Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Great Gatsby (1925)

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

Alex Schmidt is joined by writer/podcaster/filmmaker Michael Swaim (IGN, Small Beans, Kurt Vonneguys) for a look at why ‘The Great Gatsby’ is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, I have two exciting things to tell you about. One of them is Libro.fm. Libro.fm is a URL. They are also a new way to buy audiobooks. This is the first time that a company has partnered with the podcast, and I'm the whole operation making the podcast. I'm doing the editing and the research and everything. So I'm only picking companies I'm legitimately really excited about. And what's most exciting about them to me is Libro lets you purchase your audiobooks directly from your favorite local bookstore. with hundreds of US bookstores, dozens of Canadian bookstores, and a few more bookstores around the world. And this way you get that same exact audiobook, but the money goes back to your local bookstore, back to your local community. I've been a Libro customer since before this podcast launched, and that's because I want to support The Regulator, which is an independent bookstore here in Durham, North Carolina. You probably have your own favorite local bookstore

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to be affiliating with this company, Libro.fm. There may be other companies that are exciting, too. I also think if you're somebody donating to this show, if you're somebody backing it on Patreon and making the entire thing possible, people who are paying to support this show. If you're somebody backing it on Patreon and making the entire thing possible, people who are paying to support this show should not hear sponsors, and we can do that. That's how it's going to work. So there's a whole new benefit for donors now. Everyone who supports the show gets a sponsorship-free version of the show, an ad-free version of the show, in their feed. And now that that news is out of the way, here's the show. news is out of the way, here's the show. The Great Gatsby. Known for being a novel. Famous for being homework and a movie. Nobody thinks much about it except for homework, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why The Great Gatsby is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode.

A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by an old pal, an old co-host, a permanent Vana friend, who I am so excited is on this show. Michael Swaim is here today. Isn't that great? I think it's great. He was my colleague at the former workplace crack.com. We co-hosted and co-created a podcast called Kurt Vonnegut that explored the novels and short stories and essays and children's books and personal letters of the author Kurt Vonnegut. I assume people who know me know about it. If you don't, hey, there's an entire podcast you can just go here where me and today's guest dive deep on

the works of Kurt Vonnegut and an amazing author that I hope people get into. Anyway, Michael is now making great stuff, especially videos, full-time at IGN.com, you know, the massive great video game website, IGN. He's also one of the key people over at Small Beans, and Small Beans is a comedy Patreon for videos and for podcasts and for a lot more, and I really hope you'll check it out if you haven't already. We go way back in doing this stuff, and I'm really excited that we can do it again in this new show and this new situation. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and I've used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. To acknowledge Michael recorded this on the traditional land of the Ohlone people.

And to acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also, good news, you do not have to have read the book to enjoy this podcast. I assume basically all of you read it for homework at some point and then never read it again or picked it up once because maybe it's interesting to see again. If you've done that or if you're just aware of the book's existence, you're all set. You're going to love this. Also, Michael is awesome and putting his time into this and is also very busy. So I discouraged him from reading the book in advance of this. I did reread it just to be on top of it for prep reasons, but we're not going to do deep textual analysis. This podcast is about

how this short novel about a secretive rich guy written by a secretive like author guy became one of the biggest books in the entire world. Like what's the history of it? What's the lineage of it? How did this very kind of weird in hindsight thing happen? So please sit back or stand in your yard staring at the green light across the way. And here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with my guest, Michael Swaim. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Michael Swaim, it is so nice that you're here. Thank you, man.

Oh, man, my pleasure. Very excited to be here. Very, very excited. I figured that wanting to bring in the right kind of book as a topic, and my old Kurt Von Geist pal Michael Swaim, that's the guy to do it with. Of course, I ask every guest at the top, what's your relationship to the topic, opinion of the topic? How do you feel about The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Well, Alex, in my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me a piece of advice, which I've turned over in my mind ever since. Memorize the first line of The Great Gatsby and folks will think you're deep.

For some reason, that has stuck with me. In school, it was important to know the first line of The Great Gatsby. And I know the bit I should have done, which was the legendary Andy Kaufman reading it in its entirety to a dwindling audience of people realizing that this was the whole show. I've never heard of that. Oh, it's a great bit. Andy Kaufman went on stage

once and read the entirety of The Great Gatsby as people just one by one gave up and left. And we're like like i guess this is the show and by the end he got so hoarse he couldn't speak um and people started cheering and he went off stage and he came back with a phonograph of him reading the great gatsby he's a brilliant man and so i've read it i know that much about it and I am very intrigued because you said this wouldn't be an unpacking of the themes of you know uh lost love or holding a torch or whatever

the class structure was in the 20s I'm not fully sure um so I'm interested to see what could be exciting about it beyond that because it's to me just a book you read in english class and you learn the story and that's that until boz luhrmann revitalized which i also haven't seen so i have seen that movie and it's one of the rare i didn't like re-watch it for this or anything but it's one of the rare times when like you know when they make a movie out of a book and you want it to to like, nail the book properly. And if they don't, that's why you're mad, right? The Baz Luhrmann one, just kind of frustrated me as a movie. And the book part didn't even matter. It's like, it feels like it's all video game cut scenes. Oh, and it's a movie of the Great Gatsby.

