On F. Scott Fitzgerald, High School English, Woody Allen, and my Kindle

I didn't set out to buy a Kindle. It just sort of happened. I upgraded my phone to a shiny Android Smartphone, and there it was: a pre-installed Kindle app. I wonder if I will like it? I mused. I'd always thought an eReader would strip away a certain romantic aspect of reading. But then again, how often do you really find me reading a book? I can't read in the car, and my attention always seems to be flying everywhere when I try to read. I had been meaning to re-read Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so I made a commitment and downloaded it.

The Kindle app presented a wonderful new world to me. I realized that in this format, I could read for longer. I could read on the bus without getting motion sickness, and I remembered what I read far more clearly!

The first time I watched the film Midnight in Paris, I was in a cycle class at the YWCA. During the cooler months, the Minneapolis YWCA offers "Cycle To The Movies" in which you pedal furiously on spin bikes whilst viewing a film - usually an action movie. I made sure to show up for Midnight in Paris (not an action movie), because I love Woody Allen and I'd heard good things about it even from people who hate Woody Allen. It was a great movie, and giving consideration to the fact that one of my favorite novels is The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, (which is a thinly veiled gossip column about the time period depicted in parts of the film) it was very amusing to me.

Because there is only so much you can get out of a movie while exercising, and because I'd retroactively realized that Tom Hiddleston, the exceptionally talented actor who played Loki in The Avengers, had played F. Scott Fitzgerald, I grabbed a copy of the movie to watch while sitting still. I needed some diversion while getting settled into my new apartment anyways. I'm going to take this opportunity to state that I would never read a book by an author just because an actor I liked played them. That would be kind of silly. I also won't see a movie starring an actor I really like if the subject matter doesn't interest me.

I had gotten to thinking that where I had been all hot and bothered over Ernest Hemingway for a very long time (due to an incredibly heartfelt lesson on him in 12th Grade English), I had really never read any F. Scott Fitzgerald. We were supposed to read The Great Gatsby but it was glossed over. I had never gotten around to it. Somewhere between that, and the idle thought of oh shit they're doing a movie I downloaded a copy from Amazon.

I am really glad that I didn't read it in high school. It would have bored me. I wouldn't have really gotten it, I wouldn't have appreciated it. Fitzgerald seems to have had a penchant for using the novel as an exercise in trying to figure out if the people who he disliked had any redeeming qualities at all. The Great Gatsby is literary rubbernecking. Through the narration of Nick Carraway, someone who sort of sets himself above Gatsby through his repeated expressions of disapproval - but is really not a whole lot better - you see a sort of dichotomy, between the morally challenged and the repressed. There is that whole early 20th century air of cautious freedom and the bad decisions that come with it. The characters are all compelling, but none of them are likeable (really, not even Nick Carraway when you think of it. He moved into a cheap house amidst mansions, why? Not just because it was cheap I don't think.) Ultimately, I think the answer to the question is no, none of the characters have any redeeming qualities. Nick Carraway was probably only a good friend to Gatsby because he didn't have anything better to do and he felt stuck.

Now back to Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen really did a stellar job capturing a moment in time with some great authors, and the portrayls do really give a fairly coherent depiction of why even though they both come from a minimalist era in literature, reading Hemingway is a vastly different experience from reading Fitzgerald. This was illustrated in the film rather nicely, but is also well established within their literary works.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes "what a grotesque thing a rose is." In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Hemingway writes, "mighty like the rose." If you step back and get a wider perspective, this is a reminder that at any point in history, you will find infinite different ways of looking at the same thing. A rose can be grotesque, it can be mighty, it can be loving or insulting, and it is also very good in black tea.
Edited to add: Yes I have eaten rose petals.