___________________________________
4:55 p.m. Found my copy of the book.
5:12 p.m. Read the back cover. The sentence "The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s," because of its genitive prepositional phrases, reminded me of an old poem of Lord De Tabley, which I then sought out and read:
A Song of
the Rolling Wind
A song
of the fields and a song of the woods,
And a
song of the rolling gale ;
A song
for my love, and my false, false love,
To the
tune of the crackling hail
In the
teeth of the roaring wind.
A song
of the clouds and the fallow face,
Where
the wrestling leaves come down,
Of the
heart that is changed, and the voice that is gone,
And the
woodland withered brown
In the
drift of the raving wind.
A song
for me, and a song for thee,
And never
a love between,
And the
cold clay-couch of the patient dead
By the
yew tree's inky green,
In the
teeth of the rolling wind.
My point is this: If I'm reminded of some poem or another by every turn of phrase I read, I'm never going to finish this. I need to get my mind off poetry.
5:38 p.m. Read F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography on the back cover. Didn't know who John Dos Passos was, so looked him up; in his biography, saw the name Jose Robles and didn't know who that was, so looked him up; in his biography, saw the name Andres Nin, and---you guessed it---didn't know who that was, so looked him up; in his biography, saw the word "flaying" and didn't know what that was, so looked it up; saw there the name Peter Stumpp and didn't know who that was, so looked him up; in his biography, saw the word "succubus" and didn't know what that was ... okay, I'm having fun, but I'm not getting anything done ... On the other hand, I don't want to start reading the text without first reading the paratext. I'll go smoke, then continue when I'm back.
5:51 p.m. Back. Let's get this done.
5:53 p.m. The book starts with a quotation from Thomas Park d'Invilliers, and I don't know who that should be. I'll look up this one last thing, then read.
6:10 p.m. And now I know stuff about: John Peale Bishop; Charles Town, West Virginia; Edmund Wilson; Theodore Dreiser; Thelma Cudlipp; Kyra Markham. The first chapter, 21 pages long, is up now.
6:14 p.m. 2-page preamble, the first page introducing the narrator, the second the title character.
6:20 p.m. The next 3 pages were setting. I also notice it's taking me 2 min /pg :((
6:26 p.m. The next 3 pages are more characters and more setting.
6:44 p.m. Done :) Amazingly well-written! And very neatly structured, he didn't need to experiment with form in order to tell a story.
No comments:
Post a Comment