It's really strange and jarring to watch a little suicide squatty yeah i only have one question did they turn daisy's green light into the green light of an im message coming in because i i feel like an updated great gatsby that's the move right he's always looking at discord to see daisy's green light is on but he never rings her up? That would be better. Because the one, to me, the one like big update is that they took Jay-Z, who's great, and they made him the soundtrack, but they only made him the soundtrack in moments. And so then you have a thing where like, there's a bunch of 20s jazz being played, and then Jay-Z is played and it's just on top of each other. And it's really kind of hard to listen to in that format.

You know, like you don't need a bunch of crazy saxophone under Jay-Z. Those can just live apart, you know? I saw this cut scene, though, where Leo DiCaprio just nails like a nasty freestyle. It was amazing. It's a melding of the art forms. That's what Boz does. No, I haven't seen it, as I aforementioned. No, you've seen West Egg 8 Mile, and you loved it.

That's the situation. Don't miss your one chance to Trimalchio. That's right. It's a verb. You didn't know. To Trimalchio. It's to be gazed upon by creepy disembodied eyes in a disconcerting way you've been trimalchio and then i have that same experience with the book that

you've had where it was homework i i couldn't really effectively google if it's the same way in other countries but in the united states this has got to be like one of the few books everybody reads in school right like like because it varies otherwise what the curriculum is that's i always have to ask people about these two did you read a separate piece by john knolls yeah that was the very first book of high school english god it was boring yeah did you read uh we get it he broke his arm did you read ishi last of his tribe that's the other one i always ask no i haven't read that okay what was your what was your other go-to like assigned book did anything stick with you the only the only one i figure almost everybody else reads is huck finn but even then the language in it and the racial elements of it i feel like it gets banned or

left off by certain districts like this one tends to get through. Yeah, we didn't. Maybe that was the swap out because Ishii last of his tribe was like mourning the loss of native peoples. So maybe it was like a get with the times swap out Huck Finn, you know, and we got one Vonnegut. I forget which one, but that's kind of what set me off on realizing he's the greatest author of all time. Yeah. But that's not this show. Oh, that makes me want to do that show again. He needs to write more. What if the only material I brought is just how much better Kurt Vonnegut is? We don't even talk about the book or its significance or anything. Just in relation to Kurt would have done that so much better.

I mean, there would have been an elegance, a panache to it in east egg you get world war ii and west egg then you're talking that's the book billy pilgrim has become untramalchiod in time well we uh we can get into the things about it beyond uh yeah i'm desperate for credible facts now please bring some into the mix and on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics in a segment called oh i want to stats with somebody i want to count up sums with sums buddy oh wow i'm here for one of the best ones to date i'm calling it i think that's one of the better ones so far although you explicitly say the less good the better so maybe that's an insult

i don't know i love that i i feel it's both things yeah that was submitted by andrew duck so congratulations andrew michael approves good job and we're gonna have a new name for this segment every week submitted by listeners like you make them as silly and wacky as bad as possible. Submit to at SAFpod on Twitter or to SIFpod at gmail.com. Also, great use of the extra sums. Squeezing in an extra sums. I want to add sums with sums, buddy. I enjoyed that internal pun. Thank you. That was a light edit I made. I'm sorry, Andrew. Oh, that was all Schmitty okay that makes sense it's all he's the he's the guiding force you know he's the green light and then i'm just standing there you know oh so you're gatsby

you're the titular great character i see how this metaphor is wending well we uh got some numbers and stats here and the first first number, I'm still processing it, I think this number is close to 30 million. And that is the all time worldwide sales total for this book as of January 2020. Close to 30 million copies ever sold. Yeah, that's one of those numbers that becomes abstract. So you have to take some time to parse it. It's 30,000, 000 is how i try to think of it yeah do you think that isma or do you know is that mostly up to required high school reading like is that the sweet residuals place to be for a classic author or the estate thereof

yeah it's definitely for the estate another another number we have here is less than 25 000 and less than 25 000 was the total sales ever at the time of fitzgerald's death in 1940 the book was published in 1925 so in 15 years of existence they only sold less than 25 000 copies and then all the rest is after his death i thought you were gonna say that's how many people have actually read it because it's also one that you just have it's a catcher in the rye if you will oh um citizen cane catcher's another one like huck finn where i feel like every school has it unless they've objected to elements of it yeah it for some reason we it wasn't taught but i sought it out because i heard it was intense and it kind of is when you're a teen. But that's not the point of this show.

But it's amazing. I'm always fascinated by people whose work comes to such prominence after their death. If you could go back in time and tell Beethoven that cell phone ringtones would be going, that cell phone ringtones would be going, dun-dun-dun-dun. And he thought of that. One day in his life, he thought of that. You just want to be able to communicate or hope that they know somehow.

