Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Can't retweet the past?

Over the last two months, I serialized The Great Gatsby via Twitter on behalf of the American Repertory Theater. That's The Great Gatsby, the whole novel, in 140 character chunks. This was a promotion for the ART's production of Gatz - about which you can read my thoughts here - but it quickly became a labor of love.

Reducing classic literature into tweets sounds like just that - a reduction. But working with the text of Gatsby on such a minute and superficial level gave me a whole new appreciation for the jewel-like perfection of the language. Every sentence, every phrase tells an entire story. It is beyond masterful.

The followers of the @ARTGatz feed realized this as well, and I especially enjoyed seeing which lines they would re-tweet to their own followers. Some were predictable favorites - others were a bit more mysterious. I eventually collected every @ARTGatz re-tweet here, creating a sort of absurdist Gatsby micro-narrative. It's the world's first crowd-sourced abridgment. Enjoy.


THE GREAT GATSBY (abridged)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Crowd-sourced via the followers of @ARTGatz


Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.

—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, & then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself...

Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

...a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I've ever known.

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

“I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.” I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute. “He just saw the opportunity.”

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime...

...and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.

“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."

“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

...and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

—mostly I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt—

“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.” A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar.

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper...

...bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.

...and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.” He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself, that had gone into loving Daisy.

—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?”

That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!

“It seems pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year."

“What will we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of——” I hesitated.

A pause followed this apparently pointless remark.

“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously. “What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we drove for a while in silence.

Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.

“We’ve got enough to get to town,” said Tom. But there’s a garage here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat.”

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.” “Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where did you know him, Tom?”

Jordan smiled. “He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

“Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself. . . .

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

"But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes."

...and in my heart I love her all the time.”

She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

It came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.

“What are you doing?” I inquired. “Just standing here, old sport.” Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation.

I must have felt pretty weird by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be.

Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine;

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes...

She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . .

The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.

Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath.

..even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh, my God!” again...

“Don’t do it to-day,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”

and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool.

From the moment I phoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, every practical question, was referred to me.

In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.” I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!”

...and I should have known better than to call him.

I mentioned Gatsby.

“Oh—h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—What was your name?” She vanished.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested.

Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him.

“I come across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?” “It just shows you.”

So when blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air + wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners...

I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky.

Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.

“You threw me over on the phone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, & I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties...

—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting on the sideboard, I sat down & cried like a baby.

Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

As I sat brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.


THE END

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Today I learned that Figment is coming to Boston! Figment is a wonderful zany arts festival on Governor's Island in NYC and they're doing an installment along the Charles this summer! Yay!

Monday, February 22, 2010

Today I learned a sure way to reverse even the foulest, blackest, grumpiest of bad moods: sing along with "Movin' Right Along."



Gungadun gungadun.

How DOES Kermit ride that bicycle??

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Today I learned a fun fact about my own body. I played through Beethoven's 7th symphony tonight for the first time in almost a decade. I haven't played with an orchestra in two years and haven't practiced in, um, mumblemumble years, so even the easy parts were a disaster. But the harder bits? Right there in my fingers. MUSCLE MEMORY IS SO WEIRD.

Also, I am super impressed with 15-year-old Liz.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Did I learn anything today? Not really. Instead, I have questions.

1) I don't know what to do with my eyes while listening to NPR. I don't knit, I don't drive, my commute is short and on bicycle, and although I sometimes cook I do not cook for nearly as many hours a week as I would like to spend listening to Ira Glass's voice. What do you do with your eyes? Does someone make picturebooks for grownups that I could stare at?

2) I was reading an essay about Wagner by Shaw, and Shaw made me feel like an ass (as only Shaw can) for being mostly unfamiliar with the Ring Cycle. Which is to say, I've seen "What's Opera, Doc?" and Larry O'Keefe's "Magic Futon" several times each, but that's about it. Is there a way to become acquainted with the Ring that doesn't involve listening to 15 hours of opera?

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Today I learned that this exists:
The Sleep No More Crossover Fanfiction Blog

Because Sleep No More is crossover fanfiction itself! Get it? Get it?

I think this is a tiny bit brilliant. Only a tiny bit, though.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Today I learned that
1) someone recently visited my blog through Googling the query "are rabbits inauspicious?", and
2) my blog is the first hit for the query "are rabbits inauspicious?"

So I rather feel I should expound a bit on this subject. Are rabbits, in fact, inauspicious?

The first question to address is really "inauspicious for whom?" On the one hand, rabbits are very soft, which doesn't really bode well for them. On the other hand, bunnies must really enjoy cuddling with one another. So, dear mystery-reader, if you return seeking further insight on the auspiciality of bunny rabbits, please clarify your terms and I will see what I can do.

And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Today I learned that I actually really like Valentine's Day. Is that okay?

Favorites include:
2004: Performing Mozart's Requiem with Holden at ACDA*
2007: Beauty & The Geek party. And The Little Mermaid? Or was that '06?
2009: Gallo pinto in Cambridge UK
2010: 10-person dance party, and Disney 'n' pizza


*interestingly, only my third favorite Mozart's Requiem memory, following the (life-changing) first performance in December and the Eliot JCR singalong during comm choir '05.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Today I learned that chocolate-covered bacon is disgusting.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Today I learned that throwing parties on Fridays is unnecessarily difficult, when the same party could just as well be thrown on Saturday. But I also learned that, perhaps not too surprisingly considering the selection bias here, a high percentage of my friends own proper flapper attire. Yay. :)

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Today I learned a whole ton about World's Fairs. Like, way more than I could write up here. Because I also learned that when my homework is awesome, I will go above and beyond. Watch a half hour of vintage Coney Island footage, you say? See you in four hours...

So we learned last week that the word panorama originally referred to the Imax 360 of the 19th century, and only subsequently did the suffix -orama get applied as an indicator of great scale and awesomeness. Keep this in mind as I tell you about the 1939 World's Fair's Futurama - the awesomest thing to be called Futurama until that other Futurama.

The Futurama was, first of all, the grand-daddy of the Disney-style dark ride: a narrated trip in moving seats through a vivid diorama (there's that suffix again), in this case depicting the world in twenty years, as envisioned by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. The principal feature of this world is the existence of an interstate highway system - build us these roads, GM told taxpayers, and we'll sell you the cars to drive on them. The thing is that although GM's argument worked, we didn't follow their instructions very well. Bel Geddes designed a utopic highway system that was carefully calibrated for ideal traffic flow - the rural elevated highways depicted in the early parts of the ride have seven lanes, with two transition lanes on a lower level, bringing drivers safely from 25 to 50 to a cruising speed of 100 mph(!).

But of course, the system we actually built was not so idyllic. Dan Howland of The Journal of Ride Theory sums it up in one of my favorite quotes on the topic: "If we lived in the Futurama, we'd be home by now."

I highly recommend this film of the Futurama itself: http://www.archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940 Highlights include the dirigible hanger in the airport (floating in a pool of water, so it can easily rotate to suit the wind direction!), and the odd reference to the Gloria Patri at the end. If you watch it, please talk to me about it - we didn't talk about it at all in class, so it is not out of my system.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Today I learned a new Harvard building! You know that building to the right of Lamont? Me neither till today! In all these years, I have not only never been inside that building, or known what it is, but I've never even really registered its existence. So today I walked in and announced my presence to the dude at the desk:

Me: Hi! I've been here five years and have never been in this building. Where am I?
Dude: This is the Houghton rare books library.
Me: Whoa, that exists?
Dude: ...yes.
Me: I mean, I always thought it was just one of those Hollis designations for a particular collection, not an actual physical location.
Dude: Rare books generally need to be stored somewhere secure. And physical.
Me: This makes sense.

Next up: Liz learns to navigate new Lamont floor-numbering, avoids further embarrassing attempts to locate Shakespeare in the government docs stacks.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Today I learned - well, I've been learning this for two weeks now, but today was another reminder - that I really don't like singing Bach. Or the St. John Passion, at any rate. I love playing Bach, but singing him seems to be a whole 'nother matter. It's the reverse of Mozart, who is great to sing but lousy to play. It's interesting that although alto and cello lines often share many characteristics, I can have such strong opinions on whose work I'd rather sing vs play - the same line has totally different fun-ness properties depending how it is produced.

Sometimes, however, the finger can really be pointed at the composer. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Fantasia on Tallis AND God Bless The Master? Really? Really?

Thankfully, today I also learned to preserve the quality of my day through a Bach rehearsal by tying up my good mood in one of Jim Marvin's Santa Claus bags and throwing it into the balcony for safe keeping till 6:30.

Monday, February 8, 2010

This weekend I learned that the church choir experience is completely revolutionized through the addition of a neck pillow. Reverend Gomes, you are a lovely man, but your sermons are very long.

