and citing ‘The Great Gatsby’ passes as evidence that wealthy people are ‘not like you and me’ (and their point is that they are horrible, awful people). When I remind them that it is a fictional story they (maybe) read in high school, they fumpher past the moment with something like, “my point still stands!”
F. Scott Fitzgerald died at 44, some say he drank himself to death. Say this to one quoting him, and they reply “that’s a stereotype of a tortured artist, and not true!” However, they stand by the stereotypes of frivolous, indolent wealthy people in his work. Hmmm.
Also, Blacks don’t buy books, have many books in their homes, or read much (in comparision to whites). If that weren’t true, where are all the great literary works from Africa?
Of Gatsby's identity, I have no problem with a new generation seeing themselves, of whatever race, in the titular hero, even as a tagalog speaking North Dakotan, however improbable that may seem. One of the Big Ideas in the book is the fact that Jay is the American Adam character, ala Natty Bumpo (aka, Deerstalker, aka Hawkeye, from Last of the Mohicans), the man outside of history, full-grown emerging from the wilderness. He is the Primordial Man of America, a mysterious figure without a past. Anybody.
What's it about? Well, that's why it is such a great story. Endless arguments can be had on the topic. Is it a gothic tale, how Gatsby can't escape his past? Is it a story of re-invention and self-determination, in spite of Jay's (tragic?) ending? Or is Nick Carraway really the hero, his own fascination with Gatsby and Daisy being the theme, not their lives, but Carraway's own; like Fitzgerald himself, Nick feels like an imposter among the elite and he wishes he had Gatsby's ability to shed his past and become one of the beautiful people, too.
In the final analysis, it is this very ambiguity of theme, of the meaning of life itself, that makes the book great.Replies: @Kylie, @martin_2, @Bardon Kaldian
“Reading challenging work is not to be shied away from in high school; expanding the vocabulary of students is what education is all about. And besides which, The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.”
With all due respect, have you spent much time around young people and/or non-whites?
It is shocking to an older person like me how ignorant they are. Even worse, by pandering to them as this moron does, any sense of curiosity they have about others unlike themselves or the past (i.e. pre-2000) is deadened or stunted. Making students feel good about themselves as the unformed and uninformed little ignoramuses that they are is the focus of education today. That and hating whites of accomplishment.
As expected, her reply to the Black Gatsby theory was "Where the heck did they come up with that?"Replies: @Kylie
The starting point for this type of assertion was the whole “Jesus was black” thing, a few decades ago. The logical endpoint will be these people holding that, unless explicitly noted otherwise in a text, it should be assumed that the author meant that America is to be read as being synonymous with Wakanda.
1) couldn't keep a job.
2) lived with his mother, who thought he could walk on water.
3) he sat around, with his friends, drinking wine all day.
4) couldn't get a fair trial.
To be fair, Gatsby was a criminal who worked for a Jewish gangster and had opulent, gaudy tastes. That sounds pretty black to me!
I liked the part where Coach Reardon had to spank all the cheerleaders. That chapter could be problematic if the characters were swapped for people of color.
Here is the weird original cover of the book, revived for the Fitzgerald-centennial edition:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/cdn-cgi/mirage/6846fc7af16e252b3a2cb9dc2b51d4e64a8e01c6cb3b8e9b5c698316b3d63da3/1440/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/files/2013/05/gatsby-cover.jpgReplies: @Art Deco, @Anonymous, @Bardon Kaldian, @Jenner Ickham Errican
I spy Ferris wheels, so that must be Coney Island.
Gatsby looked like a studlier, more mysterious Fitzgerald.
Write your own f-ing books.
Sincerely,
Whites
These constant attempts at blackwasing are just too tiresome.Replies: @Anon, @International Jew, @Ebony Obelisk, @Thoughts
I knew an intelligent black man who did actually write his own books, specifically for his kids
They are self-published on Amazon
He’s a stand-up first-rate guy which is probably why he’s not published
I’ve had 2 unlikely people explain extremely difficult concepts to me
I got invaluable college advise from a black senior football player in highschool, I got chemistry help from a drugged up white musician (that was weird…like really, really weird)
==
Bayard Rustin is dead and ceased to be an influential figure among black politicians around about 1965. It has been some time since black politicians made a habit of demanding a 'rightful place' in American society. Equal liberty and careers-open-to-talents (qualified in some measure by common provision in certain sectors) is not a program that has in the last 50-odd years interested black politicians. What interests them practically is fodder to build patron-client relationships (the mode for Democratic politicians generally) and job opportunities for social workers and school administrators. What interests them viscerally would be instances of blacks being held accountable by people they deem to be of low status, e.g. police officers, prison guards, and (white) school district employees. Standardized tests are also 'disrespectful'.
.Replies: @Arclight
My intention in that comment is pretty similar to what you posted – what I believe blacks consider their rightful place to be in society is essentially one of a permanent protected class, not actual peers competing against whites or anyone else on equal footing when it comes to ability, talent, or effort and let the chips fall where they may.
I think that a substantial share of Latinos and Asians recognize that blacks expect to be taken care of in perpetuity, and in the years ahead as they grow in numbers and power they will not indulge these demands the way whites have.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/us-has-most-expensive-healthcare-worldReplies: @slumber_j, @Sebastian Hawks, @Anon, @Liza
So, what would this reflect? Advanced health degeneracy in the high-expenditure populations and stinginess/lack of funds for medical treatments in the lower expenditure countries?
I didn’t know about Scott Fitzgerald’s Nordicist sympathies. John Updike, in his brilliant critique of a nasty Fitzgerald’s bio, writes about some of his late escapades, but it is only marginal (“More Matter”):
The all-but-sneering tone is what is principally wrong with this biography. Mr. Meyers, like the practitioners of celebrity-centered tabloid journalism, shows his subjects no respect. He ransacks their lives for discreditable incidents and implications. Sheilah Graham, it is clearly implied above, was a sleep-around, Fitzgerald was a pathetic wreck, and they capped their corruption by post-coitally mooning in bed like a pair of sappy teenagers. Meyers’ whole presentation of Sheilah Graham is subtly poisoned. “Her series of gossipy autobiographies,” he states, “tell a number of deliberate lies.” Her rise from a London orphanage to success as an American gossip columnist is made to seem a tawdry trick, by way of a chorus line and an impotent older husband, and her invention of a new, American identity—in a Hollywood full of such inventions—is phrased as sinister psychological melodrama: “Sheilah, who had very little religious or family loyalty, consigned both her poverty and her Jewishness to the same black hole of denial.” She had been born Lily Sheil, the sixth child of a father who died soon after her birth and a “sickly mother” who, in Meyers’ vague phrase, “was a cook in an institution.”
Lily/Sheilah, after leaving the orphanage at fourteen, worked as a factory hand, an under-housemaid, and a toothbrush demonstrator in a department store. Fitzgerald in their relations comes forth as vicious, taunting her with her impoverished Jewish origins, threatening her with a gun, slapping her, humiliating her publicly. The reader inwardly cheers when she is reported to have responded to one of his suicide threats with the hearty, Hollywoodish, “Shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t raise myself from the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.” After his death, she discovered that he had scrawled “Portrait of a Prostitute” on the back of a photograph of herself she had given him. The liaison is seen as so predominantly sordid that such positive aspects as his “patiently teaching her to understand the books that he loved” and her need (characterized as “masochistic”) “to care for a great (or once-great) man” come as grudging incidentals. It is left to other biographers to emphasize that Sheilah, whatever her limitations, was responsible and responsive in a way that Zelda had not been and gave Fitzgerald a domestic stability in which he was, in his last year, overcoming the alcohol demon and picking up the pieces of his life and talent. Malcolm Cowley, in introducing his selection of twenty-eight Fitzgerald stories, tells us:
Andrew Turnbull’s biography, after admitting, “They were a curious pair—the broken novelist and the ambitious girl from the slums,” points out, “In a sense Fitzgerald was fortunate to have been loved by anyone so vital and alluring. In his present state of frailty and eclipse, his choice was not unlimited.” Turnbull as a boy had known Fitzgerald, as the renowned writer to whom his parents rented their Maryland house, and his biography retains a note of affectionate acquaintance and a willingness to be impressed. Bruccoli’s “hagiographic” biography in its staccato fashion sums up the pros and cons of the situation: “He needed Sheilah and loved her; yet his puritan streak disapproved of their arrangement, which was circumspect by Hollywood standards.” In this day of free and legal unmarried cohabitation, it is hard to imagine the old taint and strain of such arrangements; Arthur Mizener’s fine pioneering biography, which came out in 1949, when Sheilah Graham was still alive, avoids mentioning her by name. Bruccoli tells us, reassuringly if a bit bluntly, of Fitzgerald’s maturing daughter: “Scottie liked Sheilah, who went to considerable trouble making her California visits pleasant.” It is André Le Vot, in a biography written in French and translated for Doubleday by William Byron, who gives the most favorable picture of Sheilah’s role in Fitzgerald’s last years; he describes her maneuvers to keep him sober and at peace, outlines the careful tutorials he gave her in Proust and Keats, and points out that this self-willed adventuress was “a heroine after Fitzgerald’s heart.” Le Vot quotes Helen Hayes as saying, “Sheilah Graham was good to Scott, but he wasn’t nice enough to her—ever.” Mr. Meyers paraphrases Hayes’s remark in a way to redirect its sting: “The gentle Helen Hayes thought Sheilah was good to Scott, but that he treated her badly because (as Mankiewicz had implied) ‘she represented to Scott’s fevered mind the second-rate he had fallen into.’”
…….like we have a choice…….thank god for classic tv and movies from the 40’s and 50’s.
Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle
Pournelle’s Janissaries — the paperback edition with the likeness of Clint Eastwood from Kelly’s Heroes on the cover — was one of the first actual novels I’d read whilst a child. That and loathsome King’s The Shining spurred me on to even more fictions. So I’m appreciative of Pournelle’s contribution to the story-telling arts. Perhaps he felt it futile to challenge the visual medium in imagery and thus moved on to other “functions.” Based on conversations with the small number of scribes I know, creating “mental pictures” is imperative for total immersion into the worlds they create. Fully realized realities in which your characters live, kill, strive, survive. Plus, it’s fun to conjure these places from the bubbling cauldron that is the imagination.
Surely the problem is that, unlike say the Chinese or the Dot Indians, the Blacks don’t really have anything resembling a high culture. They feel inferior. This is why they constantly denigrate European culture. The Orientals OTOH have taken to Western Classical music.
Of Gatsby's identity, I have no problem with a new generation seeing themselves, of whatever race, in the titular hero, even as a tagalog speaking North Dakotan, however improbable that may seem. One of the Big Ideas in the book is the fact that Jay is the American Adam character, ala Natty Bumpo (aka, Deerstalker, aka Hawkeye, from Last of the Mohicans), the man outside of history, full-grown emerging from the wilderness. He is the Primordial Man of America, a mysterious figure without a past. Anybody.
What's it about? Well, that's why it is such a great story. Endless arguments can be had on the topic. Is it a gothic tale, how Gatsby can't escape his past? Is it a story of re-invention and self-determination, in spite of Jay's (tragic?) ending? Or is Nick Carraway really the hero, his own fascination with Gatsby and Daisy being the theme, not their lives, but Carraway's own; like Fitzgerald himself, Nick feels like an imposter among the elite and he wishes he had Gatsby's ability to shed his past and become one of the beautiful people, too.
In the final analysis, it is this very ambiguity of theme, of the meaning of life itself, that makes the book great.Replies: @Kylie, @martin_2, @Bardon Kaldian
This is not true at all. There are many words in “The Old Man and the Sea” that have to do with fishing that I needed to look up. The book could have done with a glossary in the manner of Chaucer.
Perhaps. And perhaps not.
Don’t forget that Scott Fitzgerald’s chief influences were Joseph Conrad and Henry James, whose fictions are full of observers-narrators who, generally, are substitutes for aspects of authors’ psyches. Narrators want to gain insight, not social status.
I’m Shocked!
https://thefrontierpost.com/sweden-has-become-a-gangsters-paradise-and-a-case-study-in-how-not-to-integrate-migrants/
Here is the weird original cover of the book, revived for the Fitzgerald-centennial edition:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/cdn-cgi/mirage/6846fc7af16e252b3a2cb9dc2b51d4e64a8e01c6cb3b8e9b5c698316b3d63da3/1440/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/files/2013/05/gatsby-cover.jpgReplies: @Art Deco, @Anonymous, @Bardon Kaldian, @Jenner Ickham Errican
I can forgive Scott many things, but not his original title for his last novel.
The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western
Here is the weird original cover of the book, revived for the Fitzgerald-centennial edition:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/cdn-cgi/mirage/6846fc7af16e252b3a2cb9dc2b51d4e64a8e01c6cb3b8e9b5c698316b3d63da3/1440/http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/design/files/2013/05/gatsby-cover.jpgReplies: @Art Deco, @Anonymous, @Bardon Kaldian, @Jenner Ickham Errican
https://www.unz.com/isteve/black-folk-used-to-have-souls-now-they-just-have-bodies-what-happened/#comment-1842393 (#105)
That cover is great. It was revived by Charles Scribner III in 1979.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-f-scott-fitzgerald-judged-gatsby-by-its-cover-61925763/
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/essay-charles-scribner-iii-73-f-scott-fitzgerald-17
It’s crazy to be teaching “Gatsby” to a classroom made up of present-day “first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala.” Even if your ultimate goal is to introduce some of them to trad American literature, practically speaking first you gotta get them reading and then reading books. Only then will they be up to sampling the literary stuff. You do this by first presenting them with material they’re innately curious about or that excites or pleases them in simple, direct ways — comic books, simple narratives, science, war, news stories. Eventually a few of them — a very few — will learn how to derive pleasure from relatively refined works of a literary kind.
But for god’s sake, first get the kids reading, and comfortable with books.
With all due respect, have you spent much time around young people and/or non-whites?
It is shocking to an older person like me how ignorant they are. Even worse, by pandering to them as this moron does, any sense of curiosity they have about others unlike themselves or the past (i.e. pre-2000) is deadened or stunted. Making students feel good about themselves as the unformed and uninformed little ignoramuses that they are is the focus of education today. That and hating whites of accomplishment.Replies: @Known Fact, @Woodsie
My wife annually taught Gatsby to inner city teen girls and it was a challenge, but she threw in tons of audio-visual stuff about the fashion, music, architecture and gang warfare of the period to bring it all to life. (Shakespeare was really a challenge, and yet there’d be a couple of girls who surprisingly came alive and got it)
As expected, her reply to the Black Gatsby theory was “Where the heck did they come up with that?”
Exactly the way it should be taught to those students.
I was replying to Woodsie's comment:
"...The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.”
I strongly disagree with this statement. I took to it like a duck to water but I was already reading H. James so sophisticated prose was not a problem for me. Woodsie would do well to recall the first two sentences of this lovely novel:
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'"Replies: @Nicholas Stix, @Woodsie
As for “Gatsby” specifically … Eh, as a narrative it ain’t much, but it’s short, and it’s a pretty tone poem. Fitzgerald’s language has a lot of charm, and is the kind of thing that can get a certain kind of sensitive young person interested in writin’ — in the ways you can use prose to cast spells. When I was a college kid I liked Fitzgerald a lot, but even so “Gatsby” wasn’t one of my favorites. I liked “Tender Is the Night” and a collection of his short stories a lot better. And since college, I haven’t really been able to read him at all. Grownup me finds Fitzgerald as embarrassingly mannered as I now find Hemingway.
On Star Trek Chekhov was always like that — We Russians invented this first, invented that first, etc etc. For the sake of realism Uhura should have been assigned this character trait.
Frequently, characters appearing in novels & who are at least assumed to be part-black are not. Or we never know. Take, for example, Joe Christmas in Faulkner's "Light in August"
Even in sci fi literature, like in Matheson's "I am Legend", I never thought of the chief character to be other than white. So I didn't bother to see the movie & consider it a crap because normative American, if not explicitly stated otherwise, is White.
At least before the 21st C.Replies: @J.Ross, @Steve Sailer, @Dragoslav, @Ray P
Vincent Price and Charlton Heston weren’t white?
Lord have mercy on the great books of Western civilization. Who will their future readers and interpreters be?
I won’t go so far as to say there won’t be any, but there will be very few.
And Indians are not a "real" race, when we think in racial terms. They are a very, very diverse bunch.Replies: @Known Fact
Not much weirder than 1960s musical star and prototypical NY Jewess Phyllis Newman laughably playing a feisty Bedouin on The Man From UNCLE and a feisty Indian, uh Native American squaw on Wild Wild West. Not sure how that would go over now.
But seriously, this is a very meaty post from Steve. Along with my wife’s adventures trying to teach it I know two people who call Gatsby their very favorite novel, plus radio host Mark Simone — another huge fan who found a research work that claimed to pin down the actual sites for each scene, including powerful images like the Valley of Ashes and the TJ Eckleburg billboard
Fitzgerald was typical of the nihilistic liberal upper class of the 1920’s. I remember there is a passage in Great… where a man espousing racialism is made to look bad. This book is and always was 100% astroturfed.
Before the upper class became fully anti-white, it was trendy to talk about racial differences openly but say you didn’t care about it. Those people were probably a lot like some of the nihilistic boomer clowns on these comments. Maybe those people are doing some parody influenced by literature and vague recollections from their youth.
If it helps you feel better, go with that.
Very good point but Uhura, unlike Chekhov, was never a braggart.
Something iSteve hasn’t addressed–and I’d like to see this happen–is comparing the greatest black accomplishment in the arts and sciences with second- and third-tier Asian and European accomplishment in the arts and sciences. I have thought about this, and I am convinced, eg, that George Gershwin (2d tier/some could argue 3d tier) towered over the 1st-tier black composer Duke Ellington.
This is somewhat true of the less publicized Women's History Month (March). But while I used to scoff a bit (Uh-oh, time to once again drag out those Amy Beach sonatas), I am finding more and more solid female classical era composers buried deep on YouTubeReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Meretricious, @Reg Cæsar
Never posted here before, but I teach Gatsby a lot. The clearer suggestion is that Daisy is mulatto. In the opening dinner scene, when Tom cites the "Rise of the Colored Nations" he looks around the dinner table. He notes that Nick is white, and that Jordan is white. But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can't outright say she's white. As a childhood friend of Daisy, Jordan is also hiding this secret. That's why she says the "We're all white here" line at the Plaza. Jordan is protecting Daisy. Just a theory.
There's a terrific nonfiction book, "Careless People," that completely dissects every inspiration for the novel. Now that Gatsby is in the public domain it will probably blow up even bigger.
P.s. Gatsby's first resurrection was when Fitzgerald died. His friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wanted to publish the unfinished "Loves of the Last Tycoon." But that book was too short to fill the last folio. Gatsby was tagged on in that same volume, simply because of its short length. It filled the folio. Ah, the sometimes arbitrary nature of success.Replies: @Nachum, @Peterike, @Guest1962, @John Pepple, @Wokechoke
Thanks for reminding me. When I read Steve’s quotation of Jordan’s line, I remembered that *someone* was said to be part black, but thought it was Jordan. Daisy, of course. There were always rumors about Southerners.
It is close to 150 million but the elderly are still paying something for most Medicare and probably Medigap insurance. There are 85 million Medicare recipients and 75 million Medicaid recipients. SCHIP is around 6 million.
What is the alternative? 75 million people without any healthcare? The elderly being bankrupted by healthcare?
Gatsby falls into the same category as Romeo and Juliet. The required on-screen chemistry between certain actors is probably not obtainable.
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles, @Corpse Tooth, @Joe Stalin, @Yngvar
Its Seymour Hersch. He’s written the same article scores of times. Wouldn’t take it seriously. Sort of surprising he’s still alive.
As a young man, Hersch had great journalistic success exposing the "My Lai Massacre" in 1970, 53 years ago, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.
Ever since then, he has been trying to repeat his early success by exposing the "evils" of the US government. He has exposed at least 20 of the last 5 evil acts of the US gov. He doesn't seem to worry too much about verifying sources. His motto is, "If you don’t have anything nice to say about the US gov., come sit next to me."
His source for this article is "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning". Note, SOURCE singular. There is a reason why no one but Hersch has promulgated this story.
#1, I don't think Biden had the balls to do this. Witness his pussyfooting wrt to the Chinese spy balloon.
#2, according to this, all four pipes were mined but only 3 went off. Why didn't #4 go off? If it didn't, where are the unexploded mines? Why haven't the Russian retrieved them and shown them to the world as evidence?Replies: @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast
It got a lot of publicity, even an ABC special tie-in called "Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years."
Hersch used some dubious sources on the supposed JFK-Marilyn Monroe affair which got him some criticism.Replies: @Art Deco
His last wife, Virginia, was not into the open marriage crap. That was from RAH’s earlier days and his marriage to Leslyn. He wrote about it plenty, later, but was no longer into swinging or nudity in real life. Talk, not action. Virginia didn’t contest that.
-------
OT -- A story which will probably not go national, which would be unknown but for a certain fed-plagued Mongolian throat singing enthusiast discussion forum. Someone in Maine hung a banner claiming that it's okay to be white. The authorities castigated them. But this time, people pushed back, including a black podcaster who asked on Twitter why exactly it would not be okay, and was blocked. Several layers of authorities attempted to control the situation and they all failed amid enthusiastic pubic pushback.
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/415283633Replies: @J.Ross, @Muggles, @JimDandy
So, we finally have it.
This is what the God of Internet has wrought.
“fed-plagued” no less. Our tax dollars at work?
Gatsby is an incredibly short book, a little over a hundred pages. You can sit down and read it in one sitting over the course of an afternoon. Something doable for the average high school kid as opposed to boring, unreadable dreck like "The House of Seven Gables" that my eyes ran across the words but it was so boring I couldn't actually get my brain to read the thing when in High School.Replies: @Art Deco
that after the globalists shipped all our industries off to China, the healthcare system morphed into a giant, bloated employment racket to fill in the gap.
We have ample manufacturing capacity and Chinese industry was built with local capital. Manufacturing in this country does not employ more than about 10% of the working population, of course. No clue why you fancy hospital administrators were making decisions according to Chinese production and employment statistics. About 6-7% of the working population is in the medical sector and allied areas.
From a cite: There were 22 million workers in the health care industry, one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors in the United States that accounts for 14% of all U.S. workers, according to the Census Bureau's 2019 American Community Survey (ACS)
In addition, nurses and care providers earn more than average. Think of how much a nurse anesthetist or a physical therapist makes in 2022. The only way to "bend the cost curve" in healthare will be pay cuts and layoffs.
The original inspiration is probably Genus Homo by DeCamp and Miller:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genus_Homo_(novel)
Very fun read. And includes the graphic image of an ape with a monocle.
I'm not sure when such stories became a stand in for Sub-Saharan Africans replacing Whites, though I suspect it might of been with the Anglophile French writer Pierre Bouelle's 1963 novel Planet of the Apes. For certain, the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie was, which was openly acknowledged at the time to be an allegory about present (and future?) Black/White race relations.
Fun fact about the Planet of the Apes franchise: Virtually everyone involved in it's creation, from the French writer of the original 1963 novel, Pierre Bouelle, it's English translator Xan Fielding, to the script writer/story creator of four (of the first five) of the 1968-73 movies. Paul Dehn, had extensive wartime British intel agency backgrounds. Specifically, they had all been members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Paul Dehn, the scriptwriter, is of particular note, as his particular area of expertise with the SOE had been political warfare, ie the utilization of propaganda to defeat an opponent, as opposed to using battlefield weaponry.
The context of it being issued to soldiers is interesting, though. One can see it shifting the American Dream from Horatio Alger's middle class prosperity through virtue to mega bling via alcohol smuggling.Replies: @Art Deco, @J.Ross
I’ve always felt that Gatsby could be summed up in less that 5 seconds by having the cartoon character Droopy Dog saying: “Boo hoo, I drank my fortune away and now I want another one.”
==
Kind of an idiosyncratic take on the plot. No clue which character you have in mind.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/number-foreign-workers-japan-reaches-record-high
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16838.jpeg
-- Adolf HipsterReplies: @Jack D, @AnotherDad
It’s triple from a very low base. It’s 1.7 million vs a Japanese population of 125 million.
A lot of the foreign workers are Asian from developing countries such as Vietnam. I have the feeling that they will be a relatively good fit in Japanese society or at least better than Africans are anywhere.
The Atlantic is nothing but a name now. It was bought by Steve Job’s widow a few years ago and turned over to midwit, politically-obsessed, childish wokesters to use as their sandbox. It’s a joke now with no connection to its literary past.
I haven’t read anything from The New Yorker in years, but I sense it has had the same fate. It’s hard to be an elitist cultural institution when your religion is to hate the culture and play to the lowest “inclusive” denominator. They went from pretensions of High Culture to retarded rantings about Orange Man Bad.
"[Alex] Ross trained with composers, and his calling card has always been his interest in composers and repertoire, not just performers. It was in this arena that the new woke Alex Ross first caught my attention. In February 2018, Ross penned a column on the work of Florence Price, a then relatively unknown early-twentieth-century black female composer from Arkansas. 'The Rediscovery of Florence Price,' Ross’s apologia for Price’s charming but musically undistinguished output, would set the agenda for a Price revival across the American classical music landscape—one that continues to this day."
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles, @Corpse Tooth, @Joe Stalin, @Yngvar
Yes, I wrote a similar off topic blurb on an earlier iSteve essay thread.
Highly important article about a not-so-secret “mystery” now revealed.
We will hear a lot more about this, despite MSM coverups.
This was terrorism, plain and simple. An act of war in other circumstances.
Does Biden have to hand Putin a valid “talking point” on this?
Of Gatsby's identity, I have no problem with a new generation seeing themselves, of whatever race, in the titular hero, even as a tagalog speaking North Dakotan, however improbable that may seem. One of the Big Ideas in the book is the fact that Jay is the American Adam character, ala Natty Bumpo (aka, Deerstalker, aka Hawkeye, from Last of the Mohicans), the man outside of history, full-grown emerging from the wilderness. He is the Primordial Man of America, a mysterious figure without a past. Anybody.
What's it about? Well, that's why it is such a great story. Endless arguments can be had on the topic. Is it a gothic tale, how Gatsby can't escape his past? Is it a story of re-invention and self-determination, in spite of Jay's (tragic?) ending? Or is Nick Carraway really the hero, his own fascination with Gatsby and Daisy being the theme, not their lives, but Carraway's own; like Fitzgerald himself, Nick feels like an imposter among the elite and he wishes he had Gatsby's ability to shed his past and become one of the beautiful people, too.
In the final analysis, it is this very ambiguity of theme, of the meaning of life itself, that makes the book great.Replies: @Kylie, @martin_2, @Bardon Kaldian
It was Faulkner, not Dos Passos. And this kind of “critique” is shallow & unfair. Hemingway knew, in his shorter fictions, exactly what he was doing & had done it flawlessly.
As for short fictions, one should try Melville’s “Billy Budd” with all the Gongorist & super-baroque language layers.
“The UK should never have made the pledge to Poland.”
If this website is to be believed, Chamberlain abandoned appeasement after Roosevelt told him that unless he moved from appeasement to confrontation, Britain would get no help from the US should war break out.
https://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__president-roosevelts-campaign-to-incite-war-in-europe/
Steve has done it again, just when you think you’ve seen the breadth of his knowledge in so many areas, turns out Steve has nuanced knowledge of 1950s sci-FI authors and their depictions of race in their books. Kudos
These people are all so tiresome.
Yeah!
Gatsby is a common name in … WAKANDA !!
And Ingrid Bergman was actually black. So is Dolf Lundgren. And Hulk Hogan. And Dwight Eisenhower.
Inconvenient truths.
/sarc off/
As expected, her reply to the Black Gatsby theory was "Where the heck did they come up with that?"Replies: @Kylie
“My wife annually taught Gatsby to inner city teen girls and it was a challenge, but she threw in tons of audio-visual stuff about the fashion, music, architecture and gang warfare of the period to bring it all to life.”
Exactly the way it should be taught to those students.
I was replying to Woodsie’s comment:
“…The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.”
I strongly disagree with this statement. I took to it like a duck to water but I was already reading H. James so sophisticated prose was not a problem for me. Woodsie would do well to recall the first two sentences of this lovely novel:
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
The earliest instance of this game I’m familiar with—blackifying White characters in fiction—was of a White woman who wrote a “thing,” Was Huck black?, in 1993.
In the early 1980s, during my university days in West Germany, I was homesick, so I read lots of American fiction and listened to lots of Aaron Copeland. That period included reading The Great Gatsby, “the great American novel.” However, I can recall very little of it, except that I was underwhelmed by it. But the notion that Gatsby was black is ludicrous.
The problem here is that Medgar Evers is a black supremacist craphole, and black supremacist, affirmative action “scholars” are not held to any intellectual or moral standards. And so, they just make up stuff, as do their White “allies” in support of them.
I found Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, unreadable.
However, I have loved other works by Scotty Fitzgerald. At SUNY Stony Brook, my philosophy professor, Lee Miller, had us read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Four Fists” in a senior seminar on “Love and Death.” It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)
I also saw Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) in English at the German-American Institute, but found it awful. The next day, I borrowed Fitzgerald’s eponymous, unfinished novel. (It was about Irving Thalberg, who was MGM’s official number two man during the 1930s. Thalberg held writers in contempt, but was good at charming them, as he did Fitzgerald, making them think he cared about them.)
Fitzgerald was about halfway through the book when he died of a heart attack. The version I borrowed included a rich section of the author’s notes. I concluded that Fitzgerald had painted himself into a corner, and could not satisfactorily finish the ms., which may have killed him. The problem with the picture was that the studio had hired an Englishman, Harold Pinter, to write the script. Although many of the phrases came straight from Fitzgerald’s ms., Pinter knew the words, but not the music.Replies: @Jack D, @kaganovitch, @Mr. Anon
I haven't read anything from The New Yorker in years, but I sense it has had the same fate. It's hard to be an elitist cultural institution when your religion is to hate the culture and play to the lowest "inclusive" denominator. They went from pretensions of High Culture to retarded rantings about Orange Man Bad.Replies: @Meretricious
Speaking of lowest inclusive denominators … Alex Ross, The New Yorker‘s brilliant music critic, was profiled in the 1/23 edition of City Journal. This tidbit may be of interest:
“[Alex] Ross trained with composers, and his calling card has always been his interest in composers and repertoire, not just performers. It was in this arena that the new woke Alex Ross first caught my attention. In February 2018, Ross penned a column on the work of Florence Price, a then relatively unknown early-twentieth-century black female composer from Arkansas. ‘The Rediscovery of Florence Price,’ Ross’s apologia for Price’s charming but musically undistinguished output, would set the agenda for a Price revival across the American classical music landscape—one that continues to this day.”
You fucking idiot troll.
Other countries give free healthcare to everybody. And there’s is a lot cheaper.
But the US’s healthcare, which is only free to some, costs more.
That’s logical. To a retard.
We assume the characters are Russian in Russian books, Chinese in Chinese books, Paraguayan in Paraguayan books, without it being expressly spelled out, unless told otherwise. Teacher, what’s a hot dog?
On another note, they “translated” Little Women into “modern” English because little girls can’t read it anymore. Shit, I read Shakespeare when I was 10. I skipped some words, but I got the gist. They can’t get the gist now. Probably, no certainly, because nobody reads anymore, and nobody reads to their children, and children grow up in households without any books or magazines at all.
We have ample manufacturing capacity and Chinese industry was built with local capital. Manufacturing in this country does not employ more than about 10% of the working population, of course. No clue why you fancy hospital administrators were making decisions according to Chinese production and employment statistics. About 6-7% of the working population is in the medical sector and allied areas.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Guest007
“we have ample manufacturing capacity”
You can’t close down a factory, leave it for ten or twenty years then re-open. Skills atrophy or are forgotten, knowledge is no longer passed on from the oldies to the young guys, people retire/die and take what they know with them.
There are concepts like ‘process knowledge’ or ‘production knowledge’ – there are also production ecosystems. Brit engineer James Dyson used to describe how when he had his first commercial idea, everything he needed to make it, both materials and skills, could be found in a few square miles of industrial Birmingham, UK.
It’s not like software, where you can start with an empty room, get the wiring and servers in, half a dozen bright young people with just a few years experience (because the software will only be a few years old and anyone who started on it when it came out will be one of the experts). Making things is harder.
“manufacturing in this country does not employ more than about 10% of the working population”
You say that like it’s a good thing. I don’t know what it was like in the States during the early months of Covid, but in Europe you literally had guys from the health services standing on runways in China, bidding against each other for cargoes of masks and protective aprons – not exactly the most high-tech stuff in the world, but just not made in quantity in Europe any more.
In say Russia the arms factories run 3 shifts 24/7. In the Fed and BoE the printing presses run 24/7. Selling houses and coffee to each other, and looking after each other’s kids, is all very well as a GDP-booster until the solids strike the ventilator.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/return-industrial-warfare
That's nice, but I neither stated nor implied that. Industry accounts for 19% of value-added in this country (in 1997, the share was 23%). I'm sorry you've got the idea in your head that the value of services is a mirage, but I cannot fix that. The motive for reshoring industry is reasons of state.
“wonderfully entertaining story for how he could claim to be Scottish: a shipful of slaves revolted during their exercise hour, successfully taking the ship but then realizing that they didn’t have any idea how to pilot it. They stumbled across clan warfare era Scotland”
That sounds remarkably close to the story I heard put forward as a theory of “Darkie Day” in Padstow, Cornwall. But both Cornwall and Scotland are a long way from the Atlantic slave routes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummer%27s_Day
Gatsby, published 1926: odd that Wolfsheim’s company is named Swastika Trading. Strange.
One vague connection of Fitzgerald and Heinlein is Owen Johnson. Fitzgerald called Stover at Yale “the textbook of his generation”. OJ was the sort of author that was more famous earlier in the 20th century (like Baum, say) and would have been read by Heinlein.
You get little allusions at times (like in Have Spacesuit when the protagonist mentions books where it all works out and the hero gets elected to Skull and Bones). Also The Coming of the Amazons has big similarities to For Us the Living and The Door into Summer. (Cold sleep, romance across time.)
FWIW, I find SAY way more fun and readable and the characters more sympathetic than Gatsby. It’s not deep literature, but worth a read. Some issues still affect young people.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46674/46674-h/46674-h.htm
Just trying to give quiz show Steve some Connections. 😉
It’s like Mountains of Madness, a story about recognizing the self in the other.
It is? I read MoM back in the 1990s. My brain was overly stimulated by HP’s incredible tapestry of deep history and alien races and the conflicts betwixt them. There was no room left in my brain for the psychological element.
Rename it to The Atlantic Middle Passage.
A combination of the one drop rule and Jim Crow meant white people were regularly accused of being black. For example, Pres Warren G Harding. So Fitzgerald might have left some ambiguous clues to Gatsby having some sort of black linage. Also it’s hard to come up with new aspects of a novel that has been commented on for so long. Maybe Gatsby had more IQ points that other characters because of a distant East Asian ancestor, you know, who worked on the Trans Continental railroad or something..
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles, @Corpse Tooth, @Joe Stalin, @Yngvar
high-powered C4 explosives
C4? That’s ancient technology. I’m not an explosives expert or enthusiast. But the personnel suspected to be involved — Polish, British, American, naval special units — would be equipped with advanced ordnance, especially for this job. Although explosives leave behind a signature, and C4 is in use everywhere. It could be the perps didn’t want it to be too obvious, even though just about everyone knows the Poles, Brits, and Yanks are agents of globohomo.
Me too.
No. It’s always easy to answer Steve’s questions.
I guess becoming American is somehow more challenging.Replies: @Verymuchalive, @Ian M.
I thought you were still living in Florida !
Interesting point on whether a writer decides to describe his characters in physical detail or leave it open ended. If you write the protagonist in the first-person it gets you off the hook (unless they gaze at themselves in the mirror and describe their own jut jaw, high cheekbones, pert breasts blah blah blah)
We have ample manufacturing capacity and Chinese industry was built with local capital. Manufacturing in this country does not employ more than about 10% of the working population, of course. No clue why you fancy hospital administrators were making decisions according to Chinese production and employment statistics. About 6-7% of the working population is in the medical sector and allied areas.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Guest007
Healthcare is 18% of GDP and thus, much more than 7% of the workforce.
From a cite: There were 22 million workers in the health care industry, one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors in the United States that accounts for 14% of all U.S. workers, according to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey (ACS)
In addition, nurses and care providers earn more than average. Think of how much a nurse anesthetist or a physical therapist makes in 2022. The only way to “bend the cost curve” in healthare will be pay cuts and layoffs.
Put him in your dead poll for 2023.
Seymour Hersch is 85 and still kicking. Not much older than the POTUS.
As a young man, Hersch had great journalistic success exposing the “My Lai Massacre” in 1970, 53 years ago, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.
Ever since then, he has been trying to repeat his early success by exposing the “evils” of the US government. He has exposed at least 20 of the last 5 evil acts of the US gov. He doesn’t seem to worry too much about verifying sources. His motto is, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about the US gov., come sit next to me.”
His source for this article is “a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning”. Note, SOURCE singular. There is a reason why no one but Hersch has promulgated this story.
#1, I don’t think Biden had the balls to do this. Witness his pussyfooting wrt to the Chinese spy balloon.
#2, according to this, all four pipes were mined but only 3 went off. Why didn’t #4 go off? If it didn’t, where are the unexploded mines? Why haven’t the Russian retrieved them and shown them to the world as evidence?
although he seemed too confident for the role
Redford, a movie star rather than actor, just exudes that American mid-century confidence. I didn’t read the novel but wasn’t Gatsby a bootlegger who bought his way into the society set? Successful criminals are usually confident characters.
I never bought Bruce Dern as an upper-class American snob
Dern comes from a politically-connected and wealthy family in the Midwest somewhere but it’s difficult picturing him as a snob. Dern’s a good actor and I’ve enjoyed many of his performances. He’s a guy who can go from mainstream to weirdo pretty quickly — it’s his teeth and eyes.
Dern’s a good actor and I’ve enjoyed many of his performances. He’s a guy who can go from mainstream to weirdo pretty quickly — it’s his teeth and eyes.
I agree about Dern. He could certainly play a creep as in Black Sunday but could also play a half-way normal character, as in Family Plot. I just didn't see him as Tom Buchanan.
Clearly someone understood the reasons. It's hard to make a case for printing and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel to troops in wartime. What other examples of that do we have?Replies: @J.Ross, @Jack D
Gatsby doesn’t live forever but achieves extraordinary feats which are illustrative of our economic freedom. Pretty simple actually.
The context of it being issued to soldiers is interesting, though. One can see it shifting the American Dream from Horatio Alger's middle class prosperity through virtue to mega bling via alcohol smuggling.Replies: @Art Deco, @J.Ross
Yeah, that’s not Gatsby.
If he put that much effort in, let him enjoy his kilt. Life’s short enough.
Two things in relation to that:
1. Hemingway hadn’t yet written “The Old Man and the Sea” when JDP made his observation.
2. JDP was referring to learned vocabulary, not terms of art.
OT — Boston mayor Michelle Wu, who was a complete disaster during the lockdown, has appointed an all-black reparations committee to figure out how to drive remaining employers out of Boston.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11725245/Boston-mayor-unveils-reparations-task-force-members-including-TWO-11th-graders.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11724677/Reparations-meeting-delayed-supervisor-gets-stuck-Colombia-partying-Hooters.html
------------
Ohio situation is still ongoing and the press conference they just had is straight out of HBO's Chernobyl. One journalist arrested, authorities clearly lying and looking like they're about to weep, people claiming chickens are dying ten miles from the site, no control or measurements of the traveling poisonous plume, confirmation that Pittsburgh is affected.
The media won't talk about it other than to say it's over, but over the next decade cancers are going to proliferate in this area.
Remember that Biden did this when he forced an end to the rail strike.
As a young man, Hersch had great journalistic success exposing the "My Lai Massacre" in 1970, 53 years ago, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.
Ever since then, he has been trying to repeat his early success by exposing the "evils" of the US government. He has exposed at least 20 of the last 5 evil acts of the US gov. He doesn't seem to worry too much about verifying sources. His motto is, "If you don’t have anything nice to say about the US gov., come sit next to me."
His source for this article is "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning". Note, SOURCE singular. There is a reason why no one but Hersch has promulgated this story.
#1, I don't think Biden had the balls to do this. Witness his pussyfooting wrt to the Chinese spy balloon.
#2, according to this, all four pipes were mined but only 3 went off. Why didn't #4 go off? If it didn't, where are the unexploded mines? Why haven't the Russian retrieved them and shown them to the world as evidence?Replies: @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast
Seriously, Jack D – are you still going with the claim that the Russians blew up their own pipeline?
Clearly someone understood the reasons. It's hard to make a case for printing and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel to troops in wartime. What other examples of that do we have?Replies: @J.Ross, @Jack D
Like most books published, when The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925 it received poor reviews and sold poorly and soon went out of print. Fitzgerald’s previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, were best sellers but the critics called this one a dud. Maybe in the pre-crash Roaring Twenties it was too much of a downer. When Fitzgerald died at age 44 in 1940 (ironically of a heart attack AFTER he had dried out), his obituary in the NY Times said, “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” (Despite his unflattering portrayal of Jews in Gatsby, his last companion was the Jewish gossip columnist Sheila Graham).
Cut to 1943:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62358/how-wwii-saved-great-gatsby-obscurity
Remember, this was the age before portable electronic devices. You couldn’t play video games to pass the time or listen to a transistor radio. Your choices for shipboard/battlefield entertainment were very limited so books were more attractive than they are now.
Gatsby was only one title. Altogether, the council distributed 123 million copies of 1,227 titles. In 1944, only 120 copies of Gatsby sold in bookstores. But the ASE printed 155,000. It was estimated that each copy was passed around to 7 soldiers so a million soldiers supposedly read it.
How Gatsby made the list or what else was on the list or whether any of the other titles revived someone’s literary career the way did Fitzgerald’s, I dunno.
There are many significant, or at least rather good American authors who are either almost forgotten or have a much lower literary standing because of many complex factors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell, John O'Hara, Thomas Wolfe, ... even Dos Passos.
The exception is Jack London.
London is one of those authors whom aesthetes despise, but who- against all odds- stubbornly refuse to go away. When he wrote about “serious” topics, London was a failure (Burning Daylight, Martin Eden,…); on the other hand, when he wrote about animals, primitives, mentally impaired, (white) underclass & quasi-fascist-Darwinian fantasies (most stories & short novels) -he was an unavoidable writer, one that will be read long after most canonized authors are just a footnote.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @AceDeuce, @Ian Smith
Lol! He’s totally lying. His class still didn’t give a slightest hoot about a book they couldn’t in the least understand.
Right. How does Gatsby's 'Blackness' help them understand what "feigned" means?Replies: @Gandydancer
OT, but I only recently rewatched The Matrix and saw many hints it was really about transitioning. Neo's initial meeting with Trinity:And this, which sounds like a metaphor for gender dysphoria:Replies: @HammerJack
So, super-magic negro and super-magic grrl, along with Keanu playing the white guy (showing proper ignorance and respect)? Have I summed that up properly?
I watched five minutes of that movie and bailed, due to its extreme stupidity, so I might have missed something or other. Took a while to figure out which pill was which, despite reading about them a million times back when. And sadly, still.
There’s tons of pop culture stuff I’ve missed, usually deliberately. No regrets.
Socialized medicine has worked, reasonably well, in nations which were composed of relatively responsible and intelligent people.
Hence, it could not really work in this country, at least not for the past few decades, and it’s less likely than ever to work going forward.
But yes, as you say, the printing press will save us all! Government will simply provide whatever the people need, or want.
Is ther any living black academic who ever talks about anything but race?
Never posted here before, but I teach Gatsby a lot. The clearer suggestion is that Daisy is mulatto. In the opening dinner scene, when Tom cites the "Rise of the Colored Nations" he looks around the dinner table. He notes that Nick is white, and that Jordan is white. But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can't outright say she's white. As a childhood friend of Daisy, Jordan is also hiding this secret. That's why she says the "We're all white here" line at the Plaza. Jordan is protecting Daisy. Just a theory.
There's a terrific nonfiction book, "Careless People," that completely dissects every inspiration for the novel. Now that Gatsby is in the public domain it will probably blow up even bigger.
P.s. Gatsby's first resurrection was when Fitzgerald died. His friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wanted to publish the unfinished "Loves of the Last Tycoon." But that book was too short to fill the last folio. Gatsby was tagged on in that same volume, simply because of its short length. It filled the folio. Ah, the sometimes arbitrary nature of success.Replies: @Nachum, @Peterike, @Guest1962, @John Pepple, @Wokechoke
“ But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can’t outright say she’s white.”
Maybe Daisy is Jewish. She seems the type.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/number-foreign-workers-japan-reaches-record-high
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16838.jpeg
-- Adolf HipsterReplies: @Jack D, @AnotherDad
Obviously Japan should not do this. It should pay its own people the necessary wages and allocate labor accordingly. Part of this will simply *not* be doing a bunch of low value service work, that doesn’t actually need to be done. And a big part pushing forward on automation which–unlike importing labor–actually raises living standards.
However, the key aspect is … settlement. Do the foreign workers get to settle and have families in Japan, or are they sent back. If they are always sent back and never allowed to be “Japanese” citizens, then you can live with quite a bit of this nonsense.
Ultimately in Japan–as in every nation–the struggle is to hold off the “muh immigration!” bleaters and allow your own “breeder” types to lead the fertility recovery. And as you hold off immigration, the conditions on the ground–jobs and affordable housing–before better and better for “affordable family formation”.
Those nations that do this successfully will survive, those nations that do not will die off–their territory conquered by foreign breeders.
What do think is the most comprehensive pizzagate documentary?
Late realization: The Columbia Journalism Review's total destruction of the "Russian disinformation" nonsense redounds upon pizzagate. The official story was that pizzagate was Russian disinformation. The alternative is that is was leaked and already-public confidential messages between members of a decadent ruling class.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Steve Sailer
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11725245/Boston-mayor-unveils-reparations-task-force-members-including-TWO-11th-graders.htmlReplies: @J.Ross
Partial follow-up to this: San Francisco has its own reparations committee, which was delayed because its wealthy members were partying overseas.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11724677/Reparations-meeting-delayed-supervisor-gets-stuck-Colombia-partying-Hooters.html
————
Ohio situation is still ongoing and the press conference they just had is straight out of HBO’s Chernobyl. One journalist arrested, authorities clearly lying and looking like they’re about to weep, people claiming chickens are dying ten miles from the site, no control or measurements of the traveling poisonous plume, confirmation that Pittsburgh is affected.
The media won’t talk about it other than to say it’s over, but over the next decade cancers are going to proliferate in this area.
Remember that Biden did this when he forced an end to the rail strike.
Fitzgerald reveals Gatsby’s ORIGINAL name is Gatz. The most European name of them all.
From House of Names:
It comes from the Heartland of Europe, where Nordic tribes met and bred with their Steppe warrior cousins producing the Sarmation, Ossetian and (eventually) Germans and Russians.
They keep trying. When Les Miserables was a big hit in the 1980s it occurred to somebody that Javert was born in jail, an unknown father and a Gypsy mother. So someone decided Javert’s daddy was black since part of Bonaparte’s empire was in Africa. Long stretch, but at least 3 black Javerts have shown up, one in a BBC miniseries.
The biggest hunk of this is just low quality students.
But this is also simply what you get without a common people, common culture. Why the heck should they care about this stuff about rick white people 100 years ago–the people from the old America they replaced.
As a young man, Hersch had great journalistic success exposing the "My Lai Massacre" in 1970, 53 years ago, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize.
Ever since then, he has been trying to repeat his early success by exposing the "evils" of the US government. He has exposed at least 20 of the last 5 evil acts of the US gov. He doesn't seem to worry too much about verifying sources. His motto is, "If you don’t have anything nice to say about the US gov., come sit next to me."
His source for this article is "a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning". Note, SOURCE singular. There is a reason why no one but Hersch has promulgated this story.
#1, I don't think Biden had the balls to do this. Witness his pussyfooting wrt to the Chinese spy balloon.
#2, according to this, all four pipes were mined but only 3 went off. Why didn't #4 go off? If it didn't, where are the unexploded mines? Why haven't the Russian retrieved them and shown them to the world as evidence?Replies: @vinteuil, @Cagey Beast
Nord Stream was not given access to its own pipelines until long after others had inspected them.
I don’t think I’ve seen any documentaries about pizzagate, the meat of pizzagate would be the publicly available admissions which pol noticed and correlated, things like the DC lifestyle magazine freely publishing the “art” John Podesta had on his walls and was cool with journalists photographing, or when pol figured out that John Podesta as a child attended a special summer camp for future elite brats with Dennis Hastert (the “Denny” message names the island where the summer camp was held).
Late realization: The Columbia Journalism Review’s total destruction of the “Russian disinformation” nonsense redounds upon pizzagate. The official story was that pizzagate was Russian disinformation. The alternative is that is was leaked and already-public confidential messages between members of a decadent ruling class.
I know a lot about Heinlein, less about other Golden Age sci-fi authors.
My father met him, in Cali in the 40s. Said that you could see the gears turning in his head. (Meant positively.)
A character in a Japanese book is assumed to be Japanese
If you go through line with brown colored glasses…
Lol sure I guess so. But if you read the book Rod and his family talk and behave and think exactly like nerdy midwestern Germans, not blacks.
Heinlein seems to think of race as just an accidental paint color. It’s innocent and endearing, in a way.
Gatsby doesn’t have a very compelling plot; it’s more of a generational set piece. (Callback to your previous post.)
It’s a chronicling of the Lost Generation, which corresponds in type to Generation X. Going nowhere fast, living like a shooting star, blowing their money on material pleasures, etc.
I commented on your last post that I like S&H generational theory because of its interesting and often true predictions. I’ll offer a new one: I predict that as Gen X gets into its 60s and 70s, an upper age limit will be enforced on driver’s licenses. Other generations would never accept such restrictions. But old Gen Xers will say, “Yeah, we old people are dangerous drivers, and half of us are drunk or high behind the wheel, so it’s probably better for everyone if we don’t drive. We’re losers, baby, so why don’t you kill us?”
I am curious, Steve – what do you recall about the elderly from your youth? Were they considered gregarious go-getters, joining the Rotary and playing in golf leagues, or were they considered old fogeys standing in the way of progress?
Not strange at all. Swastikas were everywhere before Hitler ruined them. They were enormously popular and the go-to name and/or symbol for companies and products of the era, thus, the town of “Swastika, Canada.” In fact the Nazi embrace of the swastika was just another illustration of its fashionableness and non-Nazi popularity. I have a chart somewhere put together by a righteous Hindoo showing at a glance a fraction of how many swastikas have no connection to Hitler. There was a Swastika Soap which printed on its label, “Hitler can go to hell, this has been our logo since 1912” or something.
There are a few clues in “The Puppet Masters” suggesting the main character is Jewish. Or maybe that’s just my ethnocentrism.
Late realization: The Columbia Journalism Review's total destruction of the "Russian disinformation" nonsense redounds upon pizzagate. The official story was that pizzagate was Russian disinformation. The alternative is that is was leaked and already-public confidential messages between members of a decadent ruling class.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Steve Sailer
C’mon, “like the DC lifestyle magazine freely publishing the “art” John Podesta had on his walls and was cool with journalists photographing”
That was Tony Podesta, not John.
One thing made clear by the Jim Biden catastrophestration is that when you elect somebody, you apparently elect their whole family. There is no minor nabob so unimportant that his retarded brother or cousin cannot sell influence. Easily a Coen brothers movie in that. Glorious exceptions: Trump, whose family might be Jewish but does not smoke crack, and Obama, whose cousin Malik was very witty on twitter.
Late realization: The Columbia Journalism Review's total destruction of the "Russian disinformation" nonsense redounds upon pizzagate. The official story was that pizzagate was Russian disinformation. The alternative is that is was leaked and already-public confidential messages between members of a decadent ruling class.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Steve Sailer
How’s the Paul Podesta story working out?
Yes a painful feature of Black History Month is having a few pretty good artistic accomplishments fawned over way too much, like putting your kid’s dopey drawing up on the refrigerator.
This is somewhat true of the less publicized Women’s History Month (March). But while I used to scoff a bit (Uh-oh, time to once again drag out those Amy Beach sonatas), I am finding more and more solid female classical era composers buried deep on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6qFCYRQKVA&t=423sReplies: @Known Fact
When Antonín Dvořák suggested that American composers look to aboriginal and Negro sources for inspiration-- not a bad idea, up to a point-- Mrs Beach let him know in no uncertain terms that we were going to do no such thing. She looked to the British Isles instead:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gaelic-Symphony
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Ane_Blak-MoirLang heff I maed of ladyes quhytt,
Nou of an blak I will indytt,
That landet furth of the last schippis,
Quhou fain wald I descryve perfytt,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
Quhou schou is tute mowitt lyk an aep,
And lyk a gangarall onto gaep,
And quhou hir schort catt nois up skippis,
And quhou schou schynes lyk ony saep,
My ladye with the mekle lippis.
So she's got muckle (big) lips, is wide-mouthed, has a short upturned nose like a cat's, and her skin shines like soap. Snub noses were apparently not the thing in those days.Replies: @J.Ross, @mc23
I won’t deny that you can read a lot into that poem.
Poland might have. Its population and government is much more hostile to Russia than ours and it has Baltic Sea access.
It also has the economic motivation, as one of the two major alternative land-based pipelines from Russia to Germany go through Poland, and the other one goes through its allies, Ukraine and Slovakia.
If so, it is possible they did so with Biden’s blessing. But probably not, as he seems to be generally unwarlike, and the more logical things for the Poles would be to ask for forgiveness if we caught them, not ask permission.
“They were the men of their time.”
Before the upper class became fully anti-white, it was trendy to talk about racial differences openly but say you didn't care about it. Those people were probably a lot like some of the nihilistic boomer clowns on these comments. Maybe those people are doing some parody influenced by literature and vague recollections from their youth.Replies: @Art Deco
Fitzgerald was typical of the nihilistic liberal upper class of the 1920’s.
If it helps you feel better, go with that.
You can’t close down a factory, leave it for ten or twenty years then re-open.
That’s nice, but I neither stated nor implied that. Industry accounts for 19% of value-added in this country (in 1997, the share was 23%). I’m sorry you’ve got the idea in your head that the value of services is a mirage, but I cannot fix that. The motive for reshoring industry is reasons of state.
Years ago I read of a Caribbean Island where blacks mingled with Irish and ended up speaking Gaelic. The Irish were said to have been transported in the time of Oliver Cromwell
Not sure if the place below is the spot but it seem the Black Irish are actually a thing and not what my niece thinks when she calls herself Black Irish.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/generation-emigration/the-caribbean-irish-the-other-emerald-isle-1.2610681
Fact check: True!
1) couldn’t keep a job.
2) lived with his mother, who thought he could walk on water.
3) he sat around, with his friends, drinking wine all day.
4) couldn’t get a fair trial.
… My students fought Gatsby from the beginning. The teenagers in my classroom—all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala—simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. …
The majority of those ensconced in secondary school should be enrolled in vocational-technical courses, if that. If they cannot handle voTech, they should be receiving instruction in the 3Rs; the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics; and domestic life skills. (See To Sir, with Love). If they’re not proficient in English, they belong in immersion programs. If they’re blind, deaf, or need one-on-one time to learn anything, put them in special ed classes. If they’re incorrigble, lock them up in day detention centers run by the sheriff’s department.
==
The year my father was born, most youths had left school by age 15 and began paid employment. Attending academic high schools was atypical. Set priorities and teach your students what they can handle at the pace they can handle. Most people are not cut out to be intellectual hobbyists.
Legitimate correction except they have the same taste in art are both celebrated as DC bigwigs (see the time James Alefantis catered at John’s pool).
One thing made clear by the Jim Biden catastrophestration is that when you elect somebody, you apparently elect their whole family. There is no minor nabob so unimportant that his retarded brother or cousin cannot sell influence. Easily a Coen brothers movie in that. Glorious exceptions: Trump, whose family might be Jewish but does not smoke crack, and Obama, whose cousin Malik was very witty on twitter.
Other countries give free healthcare to everybody. And there's is a lot cheaper.
But the US's healthcare, which is only free to some, costs more.
That's logical. To a retard.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Liza
Few of those countries are diverse. They certainly weren’t when those programs were instituted.
Maybe Daisy is Jewish. She seems the type.Replies: @Guest1962
Agreed, that’s a good theory.
I don’t know who did it but I do know that Seymour Hersch is always willing to peddle a story that makes the US look bad whether it is true or not so most of the time his “scoops” do not pan out. So reading this story does not convince me that it was the US in the slightest. The US gov says that this is pure fiction. Maybe they are lying but maybe they ain’t.
Keep in mind that “the Russians” are not unitary any more than “the Mafia” is unitary. Maybe it was some sort of factional thing between oligarchs and the FSB or something. When a Russian oligarch falls out a window, it’s generally another Russian who pushed him, so maybe when one Russian’s pipeline explodes, some other Russian wanted it exploded.
Putin might not have ordered it but he no longer has a monopoly of force in Russia. At this point Wagner has not only its own army but its own air force too. Hell, they probably have their own navy and divers for all I know. It’s all very opaque and even after the Putin regime falls and the archives are opened we are probably never going to learn the full truth. There are competing centers of power and each one is keeping their version of history.
Or it could have been any number of countries aside from the US. Russia is like the victim in an Agatha Christie murder mystery where every other character in the book has a good reason for wanting the victim dead.
Never posted here before, but I teach Gatsby a lot. The clearer suggestion is that Daisy is mulatto. In the opening dinner scene, when Tom cites the "Rise of the Colored Nations" he looks around the dinner table. He notes that Nick is white, and that Jordan is white. But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can't outright say she's white. As a childhood friend of Daisy, Jordan is also hiding this secret. That's why she says the "We're all white here" line at the Plaza. Jordan is protecting Daisy. Just a theory.
There's a terrific nonfiction book, "Careless People," that completely dissects every inspiration for the novel. Now that Gatsby is in the public domain it will probably blow up even bigger.
P.s. Gatsby's first resurrection was when Fitzgerald died. His friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wanted to publish the unfinished "Loves of the Last Tycoon." But that book was too short to fill the last folio. Gatsby was tagged on in that same volume, simply because of its short length. It filled the folio. Ah, the sometimes arbitrary nature of success.Replies: @Nachum, @Peterike, @Guest1962, @John Pepple, @Wokechoke
My mistake. The book Tom cites is “The Rise of the Colored Empires.”
This is somewhat true of the less publicized Women's History Month (March). But while I used to scoff a bit (Uh-oh, time to once again drag out those Amy Beach sonatas), I am finding more and more solid female classical era composers buried deep on YouTubeReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Meretricious, @Reg Cæsar
The amount of forgotten but pretty good classical music is absolutely immense. That includes lesser works by major names. For example, I saw a forgotten Donizetti opera, La Gazzette, in only its 2nd American production in its 200 years of existence. It was terrific.
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-1
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-2
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-3The indefatigable Heather Mac Donald also has depressing things to report about "classical music's suicide pact":https://www.city-journal.org/classical-music-under-racial-attack-part-1
https://www.city-journal.org/classical-music-under-racial-attack-part-2Replies: @Known Fact
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles, @Corpse Tooth, @Joe Stalin, @Yngvar
Seems awfully complex to get essentially a very small piece of information to a digital detonator!
Nord Stream 2 appears to have a maximum depth of 210 meters.
A waterproof fiberoptic transmission line having a length of 580 meters is described in this DARPA proposal for a communications system for a submarine.
You could attach the fiberoptic cable to anything that floats on or under the surface, even a satellite receiver like the Ukrainians used for their drone suicide attack on the Black Sea fleet.
https://navalpost.com/how-do-submarines-communicate-with-the-outside-world/
==
The year my father was born, most youths had left school by age 15 and began paid employment. Attending academic high schools was atypical. Set priorities and teach your students what they can handle at the pace they can handle. Most people are not cut out to be intellectual hobbyists.Replies: @Jack D
Last night in the SoTU, Biden said that 12 years of school were not enough for America to be competitive. The ideal Democrat voter is in college until she is 26 and later gets her loan forgiven, then works for a few months and goes out on maternity leave/ family leave/ medical leave, then goes on unemployment, then goes on disability and then retires. Maybe there are a couple of years of “work” in there at some “non-profit” or a government agency. Such a person will be eternally grateful to the Democrat Party for all of the social benefits. The money to pay for all of this stuff just magically appears.
This is somewhat true of the less publicized Women's History Month (March). But while I used to scoff a bit (Uh-oh, time to once again drag out those Amy Beach sonatas), I am finding more and more solid female classical era composers buried deep on YouTubeReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Meretricious, @Reg Cæsar
KF, I agree–are you familiar with Hildegard of Bingen (12th C)?
Actually I was thinking just a little more recently, such as Louise Farrenc and Marie Jaell
Steve, coincidentally I am listening to La Gazzetta now; it’s by Rossini (love it)
Viewing an opera is like drinking Dr. Pepper, something you do as a weird sort of penance.
-------
OT -- A story which will probably not go national, which would be unknown but for a certain fed-plagued Mongolian throat singing enthusiast discussion forum. Someone in Maine hung a banner claiming that it's okay to be white. The authorities castigated them. But this time, people pushed back, including a black podcaster who asked on Twitter why exactly it would not be okay, and was blocked. Several layers of authorities attempted to control the situation and they all failed amid enthusiastic pubic pushback.
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/415283633Replies: @J.Ross, @Muggles, @JimDandy
Fitzgerald famously wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly said, “Yes, they have more money.” Fitzgerald clearly meant to convey that Gatsby wasn’t accepted by the rich because they could smell his non-rich origins on him. This bullshit about Gatsby being black is just more ludicrously-woke academic bullshit. Woke academics–and their moron woke students–hate The Great Gatsby precisely because it focuses on class, rather than race. I remember one of Chicago’s top theater companies tried to address this almost 35 years ago by casting a black guy as Gatsby. The critics ate it up. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a film remake with similar casting in the near future.
In the Current Year, less and less of that music will be performed, due to Equity concerns prioritizing racial identity over talent. The pseudonymous orchestra conductor “Don Baton” explains why audiences across America are being subjected to mediocre but racially correct composers:
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-1
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-2
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-3
The indefatigable Heather Mac Donald also has depressing things to report about “classical music’s suicide pact”:
https://www.city-journal.org/classical-music-under-racial-attack-part-1
https://www.city-journal.org/classical-music-under-racial-attack-part-2
This is somewhat true of the less publicized Women's History Month (March). But while I used to scoff a bit (Uh-oh, time to once again drag out those Amy Beach sonatas), I am finding more and more solid female classical era composers buried deep on YouTubeReplies: @Steve Sailer, @Meretricious, @Reg Cæsar
That’s Mrs Beach to you, Philistine. Mrs H H A Beach.
When Antonín Dvořák suggested that American composers look to aboriginal and Negro sources for inspiration– not a bad idea, up to a point– Mrs Beach let him know in no uncertain terms that we were going to do no such thing. She looked to the British Isles instead:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gaelic-Symphony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6qFCYRQKVA&t=423sReplies: @Known Fact
We dated my freshman year.
Actually I was thinking just a little more recently, such as Louise Farrenc and Marie Jaell
It’s an area I’m really interested in. I’m not that well-versed in classical music, but the stuff I’m familiar with has been so overplayed in my lifetime that I’m kind of tired it, or I associate it so much with a movie or whatever. I’m on the hunt for slightly deeper cuts, like Kreutzer Sonata.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-JaVGYG2i8
Screencapped. This is now my favorite Art Deco post.
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-1
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-2
https://donb.substack.com/p/the-price-of-equity-part-3The indefatigable Heather Mac Donald also has depressing things to report about "classical music's suicide pact":https://www.city-journal.org/classical-music-under-racial-attack-part-1
https://www.city-journal.org/classical-music-under-racial-attack-part-2Replies: @Known Fact
Thanks, this is disturbing but not surprising. I’m proud that that other great white musical tradition — metal — is not yet falling all over itself begging for forgiveness
Valence electrons have spin, either “up” or “down”, and I believe I’ve seen that referred to as “its valence”, which wouldn’t make any sense if it were merely an adjective designating an electron in a valence “orbit”. But search engines seem to ignore “its”, so this is hard to prove. But if I’m right then locutions such as “his valence is left wing” would make sense. as would Steve’s usage..
I've never thought of (or seen) valence to mean spin up/down. Valence is a chemical characteristic, where the number (in unfilled shell) is of concern, not the type.
Spin up/down almost never comes into chemical considerations (for a half filled orbital, it's irrelevant in terms of reactions). It's just has to do with magnetism as well as the "only two allowed in an orbital".
"The etymology of the words valence (plural valences) and valency (plural valencies) traces back to 1425, meaning "extract, preparation", from Latin valentia "strength, capacity", from the earlier valor "worth, value", and the chemical meaning referring to the "combining power of an element" is recorded from 1884, from German Valenz.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(chemistry)Replies: @Gandydancer, @Gandydancer
Redford, a movie star rather than actor, just exudes that American mid-century confidence. I didn't read the novel but wasn't Gatsby a bootlegger who bought his way into the society set? Successful criminals are usually confident characters.
I never bought Bruce Dern as an upper-class American snob
Dern comes from a politically-connected and wealthy family in the Midwest somewhere but it's difficult picturing him as a snob. Dern's a good actor and I've enjoyed many of his performances. He's a guy who can go from mainstream to weirdo pretty quickly -- it's his teeth and eyes.Replies: @Mr. Anon
True, but Gatsby was a criminal with the heart of a romantic. He wasn’t exactly a Jimmy Cagney character. Redford wasn’t bad in the movie. Perhaps he was distracted. The Watergate hearings were going on when the movie was filmed, and according to Mia Farrow, Redford was obsessed with them.
Dern’s a good actor and I’ve enjoyed many of his performances. He’s a guy who can go from mainstream to weirdo pretty quickly — it’s his teeth and eyes.
I agree about Dern. He could certainly play a creep as in Black Sunday but could also play a half-way normal character, as in Family Plot. I just didn’t see him as Tom Buchanan.
The Atlantic needs to commit itself to the reparations movement and hire an all-Black staff.
Until that happens I will consider them as part of the White supremacist establishment.
In the movie clip above (from the DiCaprio version) the most prominent “cheerleader” (hoochie coochie dancer?) IS black. Don’t recall if they were spanked. but there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on… to RAP music.
Oh, wait. “Coach Reardon”. I guess we’re no longer talking about Gatsby. I missed that for lack of any indication as to who you are replying to.
Exactly the way it should be taught to those students.
I was replying to Woodsie's comment:
"...The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.”
I strongly disagree with this statement. I took to it like a duck to water but I was already reading H. James so sophisticated prose was not a problem for me. Woodsie would do well to recall the first two sentences of this lovely novel:
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'"Replies: @Nicholas Stix, @Woodsie
What garbage. It’s the banality of contemporary gutter culture, starring black megalomania. (Steve: Your royalties are in the mail.) the atlantic, the new yorker, and new york magazine all simply truck in dnc talking points.
The earliest instance of this game I’m familiar with—blackifying White characters in fiction—was of a White woman who wrote a “thing,” Was Huck black?, in 1993.
In the early 1980s, during my university days in West Germany, I was homesick, so I read lots of American fiction and listened to lots of Aaron Copeland. That period included reading The Great Gatsby, “the great American novel.” However, I can recall very little of it, except that I was underwhelmed by it. But the notion that Gatsby was black is ludicrous.
The problem here is that Medgar Evers is a black supremacist craphole, and black supremacist, affirmative action “scholars” are not held to any intellectual or moral standards. And so, they just make up stuff, as do their White “allies” in support of them.
I found Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, unreadable.
However, I have loved other works by Scotty Fitzgerald. At SUNY Stony Brook, my philosophy professor, Lee Miller, had us read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Four Fists” in a senior seminar on “Love and Death.” It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)
I also saw Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) in English at the German-American Institute, but found it awful. The next day, I borrowed Fitzgerald’s eponymous, unfinished novel. (It was about Irving Thalberg, who was MGM’s official number two man during the 1930s. Thalberg held writers in contempt, but was good at charming them, as he did Fitzgerald, making them think he cared about them.)
Fitzgerald was about halfway through the book when he died of a heart attack. The version I borrowed included a rich section of the author’s notes. I concluded that Fitzgerald had painted himself into a corner, and could not satisfactorily finish the ms., which may have killed him. The problem with the picture was that the studio had hired an Englishman, Harold Pinter, to write the script. Although many of the phrases came straight from Fitzgerald’s ms., Pinter knew the words, but not the music.
This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned were best sellers and considered brilliant when they came out and Gatsby was a both a critical and a commercial flop, so what contemporary readers and critics say and the long term judgment of history are two different things. I suspect a century from now, if there is still an America, readers will look at a lot of the blackety black crap that is so beloved now (Maya Angelou) and will say, "What the hell were they thinking?", or perhaps ¿ En qué demonios estaban pensando?
This is unacceptably vague . Were you the puncher or the punchee?
I don't know if Copland had ever even been there, but he turned those landscapes into music like nobody else ever has.His score for The Red Pony was pretty great too.
The earliest instance of this game I’m familiar with—blackifying White characters in fiction—was of a White woman who wrote a “thing,” Was Huck black?, in 1993.
In the early 1980s, during my university days in West Germany, I was homesick, so I read lots of American fiction and listened to lots of Aaron Copeland. That period included reading The Great Gatsby, “the great American novel.” However, I can recall very little of it, except that I was underwhelmed by it. But the notion that Gatsby was black is ludicrous.
The problem here is that Medgar Evers is a black supremacist craphole, and black supremacist, affirmative action “scholars” are not held to any intellectual or moral standards. And so, they just make up stuff, as do their White “allies” in support of them.
I found Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, unreadable.
However, I have loved other works by Scotty Fitzgerald. At SUNY Stony Brook, my philosophy professor, Lee Miller, had us read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Four Fists” in a senior seminar on “Love and Death.” It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)
I also saw Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) in English at the German-American Institute, but found it awful. The next day, I borrowed Fitzgerald’s eponymous, unfinished novel. (It was about Irving Thalberg, who was MGM’s official number two man during the 1930s. Thalberg held writers in contempt, but was good at charming them, as he did Fitzgerald, making them think he cared about them.)
Fitzgerald was about halfway through the book when he died of a heart attack. The version I borrowed included a rich section of the author’s notes. I concluded that Fitzgerald had painted himself into a corner, and could not satisfactorily finish the ms., which may have killed him. The problem with the picture was that the studio had hired an Englishman, Harold Pinter, to write the script. Although many of the phrases came straight from Fitzgerald’s ms., Pinter knew the words, but not the music.Replies: @Jack D, @kaganovitch, @Mr. Anon
Well that and the arteriosclerosis from years of hard drinking.
This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned were best sellers and considered brilliant when they came out and Gatsby was a both a critical and a commercial flop, so what contemporary readers and critics say and the long term judgment of history are two different things. I suspect a century from now, if there is still an America, readers will look at a lot of the blackety black crap that is so beloved now (Maya Angelou) and will say, “What the hell were they thinking?”, or perhaps ¿ En qué demonios estaban pensando?
But for god’s sake, first get the kids reading, and comfortable with books.Replies: @Gandydancer
Vereen claim he IS successful at getting his students to read Gatsby, and pay close attention while doing so.
I don’t mind his turning the reading exercise into a treasure hunt if it gets that effect. Maybe it’s not the highest level of appreciation that one might wish for, but it’s a start.
That said, the troubling bit is that he seems to be trying to SELL this interpretation as TRUE. Or maybe he buys into the nonsense that there is no truth, merely texts and interpretations. It anyway gives off the faint stench of the kind of nonsense peddlers who insist that Egyptian civilization was a black one, never mind all those wall paintings of Nubian soldiers who are not the same color as the Egyptians.
The Cultural Appropriation warriors don’t seem to have any objection to Shakespeare’s Moor always being played by a sub-Saharan black guy nowadays, so there’s that.
Never posted here before, but I teach Gatsby a lot. The clearer suggestion is that Daisy is mulatto. In the opening dinner scene, when Tom cites the "Rise of the Colored Nations" he looks around the dinner table. He notes that Nick is white, and that Jordan is white. But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can't outright say she's white. As a childhood friend of Daisy, Jordan is also hiding this secret. That's why she says the "We're all white here" line at the Plaza. Jordan is protecting Daisy. Just a theory.
There's a terrific nonfiction book, "Careless People," that completely dissects every inspiration for the novel. Now that Gatsby is in the public domain it will probably blow up even bigger.
P.s. Gatsby's first resurrection was when Fitzgerald died. His friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wanted to publish the unfinished "Loves of the Last Tycoon." But that book was too short to fill the last folio. Gatsby was tagged on in that same volume, simply because of its short length. It filled the folio. Ah, the sometimes arbitrary nature of success.Replies: @Nachum, @Peterike, @Guest1962, @John Pepple, @Wokechoke
He notes that Nick and Jordan are Nordics, not that they’re white. Couldn’t his hesitation about Daisy mean she was part Slavic or Italian or some other European ethnicity?
If you are talking about listening to an opera on the radio or viewing it on TV, I 100% agree with you. But somehow live opera (done well) is greater than the sum of its parts.
My mother had the Metropolitan Opera (announcer, Milton Cross) on every weekend (Saturday or Sunday, I forget). She wasn't raised to listen to opera. Her mother, father, siblings, and husband evinced no interest in it. Allan Bloom wrote about the status of classical music among college students in the 1950s; the phenomenon passed over the heads of her contemporaries in her family and evidently wasn't a thing when her parents were in school ca. WWI. An affection for concert and chamber music I can understand. An affection for people bellowing in foreign languages (or in incomprehensible English) is baffling.Replies: @shale boi, @BB753, @Jack D
His class still didn’t give a slightest hoot about a book they couldn’t in the least understand.
Right. How does Gatsby’s ‘Blackness’ help them understand what “feigned” means?
Other countries give free healthcare to everybody. And there's is a lot cheaper.
But the US's healthcare, which is only free to some, costs more.
That's logical. To a retard.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Liza
Forgive me, but that word is just too funny. No hard feelings, I hope.
The earliest instance of this game I’m familiar with—blackifying White characters in fiction—was of a White woman who wrote a “thing,” Was Huck black?, in 1993.
In the early 1980s, during my university days in West Germany, I was homesick, so I read lots of American fiction and listened to lots of Aaron Copeland. That period included reading The Great Gatsby, “the great American novel.” However, I can recall very little of it, except that I was underwhelmed by it. But the notion that Gatsby was black is ludicrous.
The problem here is that Medgar Evers is a black supremacist craphole, and black supremacist, affirmative action “scholars” are not held to any intellectual or moral standards. And so, they just make up stuff, as do their White “allies” in support of them.
I found Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, unreadable.
However, I have loved other works by Scotty Fitzgerald. At SUNY Stony Brook, my philosophy professor, Lee Miller, had us read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Four Fists” in a senior seminar on “Love and Death.” It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)
I also saw Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) in English at the German-American Institute, but found it awful. The next day, I borrowed Fitzgerald’s eponymous, unfinished novel. (It was about Irving Thalberg, who was MGM’s official number two man during the 1930s. Thalberg held writers in contempt, but was good at charming them, as he did Fitzgerald, making them think he cared about them.)
Fitzgerald was about halfway through the book when he died of a heart attack. The version I borrowed included a rich section of the author’s notes. I concluded that Fitzgerald had painted himself into a corner, and could not satisfactorily finish the ms., which may have killed him. The problem with the picture was that the studio had hired an Englishman, Harold Pinter, to write the script. Although many of the phrases came straight from Fitzgerald’s ms., Pinter knew the words, but not the music.Replies: @Jack D, @kaganovitch, @Mr. Anon
It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)
This is unacceptably vague . Were you the puncher or the punchee?
“Of course, Heinlein is Controversial (due to his last wife being a Goldwaterite), while Fitzgerald is not, presumably due to his leftism in the 1930s, although during his 1920s golden age he was something of a racist snob.”
Faintly recall a minor scene in Gatsby, where Tom Buchanan quotes (or paraphrases) Lothrop Stoddard or Madison Grant type of thinking about race. If so, it’s hardly the case that Fitzgerald would have Tom quoting such things in Gatsby’s presence. At the same time, as Gatsby aspired to gain Daisy, he would want to appear a cultured gentleman, one who was familiar with what passed for pop culture’s sophisticated thinking during the Roaring Twenties.
But they just don’t seem to ever stop, do they? From Petronius was a slave and thus automatically equals black to the people of color students simply can’t read books unless the characters outwardly resemble them.
It simply won’t ever stop until everyone lives in Wakanda.
The earliest instance of this game I’m familiar with—blackifying White characters in fiction—was of a White woman who wrote a “thing,” Was Huck black?, in 1993.
In the early 1980s, during my university days in West Germany, I was homesick, so I read lots of American fiction and listened to lots of Aaron Copeland. That period included reading The Great Gatsby, “the great American novel.” However, I can recall very little of it, except that I was underwhelmed by it. But the notion that Gatsby was black is ludicrous.
The problem here is that Medgar Evers is a black supremacist craphole, and black supremacist, affirmative action “scholars” are not held to any intellectual or moral standards. And so, they just make up stuff, as do their White “allies” in support of them.
I found Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, unreadable.
However, I have loved other works by Scotty Fitzgerald. At SUNY Stony Brook, my philosophy professor, Lee Miller, had us read Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Four Fists” in a senior seminar on “Love and Death.” It was about how a snobby young man had become a wise, rich, middle-aged one, thanks to four men who had straightened him out, along the way, by punching him in the face. (I’ve tried the same thing, more or less, but with little success.)
I also saw Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976) in English at the German-American Institute, but found it awful. The next day, I borrowed Fitzgerald’s eponymous, unfinished novel. (It was about Irving Thalberg, who was MGM’s official number two man during the 1930s. Thalberg held writers in contempt, but was good at charming them, as he did Fitzgerald, making them think he cared about them.)
Fitzgerald was about halfway through the book when he died of a heart attack. The version I borrowed included a rich section of the author’s notes. I concluded that Fitzgerald had painted himself into a corner, and could not satisfactorily finish the ms., which may have killed him. The problem with the picture was that the studio had hired an Englishman, Harold Pinter, to write the script. Although many of the phrases came straight from Fitzgerald’s ms., Pinter knew the words, but not the music.Replies: @Jack D, @kaganovitch, @Mr. Anon
For me, Rodeo and Billy the Kid are the perfect musical distillation of the Southwest.
I don’t know if Copland had ever even been there, but he turned those landscapes into music like nobody else ever has.
His score for The Red Pony was pretty great too.
If you want to continue the tradition you can buy a copy of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 on May 1 in Brooklyn. You've just missed Norman Mailer and James Dickey.Replies: @Dube
I bought… Fitzgerald’s [Gatsby] a few blocks from his birthplace, during his birth hour.
Did Reg wait for the hour? I’ll never attain full literacy. Though I did photograph my English prof friend’s face as he gazed upward for a time after finishing the last line of all of Proust.
I guess back when writers were describing characters looks more this would have been obvious but I am mystified. In which direction is it short? If vertically I would think "thin upper lip". If horizontal...does this mean the top lip is somehow shorter than the bottom?Replies: @photondancer
A short upper lip refers to the length of the philtrum, the distance between the nose and mouth. A short distance is typical of babies and tends to be considered cute on adults, especially adult women. Conversely long upper lips are seen as less attractive and ‘horsey’. I’ve seen both terms in pre-WW2 fiction but they seem to have died out since.
A lot of the foreign workers are Asian from developing countries such as Vietnam. I have the feeling that they will be a relatively good fit in Japanese society or at least better than Africans are anywhere.Replies: @Johann Ricke
Post-mortem Fitzgerald was lucky with Arthur Mizener and Edmund Wilson.
There are many significant, or at least rather good American authors who are either almost forgotten or have a much lower literary standing because of many complex factors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, … even Dos Passos.
The exception is Jack London.
London is one of those authors whom aesthetes despise, but who- against all odds- stubbornly refuse to go away. When he wrote about “serious” topics, London was a failure (Burning Daylight, Martin Eden,…); on the other hand, when he wrote about animals, primitives, mentally impaired, (white) underclass & quasi-fascist-Darwinian fantasies (most stories & short novels) -he was an unavoidable writer, one that will be read long after most canonized authors are just a footnote.
One interesting thing, to me at least, is that of the above group, only Cather and Wolfe, off the top of my head, had college degrees. It's striking how many great writers-from Twain to Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and on and on, never had the "benefit" of a college degree.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Kylie, @MEH 0910
Thanks, I was unaware of that circa 1940 fiction.
I’m not sure when such stories became a stand in for Sub-Saharan Africans replacing Whites, though I suspect it might of been with the Anglophile French writer Pierre Bouelle’s 1963 novel Planet of the Apes. For certain, the 1968 Planet of the Apes movie was, which was openly acknowledged at the time to be an allegory about present (and future?) Black/White race relations.
Fun fact about the Planet of the Apes franchise: Virtually everyone involved in it’s creation, from the French writer of the original 1963 novel, Pierre Bouelle, it’s English translator Xan Fielding, to the script writer/story creator of four (of the first five) of the 1968-73 movies. Paul Dehn, had extensive wartime British intel agency backgrounds. Specifically, they had all been members of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Paul Dehn, the scriptwriter, is of particular note, as his particular area of expertise with the SOE had been political warfare, ie the utilization of propaganda to defeat an opponent, as opposed to using battlefield weaponry.
There are many significant, or at least rather good American authors who are either almost forgotten or have a much lower literary standing because of many complex factors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell, John O'Hara, Thomas Wolfe, ... even Dos Passos.
The exception is Jack London.
London is one of those authors whom aesthetes despise, but who- against all odds- stubbornly refuse to go away. When he wrote about “serious” topics, London was a failure (Burning Daylight, Martin Eden,…); on the other hand, when he wrote about animals, primitives, mentally impaired, (white) underclass & quasi-fascist-Darwinian fantasies (most stories & short novels) -he was an unavoidable writer, one that will be read long after most canonized authors are just a footnote.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @AceDeuce, @Ian Smith
Jack London’s article on trying surfing in Hawaii around 1900 is great. I read it in an airline magazine. It was the ideal airline magazine fare: an outstanding writer, a great subject, historical interest, and it’s out of copyright.
Been there, done that. No.
My mother had the Metropolitan Opera (announcer, Milton Cross) on every weekend (Saturday or Sunday, I forget). She wasn’t raised to listen to opera. Her mother, father, siblings, and husband evinced no interest in it. Allan Bloom wrote about the status of classical music among college students in the 1950s; the phenomenon passed over the heads of her contemporaries in her family and evidently wasn’t a thing when her parents were in school ca. WWI. An affection for concert and chamber music I can understand. An affection for people bellowing in foreign languages (or in incomprehensible English) is baffling.
Also, in person, there are costumes, it is live, other people around the proverbial campfire. It's not the same thing as playing a record. You can say these are trivial...but there is still a visceral appeal...we still have plays for instance, not just movies.
When Jews started arriving in Israel from the USSR, it seemed like every other Jew got off the plane with a violin case. The USSR had a vast number of state subsidized musical groups. Israel has one professional symphony and that was already fully staffed. So they had to tell the folks with the violins that they were going to have to learn to do something new in Israel because they weren't going to get jobs as musicians.Replies: @Art Deco
Or Daisy was woke before the Woke epidemic, a sort of John the Baptist carrying the torch before Christ Robin DiAngelo?
There are many significant, or at least rather good American authors who are either almost forgotten or have a much lower literary standing because of many complex factors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell, John O'Hara, Thomas Wolfe, ... even Dos Passos.
The exception is Jack London.
London is one of those authors whom aesthetes despise, but who- against all odds- stubbornly refuse to go away. When he wrote about “serious” topics, London was a failure (Burning Daylight, Martin Eden,…); on the other hand, when he wrote about animals, primitives, mentally impaired, (white) underclass & quasi-fascist-Darwinian fantasies (most stories & short novels) -he was an unavoidable writer, one that will be read long after most canonized authors are just a footnote.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @AceDeuce, @Ian Smith
Well, of that group, Cather and O’Hara are much, much better than “rather good”.
One interesting thing, to me at least, is that of the above group, only Cather and Wolfe, off the top of my head, had college degrees. It’s striking how many great writers-from Twain to Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and on and on, never had the “benefit” of a college degree.
But, except Cather, most were middle-brow by contemporary standards. The middle-brow means Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair....
Among supreme novelists, only Dostoevsky had a degree (military engineering), while Tolstoy and Proust were college dropouts. As far as great modern prose authors go: Kafka (law degree) and Musil (mechanical enginering). Most of the rest (Conrad, Mann, Faulkner, Broch, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, ..) either didn't care or decided it wasn't worth the trouble.Replies: @AceDeuce
Miss Cather's prose is one of the glories of Western Civilization. I wonder if her Welsh ancestry was in part responsible for the lovely musicality in her words.
"All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn."
We had a good English department at my high school, or so I thought. Of American authors, we read Melville, Faulkner, H. James, Thomas Wolfe, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald. Willa Cather was not even mentioned. I have no idea why.Replies: @AceDeuce
One interesting thing, to me at least, is that of the above group, only Cather and Wolfe, off the top of my head, had college degrees. It's striking how many great writers-from Twain to Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and on and on, never had the "benefit" of a college degree.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Kylie, @MEH 0910
Perhaps the last was Stoppard who never went to college.
I got into Scarlatti as a teen, I think from reading that Buckley liked him. Learned to play a few pieces on the piano.
One interesting thing, to me at least, is that of the above group, only Cather and Wolfe, off the top of my head, had college degrees. It's striking how many great writers-from Twain to Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and on and on, never had the "benefit" of a college degree.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Kylie, @MEH 0910
I didn’t say all were just “rather good”.
But, except Cather, most were middle-brow by contemporary standards. The middle-brow means Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair….
Among supreme novelists, only Dostoevsky had a degree (military engineering), while Tolstoy and Proust were college dropouts. As far as great modern prose authors go: Kafka (law degree) and Musil (mechanical enginering). Most of the rest (Conrad, Mann, Faulkner, Broch, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, ..) either didn’t care or decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
I've never liked the whole "middlebrow" thing. It's one thing to place writers, artists, etc. above others on merit, but the whole class thing is not for me, even if sometimes technically true.
And I'd put John O'Hara--and Somerset Maugham above that level. I think they are unduly penalized for having been commercially successful.
Camus had a degree, FWIW. I'd put him in the top echelon.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
I think you have wrong connotation of word valence, both in chemistry and in English.
I’ve never thought of (or seen) valence to mean spin up/down. Valence is a chemical characteristic, where the number (in unfilled shell) is of concern, not the type.
Spin up/down almost never comes into chemical considerations (for a half filled orbital, it’s irrelevant in terms of reactions). It’s just has to do with magnetism as well as the “only two allowed in an orbital”.
“The etymology of the words valence (plural valences) and valency (plural valencies) traces back to 1425, meaning “extract, preparation”, from Latin valentia “strength, capacity”, from the earlier valor “worth, value”, and the chemical meaning referring to the “combining power of an element” is recorded from 1884, from German Valenz.[5]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(chemistry)
Imaginative literature is the only creative field where one can achieve greatness without formal education. Not so in visual arts, nor in art music, let alone sciences …..
I guess it’s time for more such fol-de-rol and to his credit this guy at least puts Fitzgerald and not the latest YA-ish Goodreads sensation in the hands of his students (not at all a given anymore); and these snippets are actually less dumb than “Was Huck Black?” – at least this contributor seems to have largely grasped where the poignance of the story lies. However the need to torture the (quite interesting, historically situated) particulars* of the story to make the Other oneself *so as to be sufficiently invested to read further* rather makes a mockery of the idea of literature as universal.
*Gatsby being thought of as Jewish, while obviously not supported by the story, or Fitzgerald’s roots, works on a “put yourself in the character’s shoes” level; and may account, along with the beauty of the writing, for some of its appeal.
My mother had the Metropolitan Opera (announcer, Milton Cross) on every weekend (Saturday or Sunday, I forget). She wasn't raised to listen to opera. Her mother, father, siblings, and husband evinced no interest in it. Allan Bloom wrote about the status of classical music among college students in the 1950s; the phenomenon passed over the heads of her contemporaries in her family and evidently wasn't a thing when her parents were in school ca. WWI. An affection for concert and chamber music I can understand. An affection for people bellowing in foreign languages (or in incomprehensible English) is baffling.Replies: @shale boi, @BB753, @Jack D
I don’t have a taste for it either. But I am a poor singer, within a family of good singers. There is a thing with females, often older but not solely so, of wanting to join choirs, do music workshops, and the like. So, I could see how someone who is a singer (amateur, but doing training, etc.) could appreciate seeing the professionals. I get more appreciation than the general public for watching Olympic sports that I have performed, and have some deeper knowledge of. So maybe your mother was into singing?
Also, in person, there are costumes, it is live, other people around the proverbial campfire. It’s not the same thing as playing a record. You can say these are trivial…but there is still a visceral appeal…we still have plays for instance, not just movies.
That makes sense. Fitzgerald noticed these were typical of southeastern Europe? Amazing. I think my philtrum is kind of long….something new to obsess about 🙂
Here is what the young Gatsby wrote inside the back cover of his copy of Hopalong Cassidy, from when Nick Carraway visits his father near the end:
“He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE and the date September 12, 1906. And underneath:
Rise from bed 6.00 A.M.
Dumbell exercise and wall scaling 6.15–6.30 “
Study electricity, etc. 7.15–8.15 “
Work 8.30–4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports 4.30–5.00 “
Practice elocution, poise and how to obtain it 5.00–6.00 “
Study needed inventions 7.00–9.00 “
General Resolves
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents”
I wonder what the kids in Alonzo Vereen’s class made of that.
The Valley of Ashes they drive through was gone while Fitzgerald was still alive. The Grand Central Parkway was built through there and Flushing Meadow Park, where they held the ’39 and ’64 World’s Fair.
And Meyer Wolfsheim’s office door says Swastika Trading Company.
Getting rid of the Valley of Ashes was all driven by Robert Moses. He arranged it so that it cost the City of New York nothing.
Philadelphia had its own Valley of Ashes but no Robert Moses so when it was time to get rid of Philly's ash dump, private interests built row houses on top of it instead. My wife's mother grew up in once such house and it was fine when she lived there (although they lost it to foreclosure in the Depression). Fast forward to the 1970s - the area is now a ghetto. The ashes began to settle unevenly and the houses lean precariously in various directions. Windows and doors won't open. But the worst part is that sometimes the gas main breaks and the house explodes. At the time, these houses were only worth maybe $20,000 so somehow Philly got some Federal money to buy out the whole neighborhood. They condemned all the houses and leveled the ground. They left the streets but blocked them off and no longer maintain them so grass is starting to grow thru the cracks in the pavement. Where the houses were is just grass but wild trees are starting to spring up. After they leveled it they never really did anything with the land because there's no Robert Moses. They really didn't need any more park land in the area - there was always a park directly across Roosevelt Blvd - Hunting Park. AFAIK, it's just going to sit like this forever.Replies: @hhsiii
You might try the piano works by Ferdinand Ries (Beethoven’s buddy) and John Field. YouTube — whatever its many annoying traits — has all this and seemingly every classical work ever recorded, if you get lucky going down their suggestions rabbithole.
John Field's nocturnes are enchanting. I think John O'Conor is the best interpreter of them.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2YJXgmLXTew&feature=shares
My mother had the Metropolitan Opera (announcer, Milton Cross) on every weekend (Saturday or Sunday, I forget). She wasn't raised to listen to opera. Her mother, father, siblings, and husband evinced no interest in it. Allan Bloom wrote about the status of classical music among college students in the 1950s; the phenomenon passed over the heads of her contemporaries in her family and evidently wasn't a thing when her parents were in school ca. WWI. An affection for concert and chamber music I can understand. An affection for people bellowing in foreign languages (or in incomprehensible English) is baffling.Replies: @shale boi, @BB753, @Jack D
Modern opera houses provide subtitles. And it’s not like German or Italian are too difficult to understand for an audience with moderate culture and intelligence. We’re not talking about Japanese opera here.
Never posted here before, but I teach Gatsby a lot. The clearer suggestion is that Daisy is mulatto. In the opening dinner scene, when Tom cites the "Rise of the Colored Nations" he looks around the dinner table. He notes that Nick is white, and that Jordan is white. But when he turns to Daisy he hesitates. Fitzgerald steps hard on this moment. All Tom can do is nod toward Daisy. He can't outright say she's white. As a childhood friend of Daisy, Jordan is also hiding this secret. That's why she says the "We're all white here" line at the Plaza. Jordan is protecting Daisy. Just a theory.
There's a terrific nonfiction book, "Careless People," that completely dissects every inspiration for the novel. Now that Gatsby is in the public domain it will probably blow up even bigger.
P.s. Gatsby's first resurrection was when Fitzgerald died. His friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, wanted to publish the unfinished "Loves of the Last Tycoon." But that book was too short to fill the last folio. Gatsby was tagged on in that same volume, simply because of its short length. It filled the folio. Ah, the sometimes arbitrary nature of success.Replies: @Nachum, @Peterike, @Guest1962, @John Pepple, @Wokechoke
lol. You did no research onto the characters then. Could that be Daisy’s politics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginevra_King
Then Jordan…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cummings
Tom Buchanan comes off like a dynastically cruel asshole as written by Fitzgerald and he’s based on William “Bill” Mitchell. Daisy seems more like a liberal upper-class woman tired of her hypocritical husband, who has probably done some oil drilling in the city behind her back. She likes the material and social safety of this domineering brutal Polo Player but gets all spoony for a bit of rough but charming and earnest working class “made good” like Gatz.
While Gatz is no Jew he’s in league with one. So he represents the liberal. He’s aping the Jews by Anglising his German name but he’s a goy front-man. Gatz is a financially successful striving version of Fitzgerald, one who made good by partnering with a Jewish gangster. Nick is more like the actual Fitzgerald but more boring. What’s amazing to us today is that Fitzgerald as an Irishman was not good enough for Genevra King. Her old school headmistress said of her:
“bold, bad hussy an adventuress”…
after she was expelled. Fitzgerald would have been a good Husband for her in reality.
Caste and Money are the story of the book. Gatz seems to me to be a fool. He had all the women he could want really, but he kept trying to chase the Girl To The Manner Born. But he too was a Tyler Durden version of Fitzgerald. A figment.
The floozy at the Gas Station that Buchanan is banging and the guy he’s cuckolding are somewhat interesting. Myrtle Wilson, how is she described? At least she’s got a name, even if she’s just roadkill.
Thanks Jack. You summed it up perfectly
He should be a guy who appears to have it all but has this stupid obsession with a girl.
Brad Pitt would have played him well I think.
The problem isn’t Gatsby’s race, it’s the poor to nonexistent reading skills of Vereen and his students. Vereen said he struggled with Gatsby- not a difficult book- in his junior year of college. The reason Gatsby is taught in HS is that a reasonably bright 15 year old should be able to read it, along with other fairly easy classics like 1984 and Grapes of Wrath. This is affirmative action summarized perfectly: a below-average intellect like Vereen who struggles to read literature is given a degree so he can teach illiterates.
Best example: Leonid Brezhnev. Combine that with a magnificent pair of eyebrows and it might indicate masculinity. Horsey? I don’t know.
"He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE and the date September 12, 1906. And underneath:
Rise from bed 6.00 A.M.
Dumbell exercise and wall scaling 6.15–6.30 “
Study electricity, etc. 7.15–8.15 “
Work 8.30–4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports 4.30–5.00 “
Practice elocution, poise and how to obtain it 5.00–6.00 “
Study needed inventions 7.00–9.00 “
General Resolves
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents"
I wonder what the kids in Alonzo Vereen's class made of that.
The Valley of Ashes they drive through was gone while Fitzgerald was still alive. The Grand Central Parkway was built through there and Flushing Meadow Park, where they held the '39 and '64 World's Fair.
And Meyer Wolfsheim's office door says Swastika Trading Company.Replies: @Jack D
In the days of coal fired boilers, a huge quantity of coal ashes was created and dumped. Another name for a garbage can is an “ash can”. Garbage is actually food waste, which was collected separately and fed to the pig farms located in the Meadowlands, across the river in NJ.
Getting rid of the Valley of Ashes was all driven by Robert Moses. He arranged it so that it cost the City of New York nothing.
Philadelphia had its own Valley of Ashes but no Robert Moses so when it was time to get rid of Philly’s ash dump, private interests built row houses on top of it instead. My wife’s mother grew up in once such house and it was fine when she lived there (although they lost it to foreclosure in the Depression). Fast forward to the 1970s – the area is now a ghetto. The ashes began to settle unevenly and the houses lean precariously in various directions. Windows and doors won’t open. But the worst part is that sometimes the gas main breaks and the house explodes. At the time, these houses were only worth maybe $20,000 so somehow Philly got some Federal money to buy out the whole neighborhood. They condemned all the houses and leveled the ground. They left the streets but blocked them off and no longer maintain them so grass is starting to grow thru the cracks in the pavement. Where the houses were is just grass but wild trees are starting to spring up. After they leveled it they never really did anything with the land because there’s no Robert Moses. They really didn’t need any more park land in the area – there was always a park directly across Roosevelt Blvd – Hunting Park. AFAIK, it’s just going to sit like this forever.
My mother had the Metropolitan Opera (announcer, Milton Cross) on every weekend (Saturday or Sunday, I forget). She wasn't raised to listen to opera. Her mother, father, siblings, and husband evinced no interest in it. Allan Bloom wrote about the status of classical music among college students in the 1950s; the phenomenon passed over the heads of her contemporaries in her family and evidently wasn't a thing when her parents were in school ca. WWI. An affection for concert and chamber music I can understand. An affection for people bellowing in foreign languages (or in incomprehensible English) is baffling.Replies: @shale boi, @BB753, @Jack D
A lot of Italian-Americans love opera (it’s not a foreign language to them). A lot of Ellis Island generation Jews liked classical music, not excluding opera. I think in the Jews’ case, they picked it up from the Russian Empire, whence they came. Russians are great classical music lovers.
When Jews started arriving in Israel from the USSR, it seemed like every other Jew got off the plane with a violin case. The USSR had a vast number of state subsidized musical groups. Israel has one professional symphony and that was already fully staffed. So they had to tell the folks with the violins that they were going to have to learn to do something new in Israel because they weren’t going to get jobs as musicians.
==
Jews liked classical music, not excluding opera.
==
I think if you did a census of the named patrons of Great Performances and of Mystery!, you'd notice the surnames are different.
One interesting thing, to me at least, is that of the above group, only Cather and Wolfe, off the top of my head, had college degrees. It's striking how many great writers-from Twain to Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and on and on, never had the "benefit" of a college degree.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Kylie, @MEH 0910
“…Cather and O’Hara are much, much better than ‘rather good’.”
Miss Cather’s prose is one of the glories of Western Civilization. I wonder if her Welsh ancestry was in part responsible for the lovely musicality in her words.
“All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn.”
We had a good English department at my high school, or so I thought. Of American authors, we read Melville, Faulkner, H. James, Thomas Wolfe, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald. Willa Cather was not even mentioned. I have no idea why.
When Jews started arriving in Israel from the USSR, it seemed like every other Jew got off the plane with a violin case. The USSR had a vast number of state subsidized musical groups. Israel has one professional symphony and that was already fully staffed. So they had to tell the folks with the violins that they were going to have to learn to do something new in Israel because they weren't going to get jobs as musicians.Replies: @Art Deco
As it happens, the two Italians most proximate to my mother had no interest in opera.
==
Jews liked classical music, not excluding opera.
==
I think if you did a census of the named patrons of Great Performances and of Mystery!, you’d notice the surnames are different.
In the realm of iSteve, it depends.
Per one set of Steve’s articles and Sailer’s Law of Mass Shootings, no. There are no mass shootings at any of Gatsby’s parties.
Per another set of Steve’s articles lately, yes. Gatsby is in a car that causes a fatal traffic accident and it speeds away from the scene.
Depends on which iSteve posts you read. If you read them all, he’s half. 😏Replies: @Knut Wicksell
Daisy was driving the car that causes a fatal traffic accident.
Blacks in the USA have a long history of claiming white history and literature by announcing that they’ve found a drop or two of their blood in famous whites, both historical and fictional. They are almost never called on it because few people want to publicly fight with them and point out the racial inferiority complex that inspires their “cultural appropriation” of achievements that are NOT theirs.
Examples:
https://newsone.com/1047835/presidents-day-five-black-presidents/
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/was-queen-charlotte-black-heres-what-we-know/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/07/beethoven-was-black-why-the-radical-idea-still-has-power-today
https://www.essence.com/news/genealogy-records-may-indicate-that-j-edgar-hoover-was-african-american/
I thought didn’t the "one drop rule" used to be… a BAD thing? An old south qualifier for racists to keep black people down?
And now Halle is saying… it’s a GOOD thing, she supports, since… it supports her making money?
I just wrote it off as Halle Berry being a complete brainless hot mess, but I guess it’s a thing now.Replies: @Lloyd1927
This has no reality outside your imagination.
“You might try the piano works by Ferdinand Ries (Beethoven’s buddy) and John Field.”
John Field’s nocturnes are enchanting. I think John O’Conor is the best interpreter of them.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2YJXgmLXTew&feature=shares
One interesting thing, to me at least, is that of the above group, only Cather and Wolfe, off the top of my head, had college degrees. It's striking how many great writers-from Twain to Melville to Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and on and on, never had the "benefit" of a college degree.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Bardon Kaldian, @Kylie, @MEH 0910
*Gatsby being thought of as Jewish, while obviously not supported by the story, or Fitzgerald's roots, works on a "put yourself in the character's shoes" level; and may account, along with the beauty of the writing, for some of its appeal.Replies: @Anonymous
So I guess redrawing a title character to trick young, closed-off ethnically willful minds to read a great American novel, ensures that we should expect “The Great Gonzalez.”
Certainly, there must have been at least one multi-millionaire Mexican living in a castle in the mansion belt of Long Island in 1925, longing to marry above his class.
As the Atlantic would tell you, it has to be likely, because Fitzgerald’s character Nick didn’t explicitly say there wasn’t.
Examples:
https://newsone.com/1047835/presidents-day-five-black-presidents/
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/was-queen-charlotte-black-heres-what-we-know/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/07/beethoven-was-black-why-the-radical-idea-still-has-power-today
https://www.essence.com/news/genealogy-records-may-indicate-that-j-edgar-hoover-was-african-american/Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
Back in the day, I recall Halle Berry stating, “I believe in the one drop rule” while arguing her case for some stupid acting choice some interviewer was pestering her about.
I thought didn’t the “one drop rule” used to be… a BAD thing? An old south qualifier for racists to keep black people down?
And now Halle is saying… it’s a GOOD thing, she supports, since… it supports her making money?
I just wrote it off as Halle Berry being a complete brainless hot mess, but I guess it’s a thing now.
Speaking of The Great Gatsby, which started the lovely Carey Mulligan as Daisy, I recently saw “An Education” the 2009 movie that put her on the map. She played a 16-year old schoolgirl who is deflowered by a much older, married Jewish man. Hollywood then as now couldn’t get enough of that sort of thing, as the movie was critically acclaimed, and Mulligan was nominated for a Oscar.
Getting rid of the Valley of Ashes was all driven by Robert Moses. He arranged it so that it cost the City of New York nothing.
Philadelphia had its own Valley of Ashes but no Robert Moses so when it was time to get rid of Philly's ash dump, private interests built row houses on top of it instead. My wife's mother grew up in once such house and it was fine when she lived there (although they lost it to foreclosure in the Depression). Fast forward to the 1970s - the area is now a ghetto. The ashes began to settle unevenly and the houses lean precariously in various directions. Windows and doors won't open. But the worst part is that sometimes the gas main breaks and the house explodes. At the time, these houses were only worth maybe $20,000 so somehow Philly got some Federal money to buy out the whole neighborhood. They condemned all the houses and leveled the ground. They left the streets but blocked them off and no longer maintain them so grass is starting to grow thru the cracks in the pavement. Where the houses were is just grass but wild trees are starting to spring up. After they leveled it they never really did anything with the land because there's no Robert Moses. They really didn't need any more park land in the area - there was always a park directly across Roosevelt Blvd - Hunting Park. AFAIK, it's just going to sit like this forever.Replies: @hhsiii
Yes, Moses arranged it, and it took a lot of cajoling. The City paid 2 million plus for the land and the rest was various others.
Is that Lola Heatherton? Or Dusty Rodes?
https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1333551181973557249
https://twitter.com/Crapplefratz/status/1333551579539140610
https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/678982034136559617
https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/678989162071003137
But, except Cather, most were middle-brow by contemporary standards. The middle-brow means Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair....
Among supreme novelists, only Dostoevsky had a degree (military engineering), while Tolstoy and Proust were college dropouts. As far as great modern prose authors go: Kafka (law degree) and Musil (mechanical enginering). Most of the rest (Conrad, Mann, Faulkner, Broch, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, ..) either didn't care or decided it wasn't worth the trouble.Replies: @AceDeuce
Well, it sure sounded like it.
I’ve never liked the whole “middlebrow” thing. It’s one thing to place writers, artists, etc. above others on merit, but the whole class thing is not for me, even if sometimes technically true.
And I’d put John O’Hara–and Somerset Maugham above that level. I think they are unduly penalized for having been commercially successful.
Camus had a degree, FWIW. I’d put him in the top echelon.
That’s Lola.
I guess becoming American is somehow more challenging.Replies: @Verymuchalive, @Ian M.
Most people in America would also call these Second Generation. But they’re wrong:
THE CORRECT MEANING OF “FIRST GENERATION,” “SECOND GENERATION”
I thought didn’t the "one drop rule" used to be… a BAD thing? An old south qualifier for racists to keep black people down?
And now Halle is saying… it’s a GOOD thing, she supports, since… it supports her making money?
I just wrote it off as Halle Berry being a complete brainless hot mess, but I guess it’s a thing now.Replies: @Lloyd1927
Actually, it’s been a “black” thing since the 19th century. As blacks and black-identified mulatto elites grow in power, they glorify the “one drop” nonsense and attempt to pressure and intimidate non-blacks into identifying with the “black race.” Why? (1) an inflated “racial resume” proclaiming “black” achievements that aren’t black; (2) off-the-record interracial marriage with whites and other non-blacks that they can pretend are “really” black. Method: Proclaim whites to be morally “inferior” and blacks morally “superior.” Then manipulate white guilt to pressure vulnerable whites (especially women) to reject “evil” whiteness in favor of holy “blackness.”
Whenever I hear about the Great Gatsby, I always remember this:
https://greatgatsbygame.com/
It hilariously combines text from the book with NES tropes, including Gatsby’s mansion collapsing in the distance if you win the game.
I've never thought of (or seen) valence to mean spin up/down. Valence is a chemical characteristic, where the number (in unfilled shell) is of concern, not the type.
Spin up/down almost never comes into chemical considerations (for a half filled orbital, it's irrelevant in terms of reactions). It's just has to do with magnetism as well as the "only two allowed in an orbital".
"The etymology of the words valence (plural valences) and valency (plural valencies) traces back to 1425, meaning "extract, preparation", from Latin valentia "strength, capacity", from the earlier valor "worth, value", and the chemical meaning referring to the "combining power of an element" is recorded from 1884, from German Valenz.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(chemistry)Replies: @Gandydancer, @Gandydancer
I come at this from a physics, not chemistry, background. It is in fact easy to locate references to the spin of valence electrons. Again, it’s instances of “its valence” that are hard to find, perhaps because of the mentioned inadequacy in the operation of search engines. My observation remains that it is unlikely that my memory of the use of “valence” in exactly the way in which Steve used it, as direction, is idiosyncratic, even if YOU have never seen. or remember, it being used that way.
My suggestion that this might have to do with spin is, however, original to me. If you can come up with a better suggestion I will be happy to hear it.
Right. How does Gatsby's 'Blackness' help them understand what "feigned" means?Replies: @Gandydancer
Where is is suggested that it does? Or ought to? But if assigning the the text inspired the question, and if Vereen answered it, then assigning the text helped the student understand what “feigned” means, didn’t it?
THE CORRECT MEANING OF “FIRST GENERATION,” “SECOND GENERATION”Replies: @Gandydancer
What Auster describes as ~”poetic truth” seems to me possibly mere truth: Just because someone is born in a country doesn’t mean that they necessarily become a member of the “legacy” native population. The assumption of birthright citizenship may be far more destructive to the interests of that native population than the giving of some apparent credence to the appellation “a country of immigrants”.
I've never thought of (or seen) valence to mean spin up/down. Valence is a chemical characteristic, where the number (in unfilled shell) is of concern, not the type.
Spin up/down almost never comes into chemical considerations (for a half filled orbital, it's irrelevant in terms of reactions). It's just has to do with magnetism as well as the "only two allowed in an orbital".
"The etymology of the words valence (plural valences) and valency (plural valencies) traces back to 1425, meaning "extract, preparation", from Latin valentia "strength, capacity", from the earlier valor "worth, value", and the chemical meaning referring to the "combining power of an element" is recorded from 1884, from German Valenz.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(chemistry)Replies: @Gandydancer, @Gandydancer
Following your Wikipedia link, and then the disambiguation, I find “positive valence” and “negative valence” occur in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(psychology) . I wouldn’t assume that the paragraph on Origin is necessarily the last word on this.
I've never liked the whole "middlebrow" thing. It's one thing to place writers, artists, etc. above others on merit, but the whole class thing is not for me, even if sometimes technically true.
And I'd put John O'Hara--and Somerset Maugham above that level. I think they are unduly penalized for having been commercially successful.
Camus had a degree, FWIW. I'd put him in the top echelon.Replies: @Bardon Kaldian
There are good writers, great writers and supreme writers, and in-betweens. It would be a waste of time to try to argue about that- there is no exact method- but this is a sort of consensus of the informed cultural-literary community for narrative prose authors from the 1850s until WW2.
Supreme authors: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust
Great authors: Flaubert, James, Conrad, Mann, Musil, Broch, Lawrence, Faulkner, …
Between good and great: Hawthorne, Willa Cather, Zola, …
Good authors: George Moore, Fitzgerald, V. Woolf, Hemingway, Thomas Hardy, Camus, ..
Joyce is somewhere above great, but not supreme; Kafka is hard to categorize because he is atypical & it is absurd to call a minimalist nihilist “great”. Similar to Swift, he is very influential & significant, but an essentially nihilist author cannot be called “great”. A writer who makes your “soul” shrink is not “great”. Hesse is between good and great. Hamsun is close to great; the same goes for Melville with his atypical opus.
Significant traditional authors are in the category of their own (Steinbeck, Martin du Gard, Sholokhov, Arnold Bennett, ..) because their achievement is not in sync with developed modern literary sensibility.
With all due respect, have you spent much time around young people and/or non-whites?
It is shocking to an older person like me how ignorant they are. Even worse, by pandering to them as this moron does, any sense of curiosity they have about others unlike themselves or the past (i.e. pre-2000) is deadened or stunted. Making students feel good about themselves as the unformed and uninformed little ignoramuses that they are is the focus of education today. That and hating whites of accomplishment.Replies: @Known Fact, @Woodsie
Just before the plague hit I did about three years with a young, diverse crew as my steady gig, and yes, they don’t read books, but neither do many of my white cohorts. That said, you make the point:
and we are in agreement. So… make ’em read and stop pandering to the worst expectations.
Exactly the way it should be taught to those students.
I was replying to Woodsie's comment:
"...The Great Gatsby is short, anybody short of a moron should be able to plow through it.”
I strongly disagree with this statement. I took to it like a duck to water but I was already reading H. James so sophisticated prose was not a problem for me. Woodsie would do well to recall the first two sentences of this lovely novel:
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'"Replies: @Nicholas Stix, @Woodsie
I stand by my comment, emphasis on the word “plow”. The student should be able to finish the book even without comprehension of everything in it because it is short. Discussion in class with the teacher will illuminate the parts that the student doesn’t “get” or comprehend. If students are only reading what they comprehend instantly, they will never go beyond See Spot Run. I didn’t enjoy or understand Chaucer, but the teacher explained it to us.
Examples:
https://newsone.com/1047835/presidents-day-five-black-presidents/
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/was-queen-charlotte-black-heres-what-we-know/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/07/beethoven-was-black-why-the-radical-idea-still-has-power-today
https://www.essence.com/news/genealogy-records-may-indicate-that-j-edgar-hoover-was-african-american/Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco
Blacks in the USA have a long history of claiming white history and literature by announcing that they’ve found a drop or two of their blood in famous whites, both historical and fictional. They are almost never called on it because few people want to publicly fight with them and point out the racial inferiority complex that inspires their “cultural appropriation” of achievements that are NOT theirs.
This has no reality outside your imagination.
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
The Americans at work in Norway operated under the same dynamic, and dutifully began working on the new problem—how to remotely detonate the C4 explosives on Biden’s order. It was a much more demanding assignment than those in Washington understood. There was no way for the team in Norway to know when the President might push the button. Would it be in a few weeks, in many months or in half a year or longer?
The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)
On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.Replies: @Art Deco, @Muggles, @Corpse Tooth, @Joe Stalin, @Yngvar
Norway didn’t have any operational P8 Poseidon’s at that time. Still don’t.
So that’s one error, or lie.
Is your comment directed to Lloyd127, or the the Blacks?
So that's one error, or lie.Replies: @Wokechoke
No British scuba divers involved though. Which is a surprise.
It’s from An Education the same guy who wrote Fever Pitch. Nick Hornby. Nick is Antisemetic.
Daisy is Genevra King. A very very rich very very white Chicago heiress.
Miss Cather's prose is one of the glories of Western Civilization. I wonder if her Welsh ancestry was in part responsible for the lovely musicality in her words.
"All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn."
We had a good English department at my high school, or so I thought. Of American authors, we read Melville, Faulkner, H. James, Thomas Wolfe, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald. Willa Cather was not even mentioned. I have no idea why.Replies: @AceDeuce
Cather’s short story “Neighbour Rosicky” (she used the British spelling of neighbor in the title, for whatever reason) is probably my favorite short story of all time. Highly recommended. It was published in her 1932 collection “Obscure Destinies”, two years after it originally appeared in a magazine, but it can be easily found online, as well.
Here, for example:
https://jerrywbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Neighbour-Rosicky-Cather-Willa.pdf
The ability to reason is man’s most distinctive and important trait. Other things are significant, but this is the one that separates humans from animals. If a person or group views themselves as less competent at reasoning, why would they possibly be insecure? I wonder.
Thanks. What an eye-opener. I had no idea, though I am not any kind of scholar on Fitzgerald. I’ve driven by a place where he lived in St. Paul, and that’s about it.
My cats reason quite well.
Oh yes, that takes me back. I remember having to look up “gaff”. That word was new to me.
There are many significant, or at least rather good American authors who are either almost forgotten or have a much lower literary standing because of many complex factors: Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Erskine Caldwell, John O'Hara, Thomas Wolfe, ... even Dos Passos.
The exception is Jack London.
London is one of those authors whom aesthetes despise, but who- against all odds- stubbornly refuse to go away. When he wrote about “serious” topics, London was a failure (Burning Daylight, Martin Eden,…); on the other hand, when he wrote about animals, primitives, mentally impaired, (white) underclass & quasi-fascist-Darwinian fantasies (most stories & short novels) -he was an unavoidable writer, one that will be read long after most canonized authors are just a footnote.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @AceDeuce, @Ian Smith
John O’Hara is going through a modest revival right now. Critics think more highly of his short stories than his novels.
In 1997 Seymour Hersch wrote “The Dark Side of Camelot.” It might be the most negative book on John F. Kennedy ever written. At least by a “name” author.
It got a lot of publicity, even an ABC special tie-in called “Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years.”
Hersch used some dubious sources on the supposed JFK-Marilyn Monroe affair which got him some criticism.
It got a lot of publicity, even an ABC special tie-in called "Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years."
Hersch used some dubious sources on the supposed JFK-Marilyn Monroe affair which got him some criticism.Replies: @Art Deco
The book was cut to pieces by Garry Wills in the Washington Post. One of Hersh’s research assistants also grassed him up publicly, maintaining that Hersh had knowingly made extensive use of a source he knew from the beginning had fabricated his background. (The source was a paralegal who was the son of a lawyer in the Kennedy circle).