It's so interesting. It also gives you a great ego out, because I can assume my comedy will become seminal. I'm just failing now in life but eventually oh i'll be john stewart of you know our generation after i'm dead after i'm dead you understand um did fitzgerald generally have success in life or not so much yeah let's that's a perfect question for a little bit later because yeah that's that's the thing oh okay yeah yeah for sure i but i love that thing of going to beethoven or something like

i wish i could tell him there's also a number here that it sells more than 500 000 copies in the u.s every year uh like these days not in the past but like it it vastly outsells what he sold in life in a single year and probably mainly through high schools and stuff yeah and it's so interesting because i don't find myself referencing it in a pop culturey way or a comedy way i never find myself in conversation rarely with people about the great gatsby current situation notwithstanding um so it has this i want yeah i'm interested to talk about what cultural impact it's had or historical impact beyond just we all read it and we're like yep i've ingested that we're all aware of the plot of the great gatsby loosely yeah in the u.s we are just assigned to

know about it like not just in a school sense, like in a deep sense. It's just like, that's one of the ones. USA Today also says it's been translated into 42 languages. So other countries and cultures have it, but I feel like it's pretty specific to the United States. I also, maybe it's worth saying, I think this book is pretty good. Fitzgerald is especially good at turns of phrase and capturing moments. And it's pretty brief. book is pretty good Fitzgerald is especially good at turns of phrase and capturing moments and uh you know and it's pretty brief I feel like also it was not only a novel assigned in school but

it was the one that I knew kids who would say like oh well that one I could I could at least kind of enjoy like I hated all of the rest of English class and that one was like pretty all right it's readable and there's violence and murder and sure you know that one in Lord of the Flies you're like these kids are crazy. They're wilding out. They're killing each other. This is great. I don't know if you got Lord of the Flies.

We got Lord of the Flies. Yeah, we got that in school too. And people were like, yeah, brutal, brutal island life. Heck yeah, let's do it. I remember everyone taking the exact wrong lesson, like playing Lord of the Flies at recess, you know, as a response to lord of the flies like it's a cautionary tale simon is christ on the cross dying in horrible pain

oh i know but i have the conch so shut up well and a couple more numbers here one of them uh relates to school very well because it's the number five to two that is the margin of a vote it was a five to two vote by an alaska school district to ban the great gatsby from their classrooms in april of 2020 oh like this year uh they banned it on the grounds of it having sexual references five to two in favor of bannings it was banned yeah so in the era of it having sexual references. Five to two in favor of bannings. It was banned. Yeah. So in the era of everyone has a phone that just has the unlimited sum of all human knowledge, they're trying to make sure their kids don't read The Great Gatsby.

It just feels like, stay down, man. You've lost. It's over. Society is way past exposing your kid to the great gatsby at too young an age it's just seems moot right like what are you doing worry about internet hardcore pornography warping their like sense of romance or sexual intimacy don't worry about the great gatsby it's just not a big. It's not what's corrupting the children. After this, I'm going to put on a virtual reality headset

and pretend to murder people. That's got to mess with me a lot more than the Great Gatsby. That's all I'm saying. Because also, it's a district that's called the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District. I learned that Alaska has boroughs instead of counties. So it's basically an entire county. It's a district that includes the city of Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin, among

other people, is from. And they banned The Great Gatsby and four other books. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Whoa. Whoa. Okay. So I don't know Tim O'Brien, but the rest give me a very strong, and I don't know if Palin's hometown supporter, but they sound like there's a clear agenda there.

They just don't like things from the vantage point of anyone downtrodden or saying that society is f***ed up. There, that's my one swear i used it that's good time yeah that's very interesting it's probably i have to assume a small population so they can do some fringe stuff more easily than like major urban centers so i think you probably just have a very aggressive faction or school board or yeah uh you know some movers and shakers who are like i don't want my kids reading catch 22 they may not sign their lives away to the military to the military industrial complex and same with the things they carried it's about like vietnam

veterans and their experiences yeah so it's all i think it's that kind of thing what was the there was one that sounded really harmless sorry can you give me the list one more time? Yeah, the other two are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, which I think were both simply too black for this district, is my guess. That's what I said. By harmless, I meant like positive fonts of empathy and justice. Like, you can't ban those. That's crazy. We don't want to know.

This ended up getting national attention. And another native of Wasilla is some of the members of Portugal the Man, which is a Grammy-winning rock band. That's awesome. And they announced they'd buy the book for any students who wanted it, all of those books. And then the following month, they held a vote that reinstated the books. Because that's awesome. Among other things, people think it's really silly to ban The Great Gatsby. Because like you said, it was racy for 1925.

And now it's 2020. So it's fine. It's okay. And then there's one last number here. And it relates to access to the book. January 1st, 2021, which is a date. New Year's Day 2021 is when The Great Gatsby enters the public domain, which I did not know until I was researching this. It's like on the cusp of the public domain, or reason the boz lorman reimagining happened that's interesting he could have waited what six years and just done it for free yeah that's very yeah as a aspiring filmmaker who has no access to money i love public domain stuff and it always gives me like abe and i often talk about doing a dracula thing because you don't have to pay anyone Dracula at this point is free game

and there's a few characters like that obviously there's things you can't do like Dracula doing certain things that are iconic to certain IPs or franchises but my point is an old vampire Great Gatsby remake is coming soon from us that's very it's honestly very exciting i think there's a lot of things you could do with the great gatsby because capitalism and statements on it are still pretty relevant right it's even yeah it's even being released to tell stories about capitalism now like it's it's getting around it that's great yeah yeah it also uh it it would have hit the public domain in the year 2000. And we'll have linked things about the Copyright Act of 1976, if you want to understand why. But it was going to be

public domain in 2000. And then in 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended that by 20 years. And so now it'll take until 2021 for it to get there. Did that apply to everything? Did Sonny Bono champion like add 20 years to everything, all the public domain stuff? They don't get it yet. Yeah, it was any works published with a copyright notice and with copyright renewed. Interesting. Which means basically anything anyone's tried to ever sell or do anything with. Yeah.

I just wonder what rubric anyone uses to decide what's fair for humanity. Like, I don't know, after 200 years, do whatever you want. I think it should be 180 years. It's fuzzy, whatever. It's all good. And yet huge lawsuits are based on the exact cutoff date. So if you're writing your Great Gatsby fan fiction just hold on hold on a little longer oh also um the great gatsby was published by a company called scribner in 1925 and they still own it to this day so it's been their top seller many of the years they've existed and and they're they made a graphic novel of it a few years ago and are trying to just like prepare they say for the for this now being something they don't own all by themselves oh and do they not have another man that's so interesting to think because that's a major publishing house i've heard of yeah to think so many careers and so much artistic fulfillment and expression is just based on we got to keep moving copies of the great gatsby that's what keeps all this going.

That's this building is made of Great Gatsby's piled on each other. Yeah. That's just crazy to think about. Or who I wonder if they have anything that's waxing as Great Gatsby Waynes, you know, like if they got The Secret or a Harry Potter and they're like, this is our new, you know, we can transition. or a Harry Potter, and they're like, this is our new, you know, we can transition. That's just crazy. Because thinking of having several friends who are novelists, they exist in this sort of universe of, look, there's Stephen King, and then there's the occasional self-help book, like The Secret, that just dominates all culture for some reason, or the occasional autobiography where someone lies on Oprah, and that dominates for some reason and then there's like thousands and thousands of writers who just sell a couple thousand books

yeah always yeah and man i that would be cool even to go back in time and tell f scott fitzgerald how many authors would eat off of the great gatsby you know that's touching in a way yeah definitely because also scribner apparently got bought by simon and schuster which is another big house but like that business and on the business above it like you say they've probably been able to take so many risks and try so many things because they just had like a gatsby swimming pool of money from the gatsby book like in case they needed to fall back on it the book that begat thousands of more books that's cool yeah and we have three big takeaways about it let's go into takeaway number one

during f scott fitzgerald's life everyone thought the great gatsby was when fitzgerald's career fell apart oh it was uh it's a really and it took researching it to find out that like, at best, people thought The Great Gatsby was a somewhat OK book that failed commercially completely and like took a very promising and huge author off the rails and messed up their life. it have been i'm sorry i know this is adjacent observation but how cool would it have been to live at a time when a book coming out by a famous author was like a new tarantino movie coming out where everyone yeah around the water cooler was like the new have you read that new gatsby thing yeah i didn't like it that much i thought it it was overhyped or whatever. Just to have such a focus on books would be so great. You don't get that these days. Totally. But yeah, what went into why did people feel it jumped the shark?

Is it just hard sales? Like it didn't make sales, so we guess it fell apart. And did he have successes after that? So the super short version is, yeah, the reviews were just okay. The sales were considered disastrous. And then he barely wrote anything else the whole rest of his life, considering how much he had done before this book. And for multiple reasons, he just was not as productive anymore after this.

Yeah. And also in the run-up to it, Fitzgerald became famous by writing two other novels before it. And his first two novels were huge successes. One of them was called This Side of Paradise in 1920. And then the second one was called The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922. And they are both books about like jazz age fancy people loving and living hard it's it's like not that different from the great gatsby from what i can tell but it's it's that same zone you know okay so maybe his thing had run its course

for all we know but that's still a pretty good stint i would say three major pieces uh on a theme yeah the idea that a career fell apart at a certain point i always wonder what that's about because knock on wood that hasn't happened to me i haven't hit a period where i suddenly had writer's block forever like it never went away but i do know artists retire it's weird as an artist who's mid my thing i think you'd probably agree i can't imagine i feel like most people in the arts imagine they'll do it till they die so it's weird when someone stops even after a commercial failure yeah and he and you're doing great and also he uh he did like keep working it's just he only ended up ended up and when I say only, it's very hard to write a novel. But he wrote one other novel, and then there was another one that was almost done and published

after his death. But he died at age 44 in 1940. It seems like from a mix of lifelong alcoholism, and then also tuberculosis, and then also mental stress and fatigue and everything else. So a lot of things piled up to end his life relatively young. He also wrote a few other short stories that were very popular before The Great Gatsby. He wrote one called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that is now a major motion picture and all kinds of other things. And he also wrote one called The Diamond as Big as the Ritz that is a pretty wild, almost sci-fi story

where someone has a diamond that's the size of a mountain and then there's a bunch of conspiracy and cover-up about it. It's pretty fun. And apparently scholars have looked at Fitzgerald's tax returns and in the run-up to The Great Gatsby he was earning the modern equivalent of three hundred thousand dollars a year as a as a writer like just from hugely successful books and short stories and everything else yet he only paid 750 in taxes which at that time was more than enough he was

very responsible i never thought of it that way if you bring that headline far enough back into the past it's like what a generous man wow yeah this french nobleman paid 750 francs in taxes wow he didn't have to do anything he rules by divine right but sorry sorry, you were saying. No, yeah. But so Fitzgerald was famous and successful and seen as, you're right on about it. It's almost that thing of Tarantino has a new movie coming. It's like, oh, Fitzgerald, this really promising, already successful young writer, has a new book coming. We should check out The Great Gatsby. He proceeded to sell only about 20,000 copies that first year.