After years of struggling to pithily describe the majority of my high school classmates in a way that doesn't:
  • involve ethnic stereotyping ("guidos")
  • inspire the listener to turn the claim back on me ("JAPs")
  • sound too douchey / loaded for people who actually know their Marx ("lumpenproletariat")
  • seem better reserved for describing the Five Towns ("nouveau riche")
  • seem inaccurate since most people do go to college ("townies")
I finally learned the perfect word for summing up my hometown - chavvy.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Today I learned that vertiginous means vertigo-y. Can you use it in a sentence? Why yes, I can!
The soundscape in Birnam Wood is vertiginous.
There ya go.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Today I learned about panoramas. Originally, panoramas were buildings that housed a 360 degree painting. These were super popular in the 19th century, and they sound a bit awesome.

Check out this cross-section of a standard panorama. The cupola overhead prevents the viewer from seeing the border of the painting on top, the artificial floor conceals the border on bottom.Fancier panoramas used projection, meaning massive amounts of Victorian mechanicalness and gas flames and roaring motors, and all in all were less like a tranquil view of the countryside and more like an awesome way to get conflagrated.

I am wondering about the Allegory of the Cave. For half a century, a significant chunk of the population has been first introduced to Plato through the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm sure this affects interpretation - the Cave and the Shadowlands are synonymous for me. There's no real conclusion to be drawn here, but I just think it's fascinating that C.S. Lewis gets to be the gatekeeper of Plato.

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Today I learned that I am the first person in the history of the internet who has blogged about something related to her job, had her boss find it, and had this lead to praise and approbation. :)

I am wondering about a presentation given to one of my classes today by a producer at WGBH. The only time she defaulted to a masculine pronoun (the only time anyone ever defaults to a masculine pronoun in children's programming) was when referring to the writers. FML.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Borne back ceaselessly into Gatz

I am wondering about Gatz, the seven hour Gatsby semi-adaptation at the A.R.T. Why did it feel so wholly immersive, despite being so extremely low-fi? Sleep No More and The Donkey Show achieve their immersion through verisimilitude, overwhelming your senses with lush detail. Their voices are full of money. Gatz, with its wafer-thin meta-narrative and commonplace imagery, is barely more than a staged reading. But you are there.

But there is not West Egg. The world of Gatz is not the story-world of The Great Gatsby - it is the world of The Great Gatsby, the novel, the paper-and-ink book with the blue-face cover that you dog-eared in AP English. The immersion is into the very act of reading The Great Gatsby. What engrosses you is the story, but what you experience is the telling of the story, the construction of it; the green twinkle of the perfect language, the careening inevitability of the narrative.

A novel this familiar has deep personal layers to it, separate from and wholly dependent on the actual narrative - and through the familiar text you can repeat the past, old sport. I felt keenly the sense memory of lifting my chin to balance an invisible object, moved to mimicry by the vividness of Jordan's gesture. My friend Cian, raised on the metric system, recalled reading the Plaza scene and first learning the word "quart." Little details... but they are the functional equivalent of the pine scent in Birnam Wood. Sleep No More creates future sense memories - Gatz exposes and explores the memories you already have.

And as such, it is an intensely personal experience. Your memories of reading Gatsby are not mine - though they are likely similar, high school curricula being what they are. The novel is one of the few media that stubbornly resist communal consumption. That's why people react so strongly to deviation in adaptations of favorite novels - they get it wrong, they don't understand, I know the story isn't real but it's still true and you can't just change what's true. (and Gatz was not immune to this effect. Chapter Five was plain wrong.) You can feel ownership over the reading of a novel, over your reading of a novel, because there is no one else there to lay a claim.

The power of live theater is the power of the communal experience, laid bare in Gatz because it was the first time all of us, any of us, had ever experienced this particular familiar story with people. With people. Laughing together, gasping together, feeling like an overgrown spider in the Loeb seats together. It's reading the novel, but amplified. Sleep No More transports you to a world you've only visited in dreams - Gatz is a world of your own creation that is suddenly lived in by others.

The wakening from Sleep No More is well-supported - between Manderley and the long bus ride from the remote location, you can stagger the staggering out of the dream. When Gatz was over, it was over, and there we were, blinking at Harvard Square. But we weren't ready to emerge from that world. Drained emotionally from the story, we wanted to sustain the magic circle of the stage - we didn't want to admit outsiders. Sure, they all had read the book too, they could tut-tut about the Buchanans as well as us - but they weren't there. They didn't understand.

At the large party, Gatsby removed our masks and whispered in our ears.

So we beat on.