Want to see the _Great Gatsby_ movie, yet despite re-reading the book last summer, I fail to see what people think is so good about it. #fb

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) May 19, 2013

I find it hard to explain what I find problematic about it. I wouldn’t say it’s bad, just that it’s not as good as nearly everyone says it is. I see it as largely being about rich people having parties, and a couple of tragic deaths. And while I don’t think that you have to like — or even identify with — all the characters for fiction to work, in this case none of them has any redeeming feature, as far as I can tell.

There’s a recent article in the Guardian by Sarah Churchwell about how wonderful it all is. It’s a well-written piece, but I find it just as hard to get to grips with, to understand the point of, as the novel itself.

So I did a search for “Gatsby overrated”, and found this piece by Kathryn Schulz which absolutely nails it.

One point she makes perhaps helps to explain why I find the characters so objectionable:

Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder.

And:

On the page, Fitzgerald’s moralizing instinct comes off as cold; the chill that settles around The Great Gatsby is an absence of empathy.

My favourite part is her parenthetical assertion that:

In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.

Though I had to look up Edward St. Aubyn.

But her main argument concerns the shallowness of the characterisations, the emphasis on symbolism over emotion:

Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”

What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory.

For me, though, as I think on it some more, the problem with it all (and in contradiction to the last quote above) is the thinness of the plot. The prose is famously poetic in places, and that’s fine; but the real weakness is that there’s almost no story there.

And that famous last line¹? Poetic though it is, when you parse it, it means absolutely nothing at all.

1. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”, as I’m sure you know

They think “Queue this track up” means “Cue this track up”. They’re thinking like DJs, but they are confused by homophones.

I’m thinking like a programmer, I admit: queues are first-in-first-out; but more importantly, like an ordinary person: you join a queue at the end, not just behind the person at the front.

See this discussion on their suggestions board which explains the weirdness, and is where (as I was adding a comment) I suddenly understood their thinking. Also definition 2 of “cue” is the appropriate one.

Edited: Queues are of course first-in-first-out, not last-in-first-out, as I wrote. That would be a stack, in programming terms. Whoops!

This is the sky at sunset in Hackney just the other day. Kind of remarkable, don’t you think? Click on the the picture for a bigger version on Flickr.

Here’s one that I made using the title of a story of mine. It remains unpublished so far, but it was the short story that was the seed for the novel I finished in November.

First, some punters punting on the Cam:

Then the famous King’s College Chapel.  More of a cathedral, really:

This wee guy looks decidedly unhappy:

There’s a pair of war memorials in a side chapel.  A famous name at position 2 of the WWI one:

There’s plenty of stained glass, of course, but in another side chapel we see this interesting creature:

Then on to Trinity College Chapel, where Isaac Newton stands in marble:

Here’s a closeup of Newton.  I can’t work out what he’s holding:

And above him there’s this rather attractive chandelier and dramatic ceiling:

The mildly annoying thing is that I haven’t posted here yet this year, and now I seem to have started the year with two reposts. I could, of course, delete them, but then the above paragraph would be wrong.

Anyway, this is the true first post of the year, even if it was triggered by an aberration.

Hello. Happy New Year.

But somehow I could never totally see the point. Flickr I understood: it’s a site to store your photos. If you don’t have, or don’t want the bother of managing, your own web space, you can put your pictures there and show them to other people. And it’s got the social thing going on, too, with the ability to follow people and all that. It feels a bit bolted on, but it does no harm. And when I discover a site like 500px, as I did a few weeks ago, well, that’s obvious: a place to store your pictures and to find other people’s. Not for nothing is their tag line, “The best photos on the web” (or it was: today it says, “The world’s best photo sharing”, which is similar, but different). I just wish they’d learn how to keep me signed in.

But Instagram didn’t really grab me. And today they nearly ejected me.

Oddly for a net-based thing, I heard about the new terms of service on the radio. The story was that the terms were going to allow them to sell their users’ pictures for advertising, without paying, asking, or even telling the users.

I tweeted:

Did I just hear on the radio that Instagram is committing suicide?

— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) December 18, 2012

It turns out to be not as bad as we thought, at least according to this post from Instagram. Though I only found that because I clicked the “I’d like to delete my account” link. On the confirmation page there was a link to that post. It turns out there’s an Instagram blog, and both the terms of service change and this update were posted there. But who knew about that?

So for now I haven’t deleted my account, and we’ll see how it goes.

I found out about the change from the radio, and the correction by requesting a deletion; my inbox remains unsullied. How about a wee email, Instagram? You’ve got my address.

Edited to add: According to this post, the new terms are actually better than the old ones.