He then had a lot of reviews that were mostly not good. A newspaper called the New York World, one of the major New York papers, their headline was Fitzgerald's latest dud was the headline. They just went for it. Yeah, this movie sucks, says Roger Ebert. And we'll link more quotes from critics like hl menken called it quote no more than a glorified anecdote that's kind of true other people said it was like not the work of a wise and mature novelist like they really panned it pretty hard that's crazy so why aren't i always wonder about stuff like this why aren't we taught the brave and the damned or whatever it was in school?

Right. What machinations of culture decide this one is going to be stuck in the public consciousness forever and ever? And we don't care what the reviews said. Everyone thinks, oh, yeah, that's one of the best books ever written. Not in a way where you believe that passionately, but it just is. Just like Citizen Kane in the world of filmmaking and citizen kane is very good but still it's just in that rarefied air and i know i assume you can't answer that because you're not a damn wizard oh no i used my second swear but uh it's fascinating to me how we select art that goes beyond just art like a Beatles level.

You know what I mean? It's remembered for, or Beethoven is more apt, remembered for a thousand years versus a couple hundred. There's like this stratosphere of art. And I feel like the great Gatsby made it. And I have no idea why. Because I bet the reviewers on the whole are not terribly off. sphere of art and i feel like the great gatsby made it and i have no idea why because i bet i bet the reviewers on the whole are not terribly off like i bet his other books are have more pizzazz or something to them there's probably a reason that the majority opinion was that way

and yet we're like no ride or die the great gatsby forever our children will know daisy right and we don't read his other novels about rich Jazz Age people. He also coined the term the Jazz Age with a short story collection called Tales of the Jazz Age. So he was like, really doing well, but we picked this one and not the other ones. We're like, no, those other very similar novels don't do it. Forget it. I think we read Diamond as Big as the Ritz as well, but that's the only other one. Yeah. Like you say, there's no way to know exactly how it as well but that's the only other one yeah yeah like you say there's no way to know exactly how it flipped but um there's an article here from npr which it's called

how gatsby went from a moldering flop to a great american novel it's by maureen corrigan who's a literary scholar and she says that one reason the reviews were bad is that people reviewed it with the the perspective of this is a crime novel so let's think of it like a crime novel which to us feels nuts because we received the book in a classroom this is a great novel right full of symbols is what we're told yeah like ingest this novel in an intellectual way which feels which it bears up against that's what it does have going for it. As a crime novel, you're just like, who's Gatsby? He's this lonely guy. Oh, okay. It's not that interesting as a whodunit or who is it? Yeah, because also Fitzgerald has Nick Carraway just tell you his background partway through,

and then the rest of the book happens. It's not a mystery. It's a book where there's some murder and a car accident and some bootleggers and things. But the scholar Maureen Corrigan says that it was pretty sexually explicit for 1925 and with all the violence and car crashes on top of it, people thought, oh, okay, this is like Fitzgerald doing some kind of pulp novel. I guess, is it a fun pulp novel?

Not in particular, bad book. Oh, wow. doing some kind of pulp novel i guess is it a fun pulp novel not in particular bad book oh wow because even as shy as a child i didn't scan it as racy or edgy at all so it's interesting to think yeah that it was almost tarantino-esque where they're like well there's so much like tna and blood spraying everywhere i don't know what he's doing. What book are you talking about? The Great Gatsby. That's crazy. Right.

But I mean, times change. I can see if you thought that he was going for a really titillating rollercoaster ride, I think the middle would be like, this is very contemplative for a rollercoaster ride. It's the kind of book that reads well when you're forced to read it that's very true i don't know that it begs to be read page to page it's not like i have to know what's going to happen with nick carraway who has is like the protagonist but is

not the main character so to speak yeah no yeah i think think it benefits from being taught as an academic exercise. So that might be why it found its fit in academia, you know? Yeah, right. It's like not for what the audience thought it would be. There's a great New Yorker article by David Denby where he talks about how Fitzgerald felt. And Fitzgerald had a friend named Edmund Wilson, and he wrote him a letter and said, of all the the reviews even the most enthusiastic not one had the slightest idea what the book was about end quote so I love that I love that he didn't let the bastards grind him down because that feels correct that at least he went to his grave presumably thinking no no no it's about a ceaseless hunger that capitalism and certain events in

your past create in you that can never be filled. They missed the point. I'm glad he knew they missed the point rather than just going, oh, I guess I did a bad job. Yeah, me too. Yeah, I like that. Don't read the comments, F. Scott Fitzgerald. And then it's also the kind of thing where Fitzgerald was famous and popular going into it. So the book kind of kept getting chances to be popular in his time. There was a the following year 1926. Producers put on a stage play of it. And then Paramount made a silent movie of it all at once. Neither were popular, neither popularized the book. Then also in 1934, they tried to put Gatsby into the Modern Libraries collection. It got dropped by 1939 because it didn't sell. It was like, this is a famous guy who just wrote a new book. We're

going to keep trying to give it chances. And apparently in 1937, he was in Hollywood with a new girlfriend and he said, hey, let me get you copies of my books to like show myself off. And they went from bookstore to bookstore and couldn't find F. Scott Fitzgerald books. He was just not popular enough to be in stores for himself. It was a real quibby moment, it feels like. Just all the buildup and expectation following through with the deployment anyway, no one's interested.

You missed your window. Your window will come when 12 to 14 year olds are forced to read you a hundred years from now, 80 years from now. Yeah. It kind of, cause also, uh,

even his New York times obituary and I, I didn't know they could be this mean. Said, the great Gatsby's a dud. Like, man, why'd you got to fit that in? It's weird. The obituary said it was his best book, but it also said, quote, the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled, end quote. What?

In his obit in December 1940. What a dunk in your obituary. Yeah. Beloved father and husband, we expected more, frankly. Yeah, right. But he is dead. We can confirm he's dead.

A lot of potential there. A lot of squandered potential there this has been the new york times that's crazy to me wow next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway before that we're gonna take a little break we'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, I think we can go from there into kind of the answer to why is it around today takeaway number two the great gatsby is famous today because it fit in the pockets of world war ii soldiers and that's a little bit of a simplification, but the World War II time period and situation is how this book goes from being basically completely unsold in Fitzgerald's life, dies 1940, to being the most well-known American novel of all time.

Were there just no other small paperback books? Why The Great Gatsby? why the great gatsby so in a there were many books that size and shape and this was kind of the most popular one and this is again maureen corrigan very helpful scholar on this because apparently armed services additions were created for the troops in world war ii especially american ones it was a project of american publishers and editors and librarians and paper manufacturers who all had an interest in getting books to the troops as best they could. Paper manufacturers, obviously self-serving, but the other ones said, hey, how can we get some books out to the men on the front? So they were still pushing it. They're like, we still have this backlog of great Gatsby that needs to get out into the world. And it finally clicked with this books for soldiers program.

Essentially they tried it as a play. They tried it as a black and white movie. That's amazing because in a way the great Gatsby itself has an endless hunger that can never be fulfilled to be read by people. The great Gatsby really wants you to know the story of the great gatsby it seems very important that's so soldiers i mean i it's not a bad story to read if you're in war because i think it would be comforting it's almost like how in quarantine animal crossing new horizons had such a moment you'd be reading about fancy people in the jazz

age their low stakes problem involved that they're rich but they're not happy you know and they have a party but they wish that other people were here that aren't here it's like yeah i'm getting shot at this is a nice vacation from what i'm going through 100 the great gatsby's doings around town i think i get i totally get that i'd rather read that than a catch-22 where i'm like look it's too late man i'm living it i signed up i don't even know also like you said this is a book that the soldiers did definitely choose to like they were it was given to them partly because scribner had like a warehouse of remaindered copies of it, and they knew they weren't making money on it, so why not put it in this thing?

But there were more than a thousand books turned into armed services editions. They printed more than one million copies of various books. But by 1945, over 123,000 copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed to troops. And all the armed services editions were printed at a size where they were a long rectangle. So it was designed to fit in a soldier's coat pocket or jacket pocket while they were doing stuff. Oh, it really was a weird shape, not just pocket-sized. It was shaped bizarrely.

Yeah. For comfort. Okay, cool. And also, apparently the biggest distribution of armed services editions was right before d-day because according to nbr quote eisenhower's staff made sure that every guy stepping onto a landing craft in the south of england right on the eve of d-day would have an armed services edition in his pocket end quote and so gatsby was one of the key books like like on the beaches of normandy and then from there the living, like, read it as they worked their way through

France and stuff. Yeah. That's just such an interesting textural element to go back and add to the my simulacrum of what World War II was like. That, like, that was the popular movie, so to speak. Or in the, you know, in the burned out, bombed out buildings in between like skirmishes, they were like, you get to the part about Daisy. Oh yeah. I'm reading that too. That's just great to know that that was the thing of the minute during D-Day. Wow.

And then, uh, so we had this situation where basically the, most of the U.S. Army in World War II reads the book. And then at the same time, you have a New York Times obituary in 1940 saying, hey, this author you've heard of, The Great Gatsby, was actually his best book, which was not the common belief at the time. For some reason, the unknown obituary writer said this. And then also, back when he published it, Fitzgerald sent copies of the book to several famous writers who he liked a lot to try to get them excited about it. And they said extremely nice things about it, but they said it privately and it was published in 1945 in a collection of Fitzgerald's letters. So you have all these positive notices all of a sudden all at once.

And then from there, the book takes off and it's it becomes a pretty much a huge bookstore hit and everything else by the 50s wow what a roller coaster ride that's pretty cool yeah and wait when did he pass and he passed in 1940 so he just missed it yeah that's yeah that's like an f scott fitgerald story. He died, and like the following year, they're like, The Great Gatsby, the most important book ever written. Yeah, I found, we'll link, it's a New York Times article from 1960, and the title is like The Great Gatsby 35 years later, because that was the timeline.

But the writer says, quote, Now 10 years later later the obvious values of the book have been reasonably established there remain a few doubts of the greatness of gatsby because like just just post-war all of society was like i'm i'm moving to the suburbs i'm getting a huge cadillac and the great gatsby is a good book like that's that's what i think now it's his life i drink cow milk i like like The Great Gatsby. Yeah. I am going to reread The Great Gatsby.

That's my major takeaway, personally. Yeah, you've Casablanca'd me on this, where it's like everyone says Casablanca's good, so you watch it and you're like, hey, Casablanca is really good. I bet The Great Gatsby is kind of like that. But and at the same time, it's like I find it kind of cold. Like it's still that book that was assigned to me and I was required to be interested

in, even though it's worthwhile. It's a strange feeling. That's what I meant by that cringy. They feel like aliens a bit. And I wonder if that's the discrepancy in time period or a choice of or affectation of fitzgerald's style but yeah it almost feels like i mean i my brain lives entirely in movie land so sorry i reference solely movies but like uh you know kubrick yeah feels very i would compare the way people feel in Kubrick to the way Fitzgerald writes people where they're so prim and proper and the subtext is roiling.

