BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT

There seems to have been so much Fitzgerald chat about recently, what with the revelation of The Great Gatsby casting being revealed. To mark the 70 years since his death, Penguin Classics are reissuing six of Fitzgerald's titles - including Gatsby! - in special-edition hardback with covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith:









Penguin Classics - the F Scott Fitzgerald Collection


Um HELLO Christmas present?

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"And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past..."

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Oh, wait, didn't you get the memo? I'm a HUGE GEEK and this is the kinda shiz that makes me MAD excited!

I was recently at a lecture by Jon Snow at Edinburgh University (nerd alert) entitled A Changing Media in a Changing World, where he made lots of interesting points about all the exciting advances in the media BUT shockingly (or perhaps not so much) he gave print newspapers a shelf-life of 25 more years MAX. I get that, I guess. That kind of news is so fleeting and insubstantial, it's out of date as soon as it's printed. People don't care about the physicality of news any more.

That said, he did say that no matter how plugged into the matrix we all become, books will never die out because people will always want to own something permanent, something that's fixed and never changes. You want to own the words themselves, they become your possessions, your thoughts. Yours. You own them metaphorically AND physically.

You can dress Gatsby up however you like, but I will ALWAYS choose reading the book - holding it in my hands, folding down the corners, tucking it into my bag just to keep me company - over downloading it online. Just doesn't feel the same, yi' know?