April 8, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Three Phone Calls

[On April 10^th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have my problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and important novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellow GatsbyStudiers!]

On three phone calls that illustrate the classic novel’s thoughtful portrayal of Modern technologies.

When you teach a book as often as I have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), you start to focus on different layers each time. Along with the dialogues with other authors/works like Nella Larsen’s Passing that I talk about in that hyperlinked post, in my last couple times reading and teaching the novel I’ve thought a lot about just how many early 20^th century technologies play central roles in its story. That’s especially true of automobiles, of course; not only in the book’s climactic events (which I won’t spoil here for the few people who managed not to read Fitzgerald’s novel in high school), but in the central presence (geographically as well as symbolically) of Wilson’s gas station and auto repair shop. It’s true of Hollywood film, both in presences at Gatsby’s parties (and Fitzgerald’s career) and in the novel’s underlying themes of surface and depth, illusion and reality. But it’s also certainly true of the still relatively new technology, particularly when it comes to the idea of every household having one, that was the telephone.

As we meet the novel’s main characters in the opening few chapters, Fitzgerald uses a couple key phone calls to present mysterious and ambiguous sides to them. In Chapter 1, as Nick Carraway visits the beautiful home of his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom for a dinner party, Tom gets a mysterious phone call; Daisy suspects that it’s his mistress on the other end, but of course can’t know for certain to whom he’s speaking. In Chapter 3, as Nick attends one of the lavish parties at his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s mansion, Gatsby gets a mysterious call; other partygoers suggest that it’s a criminal business partner of Gatsby’s on the other end, but of course no one knows for certain to whom he’s speaking. These calls reveal both men as defined by secrets, dynamics that precisely because of their ambiguity are a source of intense speculation by those around them. And those secrets can only be maintained in these scenes because of the technology of the phone, without which their conversants would have to visit in person (or write a letter, which of course would be far less immediate).

[Serious SPOILERS in this paragraph.] At the end of the novel, after all the aforementioned climactic events have unfolded, Nick has his own, quite different phone call. He is trying to organize a funeral for Gatsby (or maybe James Gatz, since his father who knows him by that name is one of the few who attends that tragic event), and manages to speak with Gatsby’s elusive business partner Meyer Wolfshiem on the phone. In one of the novel’s only moments where a character says directly what he’s feeling and thinking, shares what seems at least to be the unvarnished truth (even when Gatsby and Nick have their heart-to-hearts, it’s always an open question whether Gatsby is telling the truth), Wolfshiem confesses to Nick that he can’t possibly be seen at the funeral, that it would be far too destructive for his reputation and relationships. This is the side of the telephone that allows us to be more honest, more ourselves, in its conversations than we might manage to be if had to face someone and something in the flesh. Just another layer to how Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the technologies and contexts of its rapidly evolving Modernist world.

Next GatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 7, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s Pool

[On April 10^th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have my problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and important novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellow GatsbyStudiers!]

On the tragic dip that’s as difficult to pin down as the man taking it.

Jay Gatsby spends his final moments relaxing in his home’s luxurious swimming pool. As Nick Carraway is about to leave his neighbor for what turns out to be the last time, Gatsby’s gardener arrives to drain the pool; fall is arriving and the gardener is worried that “leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.” But Gatsby asks him to hold off for one more day, noting to Nick, “you know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer.” And so it is during Gatsby’s first and only dip in his own swimming pool, lying on “a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer,” that the grieving George Wilson arrives, an “ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” Wilson is armed and crazed, seeking vengeance for the tragic death of his wife Myrtle, and kills both Gatsby and himself.

It’s a striking and evocative image and moment, as so many of Fitzgerald’s are. And like so many others in the novel, it seems clearly symbolic—but of what, exactly? The imminent shift in seasons feels significant—Gatsby is a novel of summer, and here the season has ended but Gatsby is not willing to let it go, not least because he has not yet had a chance to enjoy it. Or perhaps the pool is simply a microcosm of Gatsby’s palatial home—the height of luxury and excess, of the Roaring 20s and their decadent atmosphere, but offering those thrills less for its actual owner (who barely makes use of it as anything other than a host for visitors) and more for all those guests who come to bathe in its excesses. Or maybe it’s just the final irony in a novel full of them—Gatsby finally takes a moment to relax, for what feels like the first time in years, and looks what it gets him.

