While Baz Lurhmann’s film (barely) remains The Cool Thing About Which to Talk and my desire to step on the toes of literature scholars everywhere has yet to wane, here were my thoughts on The Great Gatsby.

I should note by way of prelude that I am not, in fact, a literature scholar or, for that matter, much a cinephile.  My experience with The Great Gatsby, the novel, is not unlike that of millions of other Americans, i.e., I read it in high school.  I did recently re-read it just last month, so my memory of it is rather fresh.  And, in the interest of full disclosure, I don’t dislike Baz Lurhmann’s movies on principle – I would be lying through my teeth if I didn’t say that I have all of Moulin Rouge! more or less memorised – and had an all-consuming teenybopper crush on Leonardo DiCaprio during the immediate post-Titanic years.

Having said all of that, I went into Gatsby, the film, prepared for it to be an unmitigated disaster.  Lurhmann has never been the most subtle of directors, preferring hallucinogenic swathes of colour to austere charcoal sketches, and, for all of the Jazz Age excesses it contains, Gatsby is ultimately a “small story,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out a year ago.  The obvious fear was that this adaptation would be all parties, all booze, all overwhelming anachronistic soundtrack.  I ended up being surprised by the movie’s faithfulness to the book at a literal level. Well, the first bit of it really was all parties, I suppose, but, compared to the frenetic luridness of Moulin Rouge!, they seemed practically staid by comparison.  I was especially impressed by the acting, even taking into account my implacable aversion to Toby Maguire.  Carey Mulligan filled Daisy with all the inconsequential charm and painfully internalised femininity I could have wished for in her portrayal, Joel Edgerton was suitably dickish as Tom, and, as for Leo –

There’s a moment in the film, when Nick is at one of Gatsby’s parties for the first time and still trying to meet his elusive host and neighbour.  Fireworks are going off over the water, strains of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue fill the theatre, and this happens.

Perhaps it is because I once stood on the streets of New York City and, in a fit of pique, listened to that exact piece of music as my gaze was drawn irresistibly upwards by the tops of skyscrapers, but this was just such a moment that I found myself almost reduced to tears.  (In sum, Leo was sublime.)

Yet, for all that Fitzgerald’s story was indeed grafted onto the silver screen with minimal tweaks, that his characters were exactly as I imagined them to be, I found myself at a certain point utterly bored with the film, which is to say that Lurhmann managed to take a 50,000-word novel and transform into a tiresome melodrama.  He is hardly the first director to be guilty of this particular sin, but I do believe it represents a substantial problem for the film-as-faithful-and-useful-adaptation because Gatsby’s candidacy for the Great American Novel does rest, in part, on its very brevity (that this also happens to make it a suitable work for high school curricula everywhere is, of course, a happy coincidence).  The events of the book take place in the span of a single summer, so Nick’s personal acquaintance with Gatsby cannot have lasted for more than a handful of months.  By any reasonable criterion, they were nothing more than strangers brought together for a short time by coincidence and mutual need.  So heightened are Nick’s memories of this period, though, that he has assigned to them a gravity disproportionate to their actual substance and, in doing so, he betrays his youth and its feverish insistence that all the manifold joys and tragedies life can be telescoped into a single parenthesis.

In this respect, then, Lurhmann’s adaptation is an accurate one.  Certainly, watching it made me see just how tawdry the plot of Gatsby is: Boy is ashamed of his lesser social origins and tries to old sport them into oblivion!  Boy falls for girl but girl marries other, much more unpleasant boy!  Boy tries to win her back, now that he throws hella awesome parties and wears nice shirts!  Girl flirts with idea of leaving husband but is really just a tease!  People die!  And so forth.  It’s nothing that your standard tabloid writer couldn’t fabricate in the face of a looming deadline.  The fact that I had to consciously realise this, however, says something quite extraordinary about Fitzgerald’s writing.  I liken the prose in Gatsby to a Mozart symphony (and, coming from me, that’s pretty much the highest compliment I can pay to just about anything): to paraphrase that apocryphal quote, there are just as many words as there should be in Gatsby, and, ah, what magic author works with them!  Everything is in its right place, and even the most throwaway of phrases carry within them an unstudied charm that lingers for a second before drifting by, a faint tremor of perfume in its wake.  It strikes me as almost obscene that Fitzgerald should have wasted such aesthetic beauty on so silly a tale.

Then again, perhaps that was the point all along.  In my AP English class, six years ago, my classmates and I discussed – as all American high school students must – what The Great Gatsby had to say about the American dream.  This was naturally linked to debates about the symbolism of the green light.  I apparently got rather tetchy when someone insisted that it stood for money though cannot remember what I myself believed it represented.  Revisiting the discussion now, six years later, I find myself thinking more and more about the obvious discordance between substance and style in Gatsby.  The American dream is often a very vulgar thing, reduced to little more than the belief that worth is inextricably tied to material wealth, that we should all be free to pursue and accumulate that wealth, even if it is entirely divorced from what we might otherwise “deserve.”  But who can bear to reduce such an aspirational idea to crude fundamentals?  There must be some overarching romance to it as well; thus, all the usual trappings about bootstraps and self-made men.  Gatsby requires both vulgarity and metaphysics to be great.

I get the sense that Lurhmann understood this too.  What other explanation could there be for Nick Carraway’s intrusive voice-over narration and, most eye roll-inducing of all, those lines of text, lifted directly from the novel, that appeared on the screen itself?  I can respect that he was trying to bring to the story a certain measure of transcendence, but I am afraid all he managed to do was repeatedly hit the audience over their heads with a proverbial frying pan while shouting, “DO YOU GET IT, HUH?  DO YOU GET IT NOW?”

My friend Chase was in town two weekends ago – because I am awesome at writing about things punctually, don’t you know – for a show at the 9:30 Club.  As I sit down to type this up, it occurs to me that this was the first non-classical music concert I attended since seeing Rachael Yamagata five months ago and my first time back at this particular venue since Bloc Party and Stars were both in DC within a week of each other.  There obviously isn’t any need for me to add my voice to the existing chorus proclaiming the 9:30 Club to be the shit, but, seriously, it is.  I am going to miss it quite a lot after I downsize to Ithaca, NY and, though I’ve spent a number of evenings at the 9:30 Club since relocating to Columbia Heights, I do get the feeling that I ought to have taken greater advantage of its proximity.

But that’s enough wistfulness for now, I think.  Chase had made the journey to DC for the junior act in this double filling, Surfer Blood, who have been the subject of his fanboy rhapsodies for some time now.  I had the chance to superficially familiarise myself with their album Astro Coast prior to this occasion, and, as for Foals, I had never heard of them at all.  As such, I don’t think I’ve ever gone into a concert as ignorant of the bands as I did that night.

What I saw and heard of Surfer Blood completely substantiated Chase’s fanboying.  As befits a band hailing from Florida, their music is undeniably sunny, and the overall effect is marvellously “chill,” as the kids say.  At the same time, their songs are built on surprisingly clean music lines.  I know this because they were discernable even in live performance, where all of that amplification tends to distort more than anything else.

♪ Surfer Blood – Floating Vibes

There’s an immediately endearing quirkiness to many of their tracks as well.  The opening riff of “Take It Easy,” for instance, features two strong beats followed two weak ones, giving an otherwise conventional 4/4 metre a just-unsteady-enough, off-kilter feel.  But, as frontman John Paul Pitts launches into a breezy chorus, the rhythm suddenly relaxes, the bass strumming away merrily in the background.  Since this concert, I’ve been listening to Astro Coast more regularly; one cannot ask for a better album for the summertime.

♪ Surfer Blood – Take It Easy

As for the second act of the night, Foals – prior to their set, a fellow concertgoer told me that they’re originally from Oxford.  An English indie rock band, I thought, plus my favourite city in the world. What is there possibly to not like here?  A whole lot, it turns out.  For starters, it would be hard to conceive of a band that sounded less like Surfer Blood.  There was no sun, only unremitting heaviness, and, whatever sounds were being produced on the stage, they were less music than an indistinguishable thicket of noise.  The most lamentable fact of all is that, while many of their songs began with interesting musical ideas – listening now to the studio version of “Spanish Sahara,” I can begin to understand why the band received the accolades it has – they all seemed to end up in some hellish, cacophonous merry-go-round.

Maybe I just don’t have any taste because the vast majority of people squeezed into the 9:30 Club were going absolutely mad – like, I have never seen an audience whipped into such a frenzy before.  The frontman certainly played his part in inciting this reaction.  He crowdsurfed while still playing his guitar, ran onto the floor of the venue on a number of occasions, opened bottles of water and threw its contents over the crowd.  Most memorably of all, he decided at one point to clamber atop the speakers on the stage, swing himself up to the second-floor balcony, run to the opposite side of the venue, climb over the railing, and dangle there for a while before letting himself drop back down.  I do not want to know how many mind-altering substances were tumbling around his bloodstream at the time – but we are talking about musicians, after all.

