extemporally

So because the Internet told me to, today after getting back from dinner I made myself a cup of tea and settled down to watching Game of Thrones. Man, that is (and the italics are entirely well-deserved) such a good show. I am enjoying everything about it - the cinematography of it, the script, the characters, the somehow not-at-all gratuitous violence & incest (not that I have a thing against gratuitous violence or incest, you guys! but this was just so good here), and. Granted, I haven't read the original novels, and don't know much about medieval history (to the extent that I watched it going, "So this is about the Saxons, right?"), but that doesn't matter so much, I don't think. Man! that is such a wonderful show. Watching TV in real time's always so weird, because usually by the time I get around to watching shows, I usually have a bunch of episodes to be catching up on. But the next episode's Sunday, and I'm all caught up on Community, and Doctor Who hasn't started yet (I am so excited, you guys. So excited. This term is going to be so great for TV.) Con: WHY DO I HAVE TO WAIT ANOTHER SEVEN DAYS FOR A NEW EPISODE OH MY GOD :( :( :( Pro: at least this means I get to watch new episodes along with the rest of the Internet, which is always fun! I don't know if I'm going to be viewing Game of Thrones through a fannish lens per se, because when a piece of media is really really great I feel really shallow and superficial having, "These people are hot and they should bone," as my sole/main response to it. On the other hand: these people are hot and they should totally bone. Is there going to be a fandom for this/is there already one?

That aside. I have also got a book review!

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

Mm, the problem with short story collections is that they all just sort of blur into each other and you pretty much get the formulae Fitzgerald relies on after a while - they're all about flappers and Society and how awful the Twenties are for living a meaningful life, given the materialism/commercialism/etc of the decade. So many of these stories are about materialistic girls who drag their lovers down to their level, you guys. That said, FITZGERALD. He writes beautifully - I think his short stories' reputation for being... not as great as his novels (even though I've only read The Great Gatsby) is pretty well-deserved, still, but so many of these stories are so charming when (or even when they're not) they're being depressing as fuck.

One of his stock characters in pretty much all his short stories is the spoiled, materialistic rich flapper who rejects the Deserving Young Man (The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: the Nice Guy Analysis TM!):

"Rags," he began. "Rags -"

"John M. Chestnut?" she inquired, inspecting him with great interest.

"Of course!" he exclaimed angrily. "Are you trying to pretend you don't know me? That you didn't write me to meet you here?"

She laughed. A chauffeur appeared at her elbow, and she twisted out of her coat, revealing a dress made in great splashy checks of sea-blue and gray. She shook herself like a wet bird.

"I've got a lot of junk to declare," she remarked absently.

"So have I," said Chestnut anxiously, "and the first thing I want to declare is that I've loved you, Rags, every minute since you've been away."

She stopped him with a groan.

"Please! There were some young Americans on the boat. The subject has become a bore."

"My God!" cried Chestnut, "do you mean to say that you class my love with what was said to you on a boat?"

I mean, yes, you can tell that Fitzgerald was also being a little deliberately ridiculous, instead of all Taking It Very Seriously and Imparting The Last Word In Gender Relations, but it was prominent enough of a theme in his stories that it made me :/

Although some bits I can take seriously enough, and oh:

She hesitated, her eyes were far off. "You don't - thrill me, Jake. I don't know - there have been some men that sort of thrilled me when they touched me, dancing or anything. I know it's crazy, but -"

"Does Raffino thrill you?"

"Sort of, but not so much."

"And I don't at all?"

"I just feel comfortable and happy with you."

He should have urged her that that was best, but he couldn't say it, whether it was an old truth or an old lie.

And also, I really dislike the division between Dangerous & Exciting Women and Good Women Who Are Also Kind Of Boring (it is not a dichotomy, goddamnit!), but I couldn't help being charmed by this exchange anyway:

"Dear Bet, nothing could ever interfere with us."

"You're a bad boy, Teddy," she said. "I wouldn't ever be so bad to you."

"How do you know, Bet? How do you know what you'd do?"

He smoothed down her plain brown hair, knowing for the thousandth time that she had none of the world's dark magic for him, and that he couldn't live without her for six consecutive hours. "Dear Bet," he whispered. "Dear Bet."

I think it helps that Bet was basically awesome, though. Although I hated this passage from the same story, which encapsulates the basic point that the story was trying to make:

"I don't agree with your husband," said Mrs. Ruthven. "English girls hunt with their men and play politics with them on absolutely equal terms, and it tends to draw them together.

"It does not," insisted Teddy. "That's why English society is the most disorganised in the world. Betty and I are happy because we haven't any qualities in common at all.

Because we all know that equality of the sexes is the No. 1 ruiner of what could otherwise be perfectly happy relationships, you guys!