All of those interpretations hold water (sorry), but I would also note a historical context that it’s easy for us 21^st century readers to forget: like so many of the novel’s crucial social and technological features (cars, Hollywood films, recorded music), an in-ground swimming pool in the early 1920s represented a striking innovation. The first such pools in America had been open for less than two decades, and were generally public or communal spaces; it was not until more than two decades later, after World War II, that they would become part of the typical imagery of the ideal American home. So as with every aspect of Gatsby’s success, here too he would seem to have been ahead of the curve, helping to embody the American Dream—as well as its dark and violent undersides—as it would continue to develop for the rest of the American Century, and into our own.

Next GatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?

April 4, 2025: Foolish Texts: Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, repeating yesterday’s a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel reframing King Lear from the Fool’s perspective, here are AmericanStudies takeaways from a trio of similar such Shakespearean adaptations:

1)      Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966): Tom Stoppard’s play is quite simply one of the most unique and compelling cultural works I’ve ever encountered, and I’d say the 1990 film adaptation captures its essence (if you’re able to check that out more easily than the play). There are a lot of reasons why, from the philosophical debates to the witty wordplay to the ultimate pathos, but I’d say a significant element in the play’s success is integral to this broader genre of cultural text: it reminds us that many of our greatest literary works (especially from earlier centuries, although the trend undoubtedly continues) focus too fully on elite characters and worlds, and that it’s worth stopping to consider how different the story and our takeaways from it alike might look from the perspective of others (to foreshadow next week’s series, Myrtle Wilson, anyone?).

2)      Shakespeare in Love (1998): Look, I know there are people who think this film (co-written by Tom Stoppard!) is one of the most overrated ever, not least because it beat out Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for the Best Picture Oscar. Maybe all I need to say here is that I 1000% support that Oscar win, and think this is one of the most clever, funny, and ultimately moving films I’ve ever seen. But even if you don’t agree with all of that, I think it’s undeniable that Shakespeare offers a unique and thoughtful perspective on both the creative process and how it intersects with broader historical events. Given how much we tend to think of plays like Romeo and Juliet as timeless or universal, I very much appreciate this film’s reminder that it was created in one time and place, by a playwright and a group of collaborators fully and importantly immersed in that world.

3)      Opheliamachine (2013): I’ve only had the chance to read that Google Books excerpt of Magda Romanska’s postmodern drama (which as you can see only features peripheral materials for and about the play), and so will mostly direct you to check out that excerpt as well as the Wikipedia entry on what sounds like a fascinating attempt to adapt Shakespeare’s characters in a 21^st century world. While there are lots of reasons to create such adaptations, as just these few examples of the genre clearly reflect, I’d say their most important effect is precisely Romanska’s goal: to help us think further about both the original work and our own moment, on their own terms but also and especially in conversation with each other. I love this genre for both those reasons, and look forward to reading Fool soon to add another example!

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 3, 2025: Foolish Texts: This Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

First, a bit of inside baseball: I haven’t yet had a chance to check out either of the texts on which my last two posts in this series will focus. I don’t want to pretend to have specific things to say about them, but I did want to both highlight them and use them as a lens for broader AmericanStudies questions. So in honor of the acclaimed recent sitcom about cholo young men and their families and communities in LA, some thoughts on three other Latino cultural works that each redefined their respective genres (as that sitcom seems to have):

1)      Ruiz de Burton’s novels: Between that post for the American Writers Museum blog and posts here like this one, I’ve said a good bit about María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, one of my favorite 19^th century American authors and a truly unique voice and perspective on our history, community, identity, and more. Here I’ll just add one thing: I wrote in this post about my friend Larry Rosenwald’s excellent book Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (2008), and while Ruiz de Burton published her novels in English, I’d still say she exemplifies a multilingual literary legacy that can help us radically reframe what American literature itself includes and means.

2)      The Salt of the Earth (1954): When it comes to this groundbreaking film about Latino and labor history, I can’t say it any better than did the great film historian Vaughn Joy in that first hyperlinked post for her Review Roulette newsletter. In many ways Salt is in conversation with other films about labor history, including one of my personal favorites from my favorite filmmaker, John Sayles’ Matewan (1987). But in the mid-1950s, with the horrific Operation Wetback in frustratingly full swing, a film about Latino workers represents a truly radical cultural work—and one that likewise embodies an alternative vision of what the era’s “social problem films” could be and do.

3)      In the Heights (2005): As part of a 2016 series on Puerto Rican stories and histories, I wrote about West Side Story (1957), which as I noted there started with very distinct cultural backgrounds for its protagonists before evolving to feature a Puerto Rican heroine (and her even more overtly Puerto Rican friends and community). Given that multilayered evolution, I’d say that the title of “first Latino Broadway musical” was still up for grabs, and that In the Heights might well qualify. But such distinctions are ultimately less important than what cultural works themselves feature and do, and there’s no doubt that the voices and beats, the identities and communities, put on stage by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes added something significant to the genre of the Broadway musical, as each of these texts has in its respective genres.

Last foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 2, 2025: Foolish Texts: Nobody’s Fool

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

Two important American Studies lessons from one of our quirkier, funnier, and more affecting late 20^th century films.

Nobody’s Fool (1994), the Paul Newman starring vehicle based on the 1993 Richard Russo novel of the same name (which I will admit, in a very non-literature professor moment, to not having read), is a very funny movie. It’s funny in its script, which includes plenty of laugh-out-loud funny insults, retorts, and quips; Newman’s Sully gets the lion’s share, but perhaps the single funniest line is given to a judge who critiques a trigger-happy local policemen by noting, “You know my feelings on arming morons: you arm one, you’ve got to arm them all, otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.” And it’s just as funny in its world, its creation of a cast of quirky and memorable characters (who, not coincidentally, are played by some of our most talented character actors, including Jessica Tandy in her final role). That those same characters are ultimately the source of a number of hugely moving moments is a testament to the film’s (and probably book’s) true greatness.

Unlike many of the other late 20^th and early 21^st century films I’ve discussed in this space—Lone Star and City of Hope, Gangs of New York, Jungle Fever and Mississippi Masala, and many more—Nobody’s Fool is not explicitly engaged with significant American Studies issues. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t American Studies lessons to be learned from its subtle and wise perspectives on identity and community. For one thing, Sully’s most central culminating perspective (SPOILER alert, here and in the next paragraph!) is a powerful and important vision of our interconnectedness to the many communities of which we’re a meaningful part: “I just found out I’m somebody’s grandfather. And somebody’s father. And maybe I’m somebody’s friend in the bargain,” Sully notes, rejecting a tempting but escapist future in favor of staying where he is; while he has ostensibly known about all these relationships for years, what he has realized through the film’s events is both how significant these roles are for his own identity and life, and how much his presence or absence in relation to them will in turn influence the people and communities around him.

If Sully has learned that specific, significant lesson by the film’s end, he has also, more simply yet perhaps even more crucially, done something else: recognized the possibility for change. Sully’s not a young man by the time we meet him, and it’s fair to say that he’s very set in his ways; one of his first lines of the film, in response to his landlady (Tandy) offering him tea, is “No. Not now, not ever,” and the exchange becomes a mantra of sorts for the film, shorthand for Sully’s routines (with every person in his life) and the fixity of his perspective and voice. So it’s particularly salient that the film ends with an extended and different version of this exchange: “No. How many times do I have to tell you?” Newman replies, and Tandy answers, “Other people change their minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” “You do? Huh,” are Newman’s final words in the film, and he delivers them with surprise and, it seems to me, a recognition, paired with the earlier epiphany about interconnections, that perhaps Tandy is right, and he has future shifts ahead of him that he can’t yet imagine. If the American future is going to be all that it might be, that’s going to depend on most—perhaps all—of us being open to change, most especially in our own identities and perspectives; Sully’s only begun that trajectory, but exemplifies its possibility, at any point in our lives and arcs, for sure.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

April 1, 2025: Foolish Texts: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudies lessons and limits from an English classic rock anthem.

In one of my early posts, nearly 14 years ago, I wrote about the Australian rock band Midnight Oil (whose excellent latest album I included in this much more recent post), and the limits but also and especially the possibilities of the transnational turn in AmericanStudies. Since I’m writing about a song by another rock group from outside of the US, England’s The Who, in today’s post, I’d ask you to check out that prior one (the first hyperlink above), and then come on back for some thoughts on that transnational band and one of their biggest hits.

Welcome back! The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971) is very much a product of its early 1970s moment, and specifically of a rising sense of pessimism and even cynicism about the prior decade’s social movements and efforts to change the world. That tone is present throughout the song, but most especially in the chorus: “I’ll tip my hat to the new Constitution/Take a bow for the new revolution/Smile and grin at the change all around/Pick up my guitar and play/Just like yesterday/Then I’ll get on my knees and pray/We don’t get fooled again.” A lot has been written about how Watergate contributed to an erosion of trust and shift away from 1960s idealism in the early to mid-1970s, but this song (featured on the album Who’s Next) came out nearly two years before that scandal began to break, and despite its English origins I have to think it can be contextualized in similar perspectives in the US as well. The transition between decades is never a singular nor linear one, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments of demarcation, and I’d say this Who song can help us identify one between the 60s and 70s.

At the same time, it’s fair to say that a bunch of English white men aren’t going to be the best judges of what did and didn’t take place for disadvantaged American communities, and I think this Who song also features some less apt moments along those lines. For example, there’s the second verse: “A change, it had to come/We knew it all along/We were liberated from the fold, that’s all/And the world looks just the same/And history ain’t changed/’Cause the banners, they were all flown in the last war.” Maybe that last line is an anti-Vietnam War sentiment, in which case fair enough on that score, but when it comes to American domestic history I think it’s impossible to argue that the world looked just the same after 1960s changes like (for example) the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the Great Society programs, and more. I’m not a historian of England, and maybe less had really changed across the pond during this turbulent decade; but here in the US, I think it’d be foolish to suggest that “history ain’t changed” over that time.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?

March 31, 2025: Foolish Texts: A Fool’s Errand

[For this year’s April Fool’s series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural works with “fool” in the title. Share your thoughts on foolish texts, with or without the word, for a fool-hearty crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two inspiring layers to one of our most unique novels.

In this early post, I wrote about the life and career of Albion Tourgée, one of my favorite Americans for a wide variety of reasons (including but not limited to those I detailed in that post). I had a good bit to say there about his first novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879), so I’d ask you to check out that post if you would and then come on back for some further thoughts.

Welcome back! As I discussed in that post, the title of Tourgée’s novel is not misleading, as it takes a consistently ironic and self-deprecating perspective on its autobiographical protagonist’s efforts to contribute positively to Reconstruction’s efforts. To be very clear, that doesn’t mean Tourgée is critical of Reconstruction’s goals when it comes to African Americans and equality (he dedicated his life to those goals, as I hope that prior post illustrated at length), but rather that he recognizes that his own youthful, lofty ambitions and sense of self-importance were severely punctured by his experiences during Reconstruction and his recognition of the limitations of both any individual’s reach and (more complicatedly to be sure) societal change. I remain less cynical and more optimistic than the tone of Fool’s Errand (yes, even in early 2025), but I nonetheless think being able to reflect thoughtfully and critically on our own ambitions and arc is an important and inspiring skill to model.

In both that prior post and the paragraph above I focused on the real-life elements of Tourgée’s book—the autobiographical echoes and the political and cultural contexts of Reconstruction. But while those are undoubtedly present and perhaps even paramount in the book, it’s important to add that it is a novel, a work of fiction, as was Tourgée’s follow-up second book about the Black experience of Reconstruction, Bricks Without Straw (1880). Which is to say, having spent years serving as a lawyer, politician, and journalist (careers he would continue fully and successfully for the rest of his life), at the age of 40 Tourgée turned his hand to creative writing and published not one but two novels in a two-year span. And they’re good, with really interesting creative choices (such as the distanced third-person narration of Fool’s) that engage his readers and get them thinking about those aforementioned personal and political contexts. As someone who’s own career and writing have evolved a good bit over the decades, and who hopes that trend continues for the rest of my life, I find this aspect of Tourgée’s not-at-all foolish books particularly inspiring as well.

Next foolish text tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Foolish texts you’d share?