This blog, this journal, serves to tell the tale of the story ahead of me, while sharing what I have learned thus far – hoping it will help others and knowing it will help myself. I know the conclusion of this tale, but what I don’t know is the journey, the body before the conclusion, the path before the peak. This path before the peak is what I hope to capture through this blog.

This is the pursuit of definite purpose. The pursuit of God. The pursuit of knowledge & wisdom. The pursuit of greatness. The pursuit of millions.

I look forward to sharing more in detail in the near future.

& so the documented journey begins…

Thank you so much for reading,
Marco F.

In the far reaches of space there is an alien race who had long ago isolated themselves from the galaxy. They are the Hathari, whose matriarchal empire expands through the entire K’tharis Star Cluster. The Grand Matriarch, ruler of this mighty Empire, has announced that her grandson, Prince Nerune, is to be her Heir…the first male Heir-Apparent in Hathari history. But his appointment has met strong resistance from the High Council, and conditions are established that he must meet before being confirmed as The Matriarch’s Heir. Now, the untried Prince must navigate through his people’s rigid social structure and the politics of civil war in order to gain support of his candidacy. He is given a ship and a crew then sent out to the border colonies, forbidden to return until he either completes his mission or rescinds his claim to the throne. No one expects Prince Nerune to succeed; his people have underestimated him his entire life because of his gender. This is his chance to show them exactly what he’s capable of. But unexpected things happen out in space, and the destiny that awaits him there is far greater than what even he could imagine.

K’tharis is a science fiction graphic novel that is currently in pre-production.

Nevertheless, college had already booked a driver to fetch me to Brighton. Fortunately, sitting in the car and the taxi driver was telling me everything about England, I was glad I had a tour on the high way with a wonderful tour guide. He explained and told me about culture and the life in Brighton. It left me a good impression that British are kind and friendly as well as England is a big country compared to where I used to stay. It was about 11:00pm, I had arrived in my accommodation.

I was living in Homestay with a British family, my host has 3 children. I am really glad there is no problem with my race since I am a Chinese, and those gossips made me afraid of British. However they proved that the gossips are totally wrong, what I know from them is that British are kind and friendly. The next day, I have a friend who studies in university of Sussex, as soon as she knew my arrival she invited me for a brunch and decided to bring me look around in the town. Brighton is a beautiful city, but it is pretty small town because I discovered most of shops in one day, since I am a shopaholic.

There are some reasons that I chose to study in the UK. As people know that the UK is the centre of World Economy. So studying in the Great Britain for economics would definitely equip me with a better understating and skills to achieve my goal for playing a role in international business. As my father is operating an international trading company, by looking at how he runs the business from young, it has deeply inspired me in economy this area.

I would like to be a politician who really understand the economy of the country. And so has the ability to help with the nation to grow and survive as well as gaining trust from the citizens, unlike the current politician in my county, full of scandals and corruption. I hope I have the ability to attain my goal after finish my education in the United Kingdom.

The struggle continues with the hunt for a new terrain of struggle. If it is density that allows the guerrilla to maintain the dance of concentration and dispersion, oversaturation serves a similar function in the Metropolis. Through the twin forces of Biopower and the Spectacle, Empire has collected an enormous amount of information about the behaviors, habits, and preferences of the Metropolis. The residents of the Metropolis thus live in an environment with a high degree of exposure. But every information gathering suffers from overaccumulation at the point when the cost of transforming the information into something useful is more than its predicted payout. Furthermore, if the speed by which Empire poses the limits of the Metropolis is matched only by the swiftness in which it overcomes them, then its accelerating integration of information is both its greatest strength but also a potential weakness (Anti-Oedipus, 230-232; A Thousand Plateaus, 436-437; 463; 472-473). This vulnerability:

“is not the result of society’s inability to integrate its marginal phenomena; on the contrary, it stems from an overcapacity for integration and standardization. When this happens, societies which seem all-powerful are destabilized from within, with serious consequences, for the more efforts the system makes to organize itself in order to get rid of its anomalies, the further it will take its logic of over-organization, and the more it will nourish the outgrowth of those anomalies.” (“A Perverse Logic”)

The terrain of the Metropolis is therefore caught in the tension between exposure and overaccumulation that sometimes gives way to overload. The Metropolis is thus most exposed to choreography crafted to manipulate its openness and speed to create temporary escape routes. But in contrast to the guerrilla, the overloaded Metropolis leaks time more than space. Just as cyberpunk’s adrenaline-fueled hacking scenes illustrates, the terrain of the Metropolis makes space subservient to time – depicted most vividly in the dramatic ticking down of a clock. The minaret of digital culture is then a tool of temporary misapprehension and incomprehensibility for either lessening the reactionary forces of the enemy or expropriating their resources.

