You’re not a REAL Gatsby fan unless you’ve read the book. Unless you’ve read every Fitzgerald book. Unless you’ve read their early drafts, mailed to you by Fitzgerald himself. Unless you first read Gatsby when Scott handed it to you in a Parisian bar in 1925, apologising for the cover when he saw you disapproved. Unless you embarked on an intense friendship with him that culminated in rumours that you two were having a clandestine homosexual affair. Unless you once took him to the Louvre so you could prove to him that his penis wasn’t any smaller than those on the statues there. Unless Scott turned up, drunk and uninvited, at your house so many times that you had to move more than once. Unless you continued to exchange increasingly infrequent and terse letters with him for the rest of his life, then missed his funeral because you were in Cuba. Unless you called his literary talent “as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings” and won a Nobel prize and wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. That’s right, you poser, if you’re not Ernest Hemingway you can fuck straight off right now. We’re on to you.
I think the main difference between a hero and a heroine in traditional narratives is that a hero’s strength is defined by how much he can win, while a heroine’s is defined by how much loss she can endure.
I think that’s kinda fucked up.
Let’s take a look at a few of my favs so far;
Sassy Waterstones worker, I love you,
And well this is true:
Sometimes I do worry about their psyche though:
They make up cool new words;
They’re a sassy little shit.
And best of all, the Holden debacle;
And one more for good luck:
scenesfrom-an-italian-restaurant:
I just realized that “lead” rhymes with “read”, but “lead” also rhymes with “read”.
you piece of shit.
You just broke the English language.
I finally got access to my Twitter archive. By request, here are my #noirfiction tweets from quite a ways back:
She was a nutty broad, with hair that was bonkers, and legs that just didn’t make any sense at all #noirfiction
She had a pair of legs that wouldn’t quit, no matter how politely you asked #noirfiction
She was the kind of dame where you couldn’t wait for her to leave so you could write about her on your blog #noirfiction
It was a dark and stormy…. DAY #noirfictiontwists
Her legs only went halfway up and then there was just an inescapable shrieking void, like all women #noirfictiontwists #noirbydavesim
She had legs that went all the way up, and so did the rest of her. “Get back down here,” I said. She looked at me and said “No” #noirfiction
She had a nice set of legs, and then a second, less-nice set she’d found in her foyer. That’s why she came to me. #noirfiction
Her legs were like a metaphor, and the imagery they brought to mind was extreme evocative #noirfiction
She had a body like a poem, and a face like a limerick #noirfiction
She was a real classy broad: top hat, monocle, tuxedo, twirled mustache… oh wait #noirfiction
Normally a dame like this would put me on every edge I had, but nectarines were in season and I had an entire bag. #noirfiction
She had a torso and then two weird lower limbs sticking out of the bottom of it. What were those things #noirfiction
I never cared for conversation, so I let my gun do the talking. Problem was, he was shy too #noirfiction
It’s a dirty job in a dirty city, but I’m not the cleanest guy so that’s fine by me. The name’s Paul Blart… Mall Cop. #noirfiction #blart
He had a face like a stack of pancakes and whenever he talked he sprayed butter and syrup everywhere #noirfiction
She stormed into my office like a hurricane, swinging her arms around and knocking over all my things. “Hey,” I said. #noirfiction
She had a face like this :) and a pair of legs to match < #noirfiction
She had a nice face. It was pretty. She was in my office. I was a detective! It was my first day of being a detective. #noirfiction
She had a pair of legs that ended in rollerskates and the kind of body that could stay upright #noirfiction
She had a face like a zen koan: thought-provoking but impossible to figure out #noirfiction
A TRUE MASTER OF THE TWITTER REALM
This…is the greatest story ever told
they also went to the louvre together to, like, check out the dicks on statues for comparison just to calm scott the fuck down.
(i can just picture them, scott being his usual neurotic self, and ernest just like, ‘give me strength. are you fucking kidding me? i nearly died in the war. i have a fucking medal of bravery. and we’re looking at cocks together. gatsby can only take you so far, my friend. you better write another goddamn masterpiece soon.’)
Actually, the photographs are spaced ten years apart, not sixteen.
1912 to 1922.
The young, homeless (but no less dapper) wanderer shown in the first survived the sinking of the Titanic and swam to the shores of West Egg. There he built a life and a large, empty house, in an effort to win the heart of the wealthy, upper class woman he’d fallen in love with a decade earlier and had been separated from against his will.
He shed his earlier identity, and changed his name to reflect his new station. Jack was now known as Jay Gatzby, the eccentric millionaire who threw parties every night in the hopes that one day his love would show up and spin with him as they had long ago in the dance hall of the lower decks.
#and he still ends up dead floating in the water
Go to your room.
No, no.
We need to give someone a medal for that.
The thing about the Generic Shitty Tolkien Imitator Protagonist is that rather than write Frodo on the one hand and Aragorn on the other, the GSTI took their least interesting characteristics and combined them into one character, like so:
FRODO
- From the back corner of the fantasy world.
- Has come into possession of a Plot Focus
- Kind of has the plot happen to him out of nowhere
- Chooses to pursue a dangerous quest
- Good-hearted but ultimately frail
- Ultimately falters and fails and comes home with such severe PTSD that he can’t reintegrate into any kind of mortal life
ARAGORN
- Descendant of blah blah blah
- Educated by the wisest people in the world about everything he could possibly need to rule and then some other stuff
- Has been everywhere and seen everything
- Joins the quest both to help and in pursuit of being good enough for the woman he loves
- Spends half the time unsure he’s making the right choices
- Ultimately gains kingdom, wife, long and happy life
Notice how this combines into literally the most boring character arc ever written, how it leaves out the part where they work for their competencies such as they are, how it writes out all volition on the part of the characters, and how it neglects all the real uncertainty of both character and plot.
Also note how the GSTIP is always like eighteen, when Frodo is FIFTY {admittedly like thirty in hobbit aging and development} and Aragorn is EIGHTY {also like thirty in terms of his ultimate lifespan, but eighty in terms of how long he’s had to learn to do things}.
