The Great Gatsby?
We can’t verify Kevin’s sources, so we will withhold comment on the sleeping attire accusations. However, we do have an insatiable appetite for laughter and irony. And we do like finance and what it can tell you. William Quirk shows us what we can learn from F. Scott’s tax returns. The numbers in those returns are ancient history, and that’s where we continue — the age-old debate over Thucydides’s objectivity. Roger Sandall examines the similarity between the old metaphysics of Plato and Grand Theft Auto, the video game (disclaimer: we don’t play video games, well, Tecmo Bowl). Writers tend to be obsessive and now there’s a new “obsessive history” of The Elements of Style. And, finally, we get a little more contemporary with the first year of Pitchfork’s The Decade in News. Now it’s time to get back in our jammies. – Andrew Geer
– Several years ago, my colleague and friend Matthew Bruccoli, an English professor and author of books about 20th-century American writers, made a surprising request. He said he had F. Scott Fitzgerald’s income tax returns covering his working life, 1919–1940, and asked if I would like to write an article with him based on the returns. — Fitzgerald’s Tax Returns in The American Scholar
How Could You Doubt This Face?
– Modern readers are often shocked to learn that the Athenians—citizens of a free city who defeated the Persians when they invaded Greece, built the Parthenon, and staged the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles—also massacred the citizens not of an enemy state but of a neutral power. Ancient readers were also shocked when they learned this story from the same source: Thucydides, the exiled general who recorded the atrocity, and the dialogue that preceded it, in an account that is in many ways the model for all subsequent western histories of high politics and war. — Thucydides in Slate
– It had been just an ordinary day at the office, metaphysically speaking, but it looked like ending with a bang. In a sunlit grove at the foot of the Acropolis, close by the Academy, Plato was showing Aristotle something he’d found on the web. — Plato & Grand Theft Auto in Roger Sandall
This Guy Had Style
– “I hate the guts of English grammar,” an illustrious stylist once wrote. Reader, perhaps you can relate. But would you believe it if I told you the writer was E. B. White, as in half of Strunk and White, those august ambassadors of precision and clarity behind “The Elements of Style”? — The Elements of Style in The New York Times
– The most important news story of the past decade doesn’t concern a specific band or genre or trend. It’s the story of how music news itself has changed. Think back to the turn of the millennium: How did you find out that your favorite band had a new album coming out? — 2000 Music News in Pitchfork
Video: Forgetfulness — Billy Collins Animated Poetry
Forgetfulness – Billy Collins Animated Poetry from smjwt on Vimeo.
