2013s
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“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”, as I’m sure you know. ↩︎
We Are The Clash: The Last Stand of a Band That Mattered by Mark Andersen & Ralph Heibutzki — Kickstarter
This one’s in memory of Banksie.
Sunsetting.
Onions & garlic sizzling.
Can you tell what it is?
The trees are looking lush now.
London in May. Looks like the church is on fire.
Waiting to give blood. Is this a healthy option?
The Third-Person Sanctimonious
With The Great Gatsby fever in full swing (to mix a metaphor), I've been thinking about the book a lot today. I tweeted yesterday that I had never really got what all the fuss was about.
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.
Tulips outside my office in Paddington, yesterday.
Stoke Newington buggy jam. This is how the pubs are these days.
Hooray! @Savagesband album and EP.
This should be the Savages album.
Well-fired pain au chocolat. Still, they charged me less than usual.
The long hard winter made everything dormant, but now the bluebells are out in our garden.
Tidying.
What in all the bells is “Banana Ketchup”???
Spring springing in Hackney. This seems to happen every year. Eventually. #spring #hackney
The Scented City
We spent a few days in Cologne over Easter. I took lots of photographs. Here are two that have had some tweaking in Lightroom. I'm especially pleased with the second one. The effect is almost like an impressionist painting to my eye.
Cologne by night; a funfair across the Rhine.
It didn’t actually look like this. The things you can do with software.
Understanding a Misunderstanding
Spotify has always behaved weirdly regarding how you queue tracks up. Today I think I realised why.
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!