The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas: 9780374525583: Amazon.com: Books

[Paul Mackin]

On 10/3/2012 11:14 AM, Markekohut wrote:
> I actually read that bio before I read any of his fiction....high 
> school age, I don 't really know why except I musta got a stripped 
> cover paperback cheap ( before I knew they were illegal ...stores sold 
> them where I grew up)
>
> there is some good stuff in bruccoli's book about how Scribner's 
> decided to send The Great Gatsby free to WW2 soldiers which became the 
> seeds of its postwar rise in readership--becoming a major part of the 
> canon.

You'd probably seen the 1949 Great Gatsby movie.  Alan Ladd and Betty 
Field as Jay and Daisy.  Other books were  virtually forgotten until 
after Far Side appeared.  The phrase Great Gatsby seemed to have already 
been the the American consciousness.  There was an earlier silent--might 
explain it.

The coming book by Sarah Churchill also has a great title.  Careless 
People.  As Nick says, Daisy and Tom are very careless people.  The 20s 
were a very careless time.  Jay's death may be emblematic of the coming 
crash.  Fitzgerald's prescience. Churchill's view.

P
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Oct 3, 2012, at 10:55 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net 
> <mailto:mackin.paul at verizon.net>> wrote:
>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/may/25/american-dream-great-gatsby
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby_%282013_film%29
>>
>>
>>
>> ography of Fitzgerald in the early 50s revived interest in the 
>> books.  A review in Time magazine hooked me. They became available in 
>> cheap paperbacks.  Except for Gatsby they'd probably been out of 
>> print.it <http://print.it>
>>
>> The bio was entitled The Far Side of Paradise, a take off on the 
>> first of the  novels, This Side of Paradise.
>>
>> P
>>
>> On 10/2/2012 8:54 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>> And, there in the opening chapter of TN we have, what in The Pat 
>>> Hobby Stories will make for a play within a play within a plot 
>>> within a plot in a Hollywood movie lot, and the kind of plotting 
>>> Pynchon will play with, as writers morph into film makers and the 
>>> lots they live in as made for movies, and tv, as the lives or 
>>> characters they play or take their roles from. So Rosemary on the 
>>> beach, not working, is called into a plot. What plot?
>>>
>>> On Tuesday, October 2, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>     Suppose we apply that book, How to Read Novels Like a Professor
>>>     to TN, the first passage, the opening, so argues our prof, is
>>>     worth a second, close reading. And, of course, TN confirms this.
>>>     The girl, the description of the girl, so tender, so just on the
>>>     cusp of perfect beauty, not too young, just old enough, next to
>>>     the fading flower, her mother, now she springs, she is a dancer,
>>>     out of the hotel that merges with the sea under the high sun,
>>>     the sun that clips close her shadow, it is too bright to see.
>>>     What has Fitzgerald done?
>>>
>>>     And, as earlier we've peeped in on an early bather, when the sun
>>>     was only rising, we now visit the beach, a boy of 12 flashes by,
>>>     rosemary now, in the water, the hairy man drinks...sharks, dark
>>>     skin and light skin sit apart....
>>>
>>>     And here, the poetry, not quite as tender as that Fitzgerald
>>>     uses to describe the girl in the water; how it tenderly pulled
>>>     her down out of the heat.
>>>
>>>     Yes, TN passes the opening lines test with tender colors!
>>>
>>>     On Tuesday, October 2, 2012, wrote:
>>>
>>>         I like Fitzgerald- but then I'm partial to Keats. Two scenes
>>>         stand out
>>>         for me from the otherwise wonderfully masochistic
>>>         deconstruction of Dick Diver in Tender is the Night:
>>>
>>>         the scene in Switzerland  from the balustrade, looking out
>>>         into the
>>>         visto- It might have been something like this:
>>>
>>>         http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Lauterbrunnental_train.jpg
>>>
>>>         where the space is suddenly transected by filamentous
>>>         tendrils of
>>>         lightening. It reminded me of GR, when Slothrop is on the
>>>         lamb, either
>>>         in Geneva or Zurich, I can't remember which, and the
>>>         narrator remarks
>>>         on how this Swiss venue is a magnet for genius: Joyce,
>>>         Einstein... He
>>>         could have listed others- Shelly, Jung, & etc.,  just
>>>         something about
>>>         the place.
>>>
>>>         And such a wonderful contrast- the cerebral north with the
>>>         warm, mellow
>>>         Riviera, and the dinner tables floating into the night.
>>>
>>>         Then there is another- quirky scene- where Dick is taken to
>>>         a "parlor"
>>>         of sorts, and clearly the people there are smoking hemp, and
>>>         suddenly
>>>         everything is very futuristic, not at all weighed down by The
>>>         Depression, despite  the impending horror of WW II. Very Mod.
>>>
>>>         It's not hard to see (and feel) the Fitzgeraldean influence
>>>         on Pynchon,
>>>         and that without even mentioning the intro to "Been Down So
>>>         Long...."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>         -----Original Message-----
>>>         From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
>>>         To: malignd <malignd at aol.com>; pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>>         Sent: Mon, Oct 1, 2012 1:21 pm...
>>>         Subject: Re: The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas:
>>>         9780374525583: Amazon.com <http://Amazon.com>: Books
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>         > Gatsby is a marvel, but it's one small book.
>>>
>>>         While Gatsby always appeared symbolically overloaded to me -
>>>         "the green
>>>         light at the end of the pier" and everything -, I consider
>>>         Tender is
>>>         the Night to be one of the best American novels ever.
>>>         Fitzgerald's
>>>         skills do better unfold on the long distance. The rhythm, the
>>>         experience of time. Here the author treats some of his basic
>>>         themes
>>>         like love, addiction and psychosis more convincingly than
>>>         anywhere else
>>>         in his work. And the book really breathes the Mediterranean
>>>         aroma.
>>>         Although I read the novel carefully several times, I still
>>>         don't know
>>>         how Fitzgerald manages to evoke that positive feeling in the
>>>         reader
>>>         (the tenderness the title mentions) until the very end despite
>>>         everything - the second water-ski scene is simply
>>>         heartbreaking -
>>>         falling into pieces. It's really magic (I know no other word
>>>         here).
>>>         Together with Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick it's my
>>>         favorite American
>>>         novel.
>>>
>>>         What is it that you don't like about it?
>>>
>>>         On 01.10.2012 00:15, malignd at aol.com wrote:
>>>
>>>         It's Faulkner for the 20th century; for the first half, in a
>>>         rout.
>>>          Hemingway wrote great stories (so did Faulkner) but only
>>>         one great
>>>         novel, and that was his first.  Try to read Across the River and
>>>         Through the Trees without laughing.  Gatsby is a marvel, but
>>>         it's one
>>>         small book. Kerouac?  Please ....
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>

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