And like, you know, he understands human emotions because that's what the plot beats are based on and that's what the characters are motivated by. But they just talk very matter of fact and straight and in an inaccessible way. and straight and in an inaccessible way. Yeah. I guess from a fuzzy 2020 perspective where I feel like on the whole, people are more comfortable openly discussing their emotional state than let's say the thirties. Sure. Yeah.

Where it's like, it is not fitting for a man to cry and things like that. Yeah. That's done on, I think. And I think we can get into our final takeaway, which takes us into the modern era. Takeaway number three. Almost every modern trend inspired by the Great Gatsby seems to learn the wrong lesson from the book. And we have three main ones here. We haven't really summarized the book for anybody, but I think people know it.

And if they don't, well, I hope they'll catch up on why these don't make sense as trends do about it. Yeah, hit me. What are the three? Because I can't think off the top of my head anything that the great Gatsby has to this day influenced. There's a few here. The most common one is definitely gatsby parties

oh which i have heard of i've never been to one yeah but a gatsby party is more or less you throw a theme party where people wear 1920s stuff and and drink a lot but people specifically call them gatsby parties and like celebrate that book as a an art style yeah cocaine sounds plentiful at a party like that i would imagine a lot of gilded things yeah okay i've heard of those always as roaring 20 part roaring 20s party i feel like people have sort of or at least just in my lived experience people have divorced the idea from they call it a flapper party or yeah but yeah that's totally you're right that gatsby is probably the crystallization of the tropes that we consider to be i don't need to learn about the 20s and 30s i can just picture great gatsby type stuff that's the 20s and 30s

yeah at least when it comes to rich folks for sure and it also seems like the baslerman movie in 2013 like spiked a bunch of these. We have an article here from The Atlantic called The Sublime Cluelessness of Throwing Lavish Great Gatsby Parties by Zachary M. Seward. He picks out a particularly ironic one where it's a group of Princeton University students organizing a Gatsby party. The organizer said, quote, it's going to be big, it's going to be grandiose. And then it was supposed to cost more than $20,000 to put the party on. And then Seward points out the kicker, which is that F. Scott Fitzgerald went to Princeton, but then dropped out and really didn't like it there. And apparently he once called it the pleasantest country club

in America, end quote, like in a bad way. Right. Like he really hated Princeton. And they're like, time for a Gatsby party. Here we go. Yeah, that's choosing to dress as the characters in the political cartoon that was published yesterday mocking you. And you're like, I like the looks of that. Oh, my name's already on it. Perfect.

I will dress as that. Yeah. They're just leaning into it wow i bet that was a baller party i heard jay-z was there not to not to summarize the whole book but like gatsby is throwing these parties purely to get the attention of daisy and is not enjoying them at. And it's a very sad thing in context. And it's also a waste of money. And there's a lot of like over drinking and accidents and stuff happening at them.

Like you're not supposed to come out of the book thinking like, man, I got to have champagne in that guy's yard. Like you're supposed to feel other things. It's a guy being tricked into thinking that the only way to win her attention is to flex status symbols and not realizing that it doesn't matter how much he escalates that that's not her area of interest so it never works and it just gets more and more desperate and sad and that's fitting that's good princeton guys throw on that party that makes sense to me now i love it i also i also feel like the people you know or have heard of who did flapper parties they probably know all this stuff

they were like i'm not gonna call it a gatsby party because because gatsby was a really sad dude like i want to have a nice party that's a period piece which is totally which totally makes sense like great you know i want to wear leather fringe and dance like that. Yeah, that's the real. That's all I want. Say, yeah, she. Stuff like that. There's also or there's a couple other Gatsby parties. One of them was thrown also in 2013 by the company Airbnb. And they mass invited the press to a party in East Hampton at a mansion that is on Airbnb, apparently.

to a party in East Hampton at a mansion that is on Airbnb apparently. But Gawker points out that it's a PR party. It's not actually for people to enjoy, which actually fits the book's parties completely because they're not for Gatsby to enjoy. But then it's still sad for your company. It's not a good vibe. Yeah, terrible idea, Alex. It doesn't work at all it doesn't match

there's also one more gatsby party here and it's probably like the most famous and documented one michiganlive.com wrote up a gatsby party that was thrown in flint michigan in 1987 and it was thrown at the home of charles stewart Mott who was a co-founder of General Motors and it was then documented in the 1989 Michael Moore documentary Roger and Me where he intercut the lavish Gatsby party with people in Flint getting evicted from

their homes because like that's another whole issue with a Gatsby party is just the wealth inequality and so on like you don't want to you're kind of celebrating it by doing the party yeah obviously egregious that's just over the line that's ridiculous um yeah yeah it's just what it is not so great gatsby i have no clever joke because that's ass yeah it's pretty dark screw that that party. Two more much smaller trend things here. One of them, it's very Gatsby to me because I think it's totally made up and fictional,

but there's a few internet articles. And the main source here is the New York Post in June of 2018, claiming the headline is, Gatsby-ing is the confusing new millennial dating trend. That's the headline of the article. They say that Gatsby-ing is the confusing new millennial dating trend. That's the headline of the article. They say that Gatsby-ing is a dating trend. It's when you go on a first date and then pine for the person until you both die, never speaking again. Because that would save people a lot of trouble, frankly.

