great advantage

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 82:

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. In my younger and less vulnerable years, I was invariably sober among all manner of intoxication. ‘You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.‘ Obviously if you have a problem maintaining discretion, you shouldn’t drink, but the other way of saying this is that sobriety is for people with something to hide.

Later I had older and terribly vulnerable years, where I wanted to both find and show how hard drinking could get. If I had anything to hide I surely failed to do so. And sometimes I would see the person who was once me, drinking nothing but water or clutching the same glass of poison all night as if it were a talisman against chaos. It is a curious exercise, not drinking in the company of people who drink. Drunk people are tiresome, loud and self-absorbed, why spend the time with them? There is a sad secret to the sober companion in the drunken crowd – sometimes the only way to be yourself in the company of people is to be in the company of people who cannot see you.

so much as a shiver

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 81:

Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.

Daisy has quite a night before her wedding. She sucks down a bottle of sauterne, tosses the groom’s wedding present in the trash – a string of pearls worth over four million dollars* – and by early evening she’s swanning about her room wailing ‘Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say “Daisy’s change’ her mine!”‘ The bridesmaids and matrons douse her in a cold bath, where she clutches a final forlorn letter until it comes to pieces like snow. Half an hour later ‘the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over.‘

I wonder how she thinks of that night, the next day or the next year or five or twenty years down the line. If she recalls it in old age, on her deathbed, who does she think was making that scene? Does she think it was her, but not in her right mind? Does she think it wasn’t her, but a dramatic release of emotion as a final performance on closing night? Does she think it was her true self, revealed through alcohol, only to be buried forever by the necessity of sobriety? Did she ever love Jay Gatsby, and if she did, was this the night she drove a stake in the heart of that love without so much as a shiver?

Daisy is a mystery. She may be a coward for never having the bravery to suffer the consequences of her passions, or a vampire sucking the burning blood of hopeless suitors, or an involuntary canvas to dreams bigger than her meager borders … or just another confused young woman, trying on persona as the seasons turn and her beauty fades.

*the pearls are valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 1919, which is a little over $4.5 million in 2012 dollars.

every young girl

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 80:

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.

This is a clever work of sentence construction – if Fitzgerald had tried to describe what Gatsby looked like as he gazed at Daisy, the description might have worked for some readers but fallen flat for others. So instead the author describes the look as a fulfillment of universal fantasy. This breaks the hackneyed writing rule of “show, don’t tell” – but that rule was always more of a Hemingway thing than Fitzgerald.

Romance is better described by its effect than its actions, because romance is ultimately so personal that the actions that seem romantic to one person can seem ridiculous to everyone else. What is the way that every young girl wants to be looked at? Try to describe any one way, and a thousand young girls will say, “Eeeew.” But it’s close enough to the truth to say that every young girl imagines that there is a special way that no one has ever looked at her before. She herself couldn’t put it into words, other than the words for how that look should make her feel. Jordan remembers the incident not for the way that Gatsby looked at Daisy, but for the effect upon Daisy.

shoes from England

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 79:

I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground.

A minor detail can conceal a wealth of wisdom when the subject is happiness. Jordan is just explaining why, as a young girl, she liked to walk on the grass instead of the sidewalk. It’s easy to miss the detail of associating happiness with her shoes.

Can money buy happiness? Of course not. Money can eliminate many of the conditions of misery: hunger, exposure to the elements, sheer material deprivation. In contrast, happiness bought with money is at best fleeting, and more typically a profane insult to the values being purchased: friendship, love, knowledge, self-worth. But it’s too simplistic to say that money can’t buy happiness and leave it at that.

Jordan had on shoes from England, a detail connoting quality and the expense of foreign luxury. Would cheap sandals from the five-and-dime have made her as happy, even with similar tactile nobs that conveyed the texture of the earth? Possibly she acquired her shoes while on a trip to England, imprinting the happy memories of travel into the spring of her footfalls. Perhaps instead the shoes were special-ordered by her mother, a symbol of a loving bond. Years later, Jordan remembered that a particular pair of shoes brought her happiness that day, but it almost certainly wasn’t just about the shoes.

A simple rule of thumb about money and happiness is to spend money on experiences, not things – money is well spent on dinners with friends, vacations and adventures, rather than jewelry and boats and other bling. This simplicity loses nuance, for sometimes things allow you to experience adventures, sometimes souvenirs provide memories that outlast adventures. Money buys happiness when it is meaningfully spent, when the thing acquired also acquires meaning from the heart of the purchaser. A wedding ring is a classic example where a thin tin band could hold more value than a ten carat diamond – the object matters for what it means, and what really matters is what would remain if the object is destroyed.

modern politics

~ ginsu ~ 5 Comments

If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.

This cleverly constructed insult is very hard to refute from personal knowledge: if you’re young, you only have half the knowledge required to speak from experience; if you’re old, disagreement is evidence of stupidity. There does actually seem to be some correlation between age and political philosophy, but fitting statistics over politics is an exercise in explaining music with numbers – it explains everything except what it actually feels like to hear a song, which is only everything that matters about music.

On the few occasions that I pay attention to politics, I feel like the crabby old man railing about what the kids are listening to these days – it sounds like so much noise, and each election seems to bring only a dismaying choice between two unpalatable options. I wish that elections weren’t about making the “least worst” choice. But I don’t pine for the days of big band music, bebop or classic rock – to the contrary, what bothers me is that no choice ever seems to offer anything that aligns with my sense of a modern world.

The essay “Why I left the GOP” is a journey from one pre-modern society to another. The author explains his privileged background, mainstream education and birthright belief in competition and free markets – but then war, Katrina, and actual contact with honest-to-goodness poor people opened his eyes. He had no choice but to flee the GOP for the liberal heart of the Democratic party. I’ve seen this article triumphantly distributed by my left-leaning friends, but it’s sad how his story is all about what he’s fleeing from – there’s nothing at all about what he’s fleeing to. I like everything about the article but its ending – it’s the story of a man who ran out of a burning building only to sprint blindly towards a cliff.

Most of my “intelligent” friends lean Democratic, in no small part because of the anti-intellectualism of today’s Republican party. The irony here is that the intelligent citizen recognizes that the conservative values of community, decency, humanity and individual strength require that we extend these benefits to everyone in our society. But there is stunning intellectual inconsistency in the failure to acknowledge the evidence of governmental incompetence in providing the most basic services. Is there anyone who would sing the praises of their most recent interaction with the DMV, IRS, Post Office, or community planning board? Is there any large governmental agency that provides the daily benefit of America’s largest corporations? Oh sure, you can rail against Exxon or Bank of America, but can you remember the last time you couldn’t put gas in your tank or find a working ATM? Who brought you more joy yesterday, the federal or state government, or Apple or Google or Amazon?

Rich people who don’t want want to pay taxes because they don’t want to help poor people are just being assholes. But rich people who don’t want to pay taxes because they have no faith that government can help poor people are just being rational, they are just responding to the daily evidence before their eyes. Why isn’t there a third party that can satisfy both the liberal heart and conservative brain? The largest third party in the U.S. is the Libertarian party, which has succeeded only in being more heartless than conservatives and more senseless than liberals. Can’t we do better than that?

I am waiting and hoping for the day when technology will transform politics. So far, the incredible rise of the Internet, social media, mobile devices, and electronic payment have only been used in politics for the same old purposes: raising money for existing political parties. Someday these modern advances will come together to form a new political party that is committed to direct change in our society without relying on the fundamentally outdated infrastructure of the old political system. We will see a political party formed on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, organized on Facebook and Twitter and Google+, funded through Paypal and Amazon and Square – and it will improve people’s lives through Donors Choose and other direct means of helping society without the inefficiency of governmental oversight. We need political leaders who recognize that this is not just the future, this is the unevenly distributed present, and government needs to be reconstructed to enable this transformation.

sports talk

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

James Fallows notes that Bill Clinton’s speeches succeed because he treats his listeners as if they are smart, while most political speeches appeal to emotion more than fact. Fallows makes an interesting comparison:

The main other place you hear discussion based on the same assumption that people of any background, education level, or funny-sounding accent can understand sophisticated back-and-forth of argument and counter-claim is sports-talk radio. (“I understand the concern about Strasburg’s arm. But … “) You hear insults and disagreements and put-downs on sports-talk discussions. You rarely hear the kind of deliberate condescension, the unconcealable effort as if talking to slow learners, of many political “authorities” addressing the unwashed.

I’ve noticed this for years. I can hardly stand to listen to political news entertainment shows, whether Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. Every one of them treats listeners as frothing idiots, and the callers they support on their airwaves only reinforce the image with loony claims and outrageous statements. One of Fallows’ readers echoes my sentiments exactly:

I’ve begun listening to sports talk radio on my way to work because I cannot bear to listen to the news–even NPR cannot escape the false equivalence trap and I find it depressing.  I am not at all interested in sports–as I was so obsessively when I was a boy.  But I enjoy the calls, the laughs, the passion of everybody on 98.5, The Sports Hub. […]  Nobody talks down–in fact, the hosts and callers pile on detail after detail, especially here in Massachusetts about the loved/hated/damned poor Red Sox and all their troubles.

The most successful sports talk radio hosts are highly intelligent and utterly ruthless in insisting that callers contribute information that is useful and fact-based. The culture and language of these shows can be crude, but their passion and devotion to truth is refreshing in a way that barely exists in other public discourse. Why is sports talk so intelligent while political talk is so dumb? Noam Chomsky believes that people invest their intelligence in sports because they are disenfranchised from more valuable pursuits:

Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports.

You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folks. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports — so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that.

This fits into Chomsky’s theories of society, but on reflection it makes no sense. People can’t really contribute meaningfully to sport, and they know it – you can have pride in your team and buy a ticket, buy a jersey or hat, but you’ll never be on the sporting field. The separation between the sports fan and the elite athlete is even greater than that between the citizen and the politician.

What separates sport from politics, in terms of the intelligence people will bring to the discourse, is that sports has rules and measurable outcomes, and passive participation can be rewarded by being right about the outcome (rewarded by pride, or in the case of sports gambling, by money). Politics lacks easily definable rules and outcomes that are clearly connected to actions on the field.

Is there something that the Internet can do about this, is there some kind of startup that could make politics more like sports, and therefore more attractive for intelligent public discourse? A company called HubDub tried something like this, making a prediction market for politics, sports, entertainment and other topics. Unfortunately, trying to pin down public predictions turned out to be challenging. They ended up shutting down their general prediction market to focus on the most popular topic with a steady revenue model: sports, of course. FanDuel seems like great fun, but it’s also another demonstration that most people will apply their intelligence, time and money to sports in a way that they just won’t to politics.

unfamiliar look

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 78:

They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.

Gatsby’s embarrassment is the most acute strain of all, as he’s a man who has everything he wants but one woman-as-object of desire; he’s attained everything he has in single-minded pursuit of that one desire, he’s become frighteningly resourceful and unflappable, but he never envisioned this. He never gave much thought to the man who actually has the love of his life, so when they actually meet, his embarrassment is so unbearable that he flees the scene before another word of introduction can be uttered.

What do you look like when you come face to face with the one who has what you want? Someone who has the girl or guy, the clothes the car the house, the job, the life? You might see this face if your webcam was on while you surf the web. Envy is the defining emotion of our age, bolstered and boosted by the immersive wash of posts, likes, tweets, and shares. What purpose to all this public commentary on minutiae if not to spray the arrows of envy from everyone to everyone, to make us all both humblebraggarts and envious targets at once?

oddly familiar

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

p. 77:

They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

After some unsubtle prompting, Nick notices Wolfshiem’s cufflinks, which are made from human molars. I can remember the first time I read this, and thinking “Huh, kind of cool.” Now I find the concept barbaric. What has happened in the decades since?

Well, adolescents are not fully developed humans, most particularly lacking in the sense of humanity that can only be developed by definition in living. As a teen I could have worn a piece of human bone on my clothing without ever thinking about the person whose parts decorated my shirt. Now having lost various bits of my own through careless age and sundry violence, there are pieces of me adrift in the universe and I wouldn’t kindly regard their use as fashion. And even if their former owners wouldn’t care, I couldn’t wear someone else’s bodily fragments; it is too much of a denial of their humanity and a display of deficiency in mine.

It’s not just me that’s changed, but the world at large has changed since I first read about molar cufflinks, and of course changed even more since the book was published between the world wars. Wolfshiem is the only notably ethnic character in an uber-WASPy book, and his Jewish background is a terrible contrast to his accessorizing. Twenty years after the book’s publication, the world was horrified by reports of lampshades made from human skin, decorating the Nazi chambers at Buchenwald. It’s hard to read about Meyer Wolfshiem’s accessorial pride now without projecting the character into his future, reading sadly about the concentration camps and angrily tossing his cufflinks into the trash.

A sign of a world beyond both morality and irony: today you can get your very own replica molar cufflinks for around forty dollars, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find parts of the world where you could get the real thing for less.

louie louie

~ ginsu ~ Leave a comment

There’s a package of personal skills that I’d call “being good at life” – some combination of being open-minded, open-hearted, honest and adventurous. Here I’m not trying to define exactly what’s in the package; I’m just saying such a thing exists, and you know this when you meet someone who is good at life. These people glow with contagious energy, you can feel it within a minute in their presence, and in half an hour you are imbued with some measure of their magic. They are so good at life that the irrepressible force of life overflows the boundaries of their bodies and penetrates into the lucky souls nearby.

This happens in the two-episode story arc completed this week on Louie, which is very close to entering my pantheon of favorite TV shows over the last decade (in chronological order: The Sopranos, Firefly, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men). If you don’t watch Louie CK’s brilliant show, and you don’t want to know what happens in it before you watch it, then you shouldn’t read the rest of this. Just go watch Louie – the first two seasons are on Netflix, the third is available on Amazon Instant Video.

Louie is a bit of a sad sack – divorced, out of shape, mid-forties, and haplessly looking for love. In the first episode of this story, he goes to a bookstore to buy something for his daughter. He turns down an offer of help from the first salesperson who inquires because he sees the other beside him, a librarian-sexy woman played by Parker Posey. He mumbles about finding a book about flowers for his daughter, and she really engages with the request, asking questions about his daughter and suggesting something that seems just right. It’s not a perfunctory execution of her task as a retail drone – she brings authentic humanity to a routine interaction. Louie’s days are filled with dross and here is a pure rivulet of gold.

Some time later, he’s back at the store panning for more, and she remembers him, her greeting lighting up his heart immediately. Finding a book for his other daughter, she draws on the shared personal history of being a girl just starting to grapple with life and femininity, and suggests another title that will surely be perfect. Truly infatuated now, Louie returns to the store a third time and stumbles out the best possible pitch for a date that can be made by an overweight balding older man to a vivacious younger woman. She says yes.

It’s wonderful … and in some ways it’s the high point of this relationship, as this moment is on average the high point of all possible relationships – the moment when both people think there might be something there, when the entire history is nothing but short sweet vignettes of warmth and attraction, when none of the best things have happened yet and all of them seem possible, when none of the worst things have happened yet and none of them seem plausible.

In the next episode, Louie picks her up at the bookstore at the end of her shift, and almost immediately, certainly inevitability, the reality of the person fills out differently than the fantasy of the dream. She actually is a wonderful person – vibrant, compassionate, authentic, funny and adventurous – and their date quickly becomes a classic New York journey, the city so alive that it’s almost like the third wheel in their evening, a meandering trawl through a bar, vintage clothing store, gourmet delicatessen and spectacular rooftop views. Parker Posey plays a woman who is just so damn good at life that it’s bursting from her seams, and the magic of her performance is how she shows the dark beauty of those seams and the fragile stitching that holds this woman together. She’s good at life because she has to be, because she’s learned to be, because it’s the only way she can survive.

Being good at life is a learned skill, no one is born this way. Some people learn from a blank slate, or even better from a foundation prepared well by a loving family and fortuitous circumstances. But some people learn in order to recover from misfortune, from illness or abuse or poverty or genetic disadvantage. For this group, being good at life is a survival skill, a necessity more than a blessing, medicine to cure a fatal condition.

a great sportswoman

~ ginsu ~ 2 Comments

p. 76:

‘Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.’

Of the six romantically involved characters – Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Nick and Jordan – I’ve always found Jordan the most attractive. Not the most alluring, that would be Daisy. Gatsby, Tom and Nick were too dangerous, stupid and boring in turn. Myrtle had earthy sensuality, but that was about all.

All of these characters are living a lie, each of a different sort, and a couple of those lies will be fatal. But Jordan will emerge almost completely unscathed from this story of betrayal and death. She wears her dishonesty lightly and openly, a casually careless driver in a world of cautious motorists. In a sense, she’s more authentic than her summer friends – she knows who she is, she knows she’s a liar, she doesn’t get lost in the mazes of self-deception that surround the others. She’d never do anything that wasn’t all right … for her.