So I've been lambasting Fitzgerald for his sexist (yes, it's an easy disclaimer to make, that sexism was pretty much a product of the times, and you could make an argument of this for any decade up to... well, any decade basically, but the sexism still grated on me), but I did enjoy this bit of astute social consciousness from The Diamond As Big As The Ritz:

There was no alternative - he must market his mountain in secret. He sent South for his younger brother and put him in charge of his colored following - darkies who had never realised that slavery was abolished. To make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that he had composed, which announced that General Forrest had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated the North in one pitched battle.

To put this in context, for those who haven't read it, it's all about a mega-rich guy who owns a diamond as big as the Ritz and keeps it a secret. I liked this bit because of Fitzgerald's skilled recognition of the fact that (I suppose you could say this is a recurring theme in his works, but!) incredible wealth is usually built on incredible exploitation, and the enslavement of colored people was a natural extension of that. I like that he had the detail of imagination to put that in - in fact, as someone who's studied Economics in an extremely limited sort of way, it was pretty fun to read this story and recognise the bits Fitzgerald devoted to an analysis of monopoly and market forces. :D

Also, BASIL DUKE LEE AND JOSEPHINE PERRY MIGHT JUST BE MY FAVOURITE RECURRING CHARACTERS EVER. You guys. Also, on casual googling: "The title characters were intended by Fitzgerald to meet each other but this never happened in his literature." It's so tragic that this never happened. I have this thing for stories about adolescence, and the way teenage inarticulacy is treated, and the awkward made beautiful, and the way teenagerhood is this... particularly fraught period of time in which so many things go on, but these things happen to kids who haven't quite developed the vocabulary to describe what's going on yet, and. ANYWAY I JUST HAVE THIS THING. And Fitzgerald just does it so perfectly:

"Yes." He turned his head away.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," and then, "Nobody really cares, do they?"

"About what?"

"About anything."

"Everybody cares about different things. I care about you, for instance."

Instinctively he ducked away from a hand extended caressingly toward him: "Oh, don't. I don't mean like that."

"You're just overwrought, dear."

"I am not overwrought. I just feel sort of sad."

"You shouldn't feel sad. Why, people told me after the play -"

"Oh, that's all over. Don't talk about that - don't ever talk to me about that any more."

And also just in general the way he describes things (although this was a trait I enjoyed more in The Great Gatsby):

"Jesus," he said to himself. "Drunk for ten years."

He felt suddenly of the texture of his own coat and then he reached out and pressed his thumb against the granite of the building by his side.

All in all, this was a pretty good collection. I thought it was pretty comprehensive - it had the more famous stories, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and though I could have done with more Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry (I can always do with more Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry) stories, the spread was pretty good? The editing, though, I could have done without the unnecessarily didactic high school-level headnotes at the beginning of each story, and the preface just annoyed me:

Literature is what lasts. Literary history demonstrates that critical reception is an inaccurate forecast of permanent merit. The writings that turn out to be literature are frequently ignored or savaged at the time of their initial publication. In the Twenties the assertion that Fitzgerald's short stories would become classics would have excited incredulity and risibility. The process by which literary works ultimately achieve their proper stature is inexplicable. One lesson provided by F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories is that everything a genius writes partakes of his genius. One hopes there is a second lesson: genius always compells its just recognition.

Well... this was unnecessarily gushy. I like Fitzgerald! But that "The process by which literary works ultimately achieve their proper stature is inexplicable" is pretty facile to me, I guess, since I am incapable of looking at anything without being like, "WHAT ABOUT PREVAILING GENDER/RACE/CLASS/ETC STRUCTURES" and also the references to "genius" just, grate on me. I read something Jonathan Bate wrote, a couple of years ago, about how "genius" is pretty much a male construct, and I guess that's true given that a lot of women rise to the top via a narrative of extremely hard work/battling the odds (especially so historically), given the fact that women had to work harder than men to succeed in the first place, which... pretty much goes against the requirements of genius, the idea of succeeding without having to work for it, because - whoever - is just that great. Which I think is an obvious point to make, but I am pretty much just writing All My Thoughts TM here, and yes! It just annoyed me, not in the sense of "I don't agree with this editor's social outlook" (although: I don't agree with his social outlook) but also in the sense of all his commentary tending towards the simplistic and superficial. So, uh, read Fitzgerald's short stories, but don't read this edition if there's a better one available?

Anyway. This has been a nice evening - TV and tea and booktalk. Now I'm just sitting at my laptop, playing this Okay song on loop (which expressed how I felt all the time, and sometimes still feel, in high school, it's uncanny). In a few minutes I will probably go shower, and wash my dishes. I like this evening.

Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby