![]() ![]() Maybe you could argue Oscar Wilde doesn’t fit into modern categories of human sexuality, but I think any such argument is a Sisyphean effort, considering he is a prototypical sassy, gay male (interestingly enough, he’s not listed as a gay writer on Wikipedia… he’s listed as bisexual). Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and then Truman Capote. But there were definitely gay authors operating before, during, and after Fitzgerald. Or as a friend of mine once said, “Labels are for cans.”įoucault may have be correct about the history of human sexuality, I don’t know to have an educated opinion. In the past century this has changed because of the coercive power of institutions blah blah blah… people used to be able to engage in sexual acts without it being a constitutive component of their identity. To sum up his ideas of sexuality pertinent to The Great Gatsby, the notion of a sexual identity is an invention of our time, i.e. (Side note: compare that obituary with those of Derrida and Said to see examples of the New York Time’s rightward tack.) So for those of you not in the know, here’s his obituary. I’ve been lucky enough to be familiar with Foucault through repeated indoctrination by militant, lesbian (but not militantly lesbian) professors. You can interpret this passage as him not being sexually involved with the guy, but you can’t argue that him having sex with the guy is an invalid interpretation. ![]() There is a period of about four hours between Nick leaving the party and him waiting for the train. Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning ‘Tribune’ and waiting for the four o’clock train. ‘Beauty and the beast… Loneliness… Old Grocery Horse… Brook’n Bridge’ …I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. ![]() Good for Scribner, not so good for Fitzgerald.Īt the end of chapter 2, the most puzzling paragraphs in the book: Now most high schoolers in the US read it at some point. I’m baffled a book this good, written by a popular writer, had such a lukewarm reception. It’s lean, it’s poetic, and it’s witty, and those virtues all went over my head when I read it in high school. (Not mentioning they were farmers who had to GTFO in 1847.)īut The Great Gatsby is my true literary love. If you’re a cute girl, I’ll tell you how I’ve always wanted to visit Ireland and reconnect with my heritage. If you’re wearing a scarf, I’ll tell you it’s Paradise Regained. If you’re the kind of person who says their favorite book is Ulysses, and you only really learned to appreciate it during your summer spent in Dublin, you’re getting the Paradise Lost treatment. So I tell people my favorite book is either As I Lay Dying (if they don’t seem too snobby), Pamela: A Novel (because no one has fucking read it), or Paradise Lost, if I don’t like them. I hate telling people The Great Gatsby is my favorite book, because it looks like your literary tastes ossified in high school. Today we’re here to talk about The Great Gatsby, which of those five books is the only one about which I really have anything better to say than a wordier thumbs up or down. Okay, the old blog is defunct, let’s get some greatest hits going while I work up new content: ![]()
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