I imagine this is going to be the first in a series of haphazard posts in which I explore the “something like sentimentality” mentioned at the end of my last entry.  This one, which I must confess has been a work in progress for almost two months, looks at one particular aspect of the Young Professional Life™.  I have about ten weeks left at my current job, and, as it as been my first post-graduation job – indeed, the first properly salaried job I’ve ever held – I feel justified in considering it a milestone.  Or perhaps it is merely a reflection of my need to impose some kind of defined, logical chronology to the otherwise hazy nature of existence released from the ivory tower and into the wild.

In any event, in the time-honoured tradition of premature retrospection and contemplation, I have begun to think about what I will have learned from two years in the Real World, in what ways the Real World has been better or worse than Georgetown, and other such navel-gazing questions.  Certainly, one aspect in which it has been notably different from Georgetown is the very existence of a distinction between work and life.  This has produced two curious and mutually reinforcing results: (1) I have never in my life been this social, defined here as the act of being in the company of at least one other human being, and (2) I have never in my life been this comfortable with being social.  No doubt this will elicit no more than a “so what?” from most.  As someone with a rather pronounced introverted streak (INTJs represent!), though, I can’t help but think that these are among the larger achievements I will take from this particular chapter of my life.

Part of it must be attributable to the change in environment.  Living on my own, my default setting is solitude, whereas college life was nothing if not hyper-social, revolving as it did around clubs, parties, and, at least in the earlier years, group visits to the dining hall.  It was an aspect of Georgetown, I realised both in media res and ex post, that never sat too well with me.  This was the story I developed to explain why that was: an far too consuming relationship during my first year crowded out precious opportunities to make friends and meet new people during that most malleable period, studying abroad put most of the friendships I developed as a sophomore on hiatus and were never subsequently revived, and I spent most of senior year simultaneously attempting to figure out where precisely I “belonged” and being angry at myself for having those insecurities in the first place.  Add to this my usual stew of loner habits, and it is no wonder that, more often than I liked, I felt like a fish out of water while it seemed like the rest of the school fluttered through the ocean without a care in the world.

There is a good deal of truth to the story, but it is both too pessimistic, because I don’t feel nearly as much angst about it now, and too pessimistic, for the plain reason that nothing is ever as straightforward as it is in our rationalisations (and, besides, I wouldn’t trade my Georgetown experience for anything else).  A fact that has been drawn into much sharper relief, now that I have to actively seek out company rather than company surrounding me at all times, is that I feel far more at ease in more intimate settings involving myself and, at most, two or three people.  This holds true even if the opposite party is a complete stranger.  Though I do loathe the word and concept of networking – whatever happened to simply making friends? – I, as an individual with a Real Job, have had to dabble in it it during the last two years, proffering whatever limited wisdom I’ve accrued while looking for it in others.  I still cannot work a room – another turn of phrase I cannot stand – to save my life, but, if I find myself holding a conversation with somebody away from the main proceedings, I can largely get through the proceedings without the sinking suspicion that I’m making an utter ass of myself.  More generally, I have learned not to take these forms of social interaction too personally.  What can you really learn about someone after a bit of small talk, really, and it would be far too much egoism on my part if I thought that people bothered to pay much attention to me anyway.

Yet I do not mean for this to sound too jaded, because I have learned another, more important thing about being social, which is that it is never too late to make friends, in a manner of speaking.  My especially close associations notwithstanding, relationships are exceptionally fluid quantities, far more dependent on circumstance than most would care to admit.  Some individuals who were once dear to me are now no more than text and the occasional photo on my Facebook newsfeed.  I struggled with this phenomenon of disappearance quite a bit during my last year at Georgetown, and there has naturally been more of this slow fade since graduation.  The process can just as easily run in reverse, though.  Here in DC, I am fortunate to not only be living around so many Georgetown alumni (and current students, obviously) but also happen to be placed in a major urban convergence point for out-of-town visitors.  An errant email, a workday lunch – sometimes, all it takes is a happenstance encounter to turn a bare acquaintance into a sudden confidant, if only for that short and discrete amount of time.

I am no longer so young or naive that I believe it will amount to anything more than that, though I am not saying that it can’t.  We make all the right noises about doing this again or staying in touch, but such good intentions are rarely ever realised.  But, maybe, that is okay.  If you were once important enough to me so that I saw in you a flicker of kindred heart, then it will be so once again, when our lives miraculously align and we may resume the story, casting our eyes back on all that has transpired since.  Until then, I will be content to have shared that moment with you.

Better late than never with this sort of thing, right?

This Month in Blogging

It was another light posting month for me, I’m afraid; one of these days, I’ll get this blogging regularly act figured out. In any event, April found me writing about my second trip to Chicago, the manifold pleasures of filing one's taxes, a visit to the Hillwood Museum & Gardens here in DC, and the state of my to-read list.

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One thing I did not write about, if only because I would have mostly just repeated the material already covered here, was that I formally accepted my grad school offer, which came with a revised-at-the-last-minute financial aid offer that will now guarantee funding for all five years of the degree.  The news arrived in my inbox as I was about to meet up with an old friend for coffee in Georgetown.  If this was any indication of the immense relief engendered by this development, said friend could immediately tell after we exchanged preliminary greetings & hugs that something big had just happened.

That interminable amount of time spent agonising over The Future seems now but a distant memory, best neglected in the retelling of the last year of my life.  With this uncertainty now expunged, it feels like the run-up to graduating from Georgetown all over again.  I had various obligations to fulfil then, of course – exams, finishing touches on my thesis, et al – but they were merely digressions from the gravitational pull of commencement.  There is no one around this time to place a silly tasselled cap on my head and hand me a Latinate diploma, but this end is no less monumental or irrevocable.  The days tick onwards, metronomic, and something like sentimentality filters into my thoughts.

Hi, my name is Malin, and I’m apparently really, really addicted to collecting books.  Not that you didn’t already know this about me.

When I first moved into this humble flat of mine, this is what my equally humble bookshelf looked like:

You’ll have to pardon me while I LOL at its sorry state (and maybe also LOL at the fact that I once had a David Brooks book – it belongs to my mother, I swear) because this is what the same bookshelf looks like now:

Not pictured are the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which have been consigned to sitting on top of my radiator lest they take up half a shelf on their own; my two Beatrix Potter books, which, being beautifully illustrated volumes admittedly designed for children, only fit on the bottom shelf (where the DVDs you can see in the first photo now reside); and 1688: The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus, which I am currently reading.

Also missing are any number of books that once lived here with me but are now back in Philly.  In many ways, I feel like I’ve established my own book economy: I buy new (and used) books here, drop them off at home and “trade” them for ones in my existing library that I either haven’t read yet or haven’t picked up in while, and bring those back to DC.  Though it pains me that the total sum of my books live in separate places, I must say that I quite like the small library that I’ve managed to build here.  There is a good deal of fiction – mostly contemporary – and a fair amount of history – mostly European and/or classical music-related – as well as the occasional intimation of my Anglophilia.  I’m going to say that my library is actually less nerdy now than it was at the beginning because, well, being in possession of an econometrics text means that you’ve automatically won the race to geekiness, right?

I have long maintained that it is impossible for me to walk into a bookstore and not leave with anything.  Last Sunday, for instance, I introduced the boyfriend to the slice of heaven that is Kramerbooks last Sunday and, without quite realising what had happened, found myself walking out with Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations tucked under my arm (my credit card statement assures me that I did, in fact, paid for it).  The problem is that I end up accumulating books faster than I can consume them, and, with grad school lurking around the corner, I know full well that the energy I can spare on anything that isn’t problem sets or problem sets will soon plummet.  I am therefore going to spend the next three months reading as much as I can while putting an end to further book purchases – or trying to, anyway.

To facilitate this, I’ve written down a reading list that is now tacked on the wall above my bookshelf.  I think it’s overly ambitious for me to think that I can read all twenty of these in the amount of time allotted, but I’m already 20 percent of the way there!

1. Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations
2. J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy
3. David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
5. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution
6. Magnus Flyte, City of Dark Magic
7. Harvey Sachs, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824
8. Jane Hyun, Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians (again, permit me to note that my mother gave me this book)
9. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
10. James Vreeland, The International Monetary Fund
11. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
12. Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story
13. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
14. Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
15. Robert Graves, I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius
16. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
17. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales
18. William Vollman, Europe Central
19. Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
20. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride