dog days of gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a summer novel that begins with the exciting promise of a glamorous season for Nick yet ends with disillusion and tragedy, a thirtieth birthday, and leaves from "yellowing trees" about to turn and start dropping downward into Gatsby's fateful swimming pool.  There's the longest day of the year that Daisy always forgets to remember, Gatsby's lavish weekend parties on endless warm nights, gin rickeys and mint juleps, and lilac trees in the July rain.  But in the middle of another sticky August heatwave, even summer-loving people might start to agree with Jordan Baker's comment that "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."  Or we can just take Tom's bullying advice to just forget about the heat:  "You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it."

Pictured:  Beach Scene with Lavender Sky -- William Glackens, 1914 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

cicada days

“Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.”

Runaway Horses -- Yukio Mishima (1925-1970)

(Pictured:  Moonlight View of Tsukuda with Lady on a Balcony -- Utagawa Hiroshige)

born today

 

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891), author of Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Typee, and a personal favorite, "Bartleby, the Scrivener."

It is, of course, an indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy, word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair. I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable. For example, I cannot credit that the mettlesome poet Byron would have contentedly sat down with Bartleby to examine a law document of, say five hundred pages, closely written in a crimpy hand. 

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street -- Herman Melville, 1853