It's not a bad system. No, what is Gatsby-ing, Alex? It is like equally strange. So the article claims the name comes from Jay Gatsby, Alex? It is like equally strange edits. So the name, the article claims the name comes from Jay Gatsby's actions in the book, which is what we described, like building up massive wealth, throw a party just to get somebody's attention. Then the New York Post story says, quote, just one difference.

Instead of buying a mansion, remaking themselves and throwing a fancy wild fate, they just post a photo or video on their Instagram or Snapchat story designed to attract that special someone. Think of Gatsby-ing as a highbrow version of the thirst trap. End quote. Sure. Well, that's just living. Show me a zoomer who has said the phrase. Yeah, I'm Gatsby-ing this guy. Yeah. He's nagging me. I'm Gatsbying this guy yeah he's nagging me i'm gatsbying him it balances out i just don't buy it yeah i think you're right that that was just a clickbait title that swept through somehow yeah because and i think the post did it and then other sites said let's just repeat this story because maybe people will click on the name gatsby and and to me that is as made up as gatsby's whole backstory because

he's secretly a guy from north dakota who's like who like snuck his way into wealth and his bootlegger and stuff like it's all it's all just as fake as the book you know it's all a trick and then the final thing here i feel like with the right teacher it could be good but also with the wrong teacher it could be bad this is uh something that's called my green light classroom activity which is this atlantic story about gatsby parties and things they point out that at the boston latin school which is a grade 7 to 12 exam school in boston some students did an activity where the teacher had them write up their green light, which is in the book, Gatsby is like fixated on the green light on the dock of Daisy and Tom's house. And it's the symbol of everything he wants. So quote,

on the wall of the classroom, students had written their own green lights on a large piece of green construction paper in the shape of a light bulb. And the green lights included pediatric neurosurgeon, earn a black belt, make it to junior year become incredibly rich now those are some examples then i made them stare at their green lights until they saw their youth fade having accomplished nothing then they understood the great gatsby right yeah that's just such a weirdly dark narrative to turn into that reach for the stars baby right you're haunting green light the gatsby never reached that's so funny because like i could see a an amazing teacher being like do this activity and then your goals are great but also like try to have perspective

on things and if you don't reach your goal you can still have a fulfilling life other ways and so on or this is a teacher who's just like gatsby wanted stuff and you do too that's the activity boom like it's it could really go two ways that's what i mean is it shows such a it's such a basic understanding of the great gatsby that i question whether the teacher finished reading the great gatsby to think that this is a good idea green light it literally could have been a green traffic light and it's just go go for your dreams don't stop but you're like no i want to tie it in to this 1930s tale of a an imposter yeah this 1920s tale of a jazz age imposter pining for something he can never achieve weird yeah that's interesting that it won't be weird

to those kids until they get like four years older and read the great gatsby then they'll know then they'll be like wait what did that teacher mean by that i'm never gonna get my thing okay dang yeah at the end of the book, Gatsby is murdered. Okay, well, that's interesting. Doesn't he die face down in a pool, if I remember? Yeah, that's my memory, but I could be wrong. Yeah, the auto mechanic George Wilson believes Gatsby murdered his wife and comes and kills him. So, yeah, it's a pretty dark ending for Gatsby.

The teacher was like, yeah, no, that's what I meant. Mechanics will club you all to death. I hate teaching. I just want out of here. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Michael Swaim for beating on Boats Against the Current, born back ceaselessly into the past with me. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Ginevra King. I don't think you know the name Ginevra King. You do know the novel that came out of it. Hint, hint, wink, wink, significant other noises. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than a dozen other bonus shows that do have the pages cut, reference to the book, and to back this entire podcast operation.

And thank you for exploring The Great Gatsby with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, during F. Scott Fitzgerald's life, everyone thought the Great Gatsby was a tragic turning point in his career. Takeaway number two, the Great Gatsby is famous today because it was easy to fit in World War II soldiers' pockets. And takeaway number three, somehow, basically every modern trend inspired by the Great Gatsby learns the wrong lesson from the book. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. I feel like many of you already follow Michael Swaim. You know who that

is. If you don't, I really hope you check out his new work over at IGN.com. A ton of videos, a lot of fun. We'll have a link for that. And we will have a link to Patreon.com slash Small Beans. Patreon.com slash Small Beans brings you all of the videos and podcasts by Michael and Abe Epperson and Adam Ganser and Christian Ramirez and many other people who I'm not mentioning because I'm running out of air. many other people who I'm not mentioning because I'm running out of air. Now that I've taken another breath, just please support that operation because they're doing great and fun stuff in so many ways. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in The New Yorker. It's called The Serious Superficiality of the Great Gatsby. It's by Joshua Rothman. Another great article in The Atlantic. It's called The Sublime Cluelessness of Throwing Lavish Great Gatsby Parties.

It's by Zachary M. Seward. And then a fascinating article in The New York Times. It's titled Gatsby 35 Years Later, and it's written by Arthur Mizner in April of 1960. So it is a time capsule of America finding out about this book. So find those and more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra special thanks to a majority of U.S. voters. You did the right thing. Good job.

And then extra different thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.