people daisy buchanan owes shit to:
- myrtle (namely owning up to what she did)
people daisy does not owe shit to:
- tom buchanan
- jay gatsby
- any other character in the novel
- the readers of the book/viewers of the movie
- you
emmerish: #i feel like teaching this one when im an educator is going to be FUN.
I am going to LOVE living vicariously through you when you teach this.
(via emmerish)
emmerish asked: hello I actually read The Great Gatsby for the very first time yesterday and so I have only surface feelings but I looked up the general interpretation and jeez yeah I was like 1. why would you trust nick carraway's words he's kind of a dick and a half 2. why are you all going on about how daisy was 'unworthy' of his dream like what. is this legitimate literary analysis.
Well, now you and I are bosom companions for life and we shall fight the good fight forever.
I honestly don’t know why anyone would read The Great Gatsby and walk away with the impression that a narrator who used the word “great” unironically in his title was going to be shooting for accuracy. It’s right there in the title: Nick’s obsessed with spectacle. And why would you believe a word out of his mouth, knowing that? All the modernist lit crit tells you how elusive he is, how remarkable, how transcendent….and I just want to shake everyone. Because that’s what he told you he was. Why would we take his word on it?
And Nick is the one who thinks Daisy is “unworthy” of Gatsby’s dream. That’s it. He’s perplexed by her mystique because he’s an asshole and he doesn’t realize that Daisy has a vein of magic in her that runs just as deeply as Gatsby’s. Nick just hates her and so he misses out—he actually misses the point of their love story because he’s so obsessed with the idea that no one but him can/should/will-be-allowed-to love Gatsby as he can/should be loved.
The book itself—without the bullshit lit crit—is about a man looking into a great love story, the kind that shakes you to your core and makes you reorganize right and wrong along a new axis, and misreading it. That’s brilliant. I love that.
But I hate how often people quote Nick like he’s some great thinker and just blindly agree that Daisy is the worst because Nick said she was….what was the point of having such a great book when no one is hearing a word it says?
We were born different from you, it’s in our blood. Nothing that you do or dream up can ever change that.
Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby”.
Things you should know before you listen to anything I have to say about Gatsby: I am a Victorianist (and, thus, the person who will argue with modernists when they go on and on about how their writers liberated society from Victorian mores), I hate Nick Carraway, and I will disagree with everything any man says about Daisy ever.
But I loved this film.
(via fivepips)
So, in case you don’t know: Shaw added a clarification of the ending he “intended” for Eliza/Freddy/Higgins/Pickering after he became aware of the fact that most people read Eliza walking out on Higgins to marry Freddy as a victory on her part. He specified that Freddy would not, in fact, be able to support her financially because he turned out to be useless at life (but still very, very pretty) and so Eliza would end up moving them back in with Pickering and Higgins. His tone in this addendum is basically: “HA. SO THERE, ELIZA.”
But what I inevitably picture is: Eliza coming downstairs all sweaty and wearing only her kimono—because she’s just banged Freddy into the mattress and he subsequently needed a recovery nap—and continuing the argument she started earlier in the day about the prescriptive versus descriptive grammatical rules. Neither Pickering nor Higgins connect the kimono and the sweatiness with sex—they’ve both been known to laze about the house in a dressing gown for no particular reason—but Mrs. Pearce makes a couple of pointed comments in Eliza’s general direction that Eliza returns with biting satirical force. Freddy comes down for a nosh a couple hours later and Pickering politely averts his eyes when Eliza pulls him down to where she’s lounging on the chaise by his belt loops and Higgins doesn’t notice because he’s chasing down a piece of information he needs to finally defeat Eliza’s point (spoiler: she already knows the point he’s going to make and has a rejoinder simmering in the back of her mind).
So. That’s how I imagine the future in the Higgins/Doolittle & Doolittle/Pickering household.
Literary Birthday - 28 April
Happy Birthday, Terry Pratchett, born 28 April 1948
12 Quotes On Writing
- Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
- You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‘The A-Team’ - if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.
- Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
- Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
- I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.
- You can’t die with an unfinished book.
- I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
- No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
- In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
- Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
- I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
- They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
And one more on life: I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
Pratchett is an English author of fantasy novels who was awarded the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award in 2010. He is best known for the Discworld series. Pratchett has sold more than 70 million books in 37 languages. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and was knighted for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours. Pratchett announced that he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2007.
by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write
(via cosmictuesdays)
Ford! There’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.Arthur Dent; Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, (via fluffywhitechicken)
(via rob-anybody)
The truth is that even collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proven by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second hand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than stories and those rows of shelves that end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards (via ekimsal)
(via rob-anybody)
I love the way this feminist commentary comes up—it’s not a revelation to anyone but the children. The woman herself is tired—exhausted by having to explain this again—and this last history lesson is what she can work up the energy for. It’s a gift, really, and just another moment when a woman has to make the effort or it goes unsaid again.
What I find interesting about Mrs Lintott in that play is that she is largely marginalised by the narrative. You could completely remove her from it and you wouldn’t have to change a single beat of the plot. Her role is basically the one she ironically describes in her soliloquy: sounding board for the people with character arcs. Given that Bennett is awesome at writing women in other contexts, I love the idea that he did this on purpose: marginalised her in the play, but flagged it, to help us to feel the marginalization of women in history.
Reblogging for a better articulation.
[x]
Stephen fry. Stop it.
You are clearly being too smart. You are not of this Earth.
why keeping track of usage matters
(via swingsetindecember)
about a reverse little mermaid, in which the prince’s sister has always dreamed of life under the sea, and then they are in a shipwreck, and as she hangs onto a piece of driftwood, she sees her brother rescued from drowning by a mermaid. Everybody thinks she’s mad, later, after she’s been rescued. But her brother did turn up alive and unharmed on the beach, and she knows what she saw: a girl, beautiful as the dawn, with a fish’s tail, keeping her brother safe above the waves. She grows sick with longing.
So the princess goes to visit the witch who lives in the woods, and she tells her that she can give her a mermaid’s tail and a mermaid’s breath—but she will always be human in her heart and in her soul, unless she can convince one of the merfolk to fall in love with her. For humans live short lives, and their immortal souls vanish to distant realms after death, while the merfolk live for hundreds of years, and when they die they remain in the sea that is their home.
The princess agrees, and the witch tells her she will make a potion that she must swallow when she wants to transform. But then she reminds her that she must be paid—and laughs at her when she offers gold. She tells her that she will have her voice, and slowly the princess agrees, so she cuts off her tongue and throws it into a boiling pot, adds a knot of snakes and a drop of her own black blood, and gives her the resulting potion to drink.
At midnight, she takes the potion out to the jetty, and as soon as it passes her lips, her legs are bound together, becoming a mermaid’s tail. She falls—kinda ungracefully—into the ocean, and it feels unbelievably natural to dive down, and she’s shocked by how well she can see, even in the deep water, even at midnight. And then she just sort of carelessly, cluelessly swims on, and she almost gets eaten by a shark, and then she’s trailing blood in the water so she almost gets eaten by another shark, and another, and she can’t find the merfolk city she’s always been taught was under the water, and it’s late and she’s exhausted and is running from all sorts of terrifying creatures who she’d never really thought about existing before, and she only escapes the sharks by dodging past a whirlpool, and then another whirlpool, close to the ocean bottom. She passes through a series of foaming whirlpools like a labyrinth, and then she sees a white house on the ocean bottom, in the middle of a strange forest of polypi. The polypi are half animal, half plant, reaching out and grasping at anything they can touch. The princess swims carefully through it, and she sees that there are things caught in the polypi’s arms: anchors, planks, wooden chests, the white skeletons of drowned men. A little mermaid. She makes it to the house, and recoils when she realizes that it’s also made of bleached human bones.
haunting and perfect