The unavoidable noise of digital culture provides the camouflage for operation. But noise is quite ambivalent even if its sometimes disrupts communication. It is true that the feedback loop of the rising decibels of a loud dinner party drowns out certain intimacies, yet others would be impossible without it. And while “noise destroys and horrifies,” conversely “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death,” so that noise not only disrupts by “nourishes a new order” because it opens any system to its outside (The Parasite, 27). This is because background noise forms “the ground of our perception,” whose constant concealments are an unstoppable force of “perennial sustenance” and “the element of the software of all our logic” (Genesis, 7). In fact, a certain degree of noise may even aid transmission, for it may “allow for greater compression of the signal” that increases the efficiency of the channel and its system (“Of Glitch and Men,” 27). Yet even if the introduction of noise improves signal compression, it does so by sacrificing fidelity for mobility and flexibility. And it is here that noise becomes its most strategic, as it engenders an indiscernibility similar to the density of urban terrain, but it also spells out the possible effects: distortion and loss. But as the guerrilla dissolves its presence into the people, noise invades the channel with the force of the outside. Like a network detached from any subjection, noise still functions with the intentionality of a ‘strategy without a strategist.’ Yet noise delivers its message with ultimate force of anonymity – letting the outside speaks for itself.

It is finally time to answer Foucault’s demand for a force of truth that is not just the truth of force by way of a reintroduction of insinuation. The “propaganda by the deed” of turn-of-the-century anarchists and the “armed propaganda” of mid-century guerrillas typify the truth of force, but they also epitomize the rhetorical power of action. These radicals were unable to find a force of truth independent of power itself. Instead, they found that rhetoric and force were both amplified when treated as imbricated and thus mutually-constituted. Propaganda by the deed was able to declare that the actions of anarchists was more than idle talk or utopian dreams, while guerrillas waged ideologically-fueled wars against occupying powers. Resistance to Empire should take heed. But the prior anarchist or communist approaches do not speak to the thoroughly digital character of life in the Metropolis. Yet neither does the politics of persuasion or the presentation of facts. The Metropolis will remain unphased as long as tactical media leans on the force of truth. Empire will be defeated by a battle that fuses force and truth – injecting insinuations while fighting cultural politics in digital code – releasing a cascade of affect charges while turning glitches into exploits, overaccumulation into overload, and flooding the Metropolis with the noisy force of the outside.

Yes, I’m changing the name. ‘Swift Picks’ sounds a bit catchier to me than ‘Swift Fix’. Since they’re ‘picks’ now, this’ll mean I’ll primarily be using the category for quick little things I recommend rather than actually reviewing them in a quick and hurried manner. And hey, if it’s music, I’ll even embed the link for you like I did up there. Sound good? Good.

Anyways, so after almost 5 years of silence, one of my favorite Electronic-Indie bands is finally making a comeback! And so far, it sounds amazing. Their first single off the upcoming album Ice on the Dune is this little beauty here: ‘Alive’.

The band retains their catchy, dancy, poppy, flashy sound that is sure to awaken your dormant desire for some good, old fashioned tunes. Electronic-Indie? Old Fashioned? Whatever. Just be sure to hit the play button on that convenient little embedded Spotify mamajamma up there. (Thanks Spotify!)

One aspect of MOOCs is that the stars are (almost) all men. At one website only 9 of 56 History MOOCS were presented by women. Without a doubt, the model of the MOOC – of the authoritative talking head – is one that privileges cultural perceptions of men and male control over certain types of knowledge. The gendered nature of the hierarchy of knowledge transmission that takes place is clear in the MOOC model of education. Although “students” are invited to respond at different points, to a large extent, the presenter controls the topic, the vocabulary, and the trajectory of whatever “dialogue” might take place. In recent stories on MOOCs at Princeton and Harvard, the instructors (all men) are described by their reputation as charismatic teachers.

MOOCS: Gender, Class, and Empire.

“To make Kirk relevant again Abrams has reinvented him as what he wishes Obama could be. Kirk is an Obama trying to lead a recovery from a time of darkness and defeats.”

Abrams’ New “Star Trek” Loaded with Political Parallels: Kirk as Obama

There’s not a lot to go on, I suppose, until Friday.

I will say I’ve been seriously dreading this new “edgier” and “darker” turn in Star Trek, just like every other “franchise” out there making big money.  The old complexities and sci-fi concepts that made the original Star Trek interesting have been replaced by white male revenge fantasies.  It seems the only ideas Hollywood has left to offer the world are how to kill bad guys in new and more explosive ways.  I don’t expect much from studio projects, but I was hoping that Star Trek wouldn’t devolve into the same jingoistic imperial propaganda, masquerading as space opera.  Friday, the verdict will be in.

Of course Hollywood loves the Obama image without even understanding real geopolitics on the ground, at all.  H’weird is a land of great ignorance, like the rest of America, and it reinforces this ignorance with simplistic good v. evil formulas.  Hollywood is a symptom of a sick culture as much as it is an illness driving the race over the cliff.  A people so ignorant, so nationalistic, and so one-sided, who trade rights for false promises of “security” and trade their own morality for empty vengeance — in real life* — can’t remain a functioning democratic republic for long.  That is the natural result of the accumulation of illegitimate power and unaccountable militarism.

America had it all.  And lost it all.  In the end perhaps Americans were too fat, lazy, selfish and stupid to even keep up with the state of the world.  They shirked their responsibility to keep their own government in check and they succumbed to mass brainwashing.  They weren’t the first, and they were warned.

* “More to the point, two-thirds of those in the current poll still believed the war was justified even if we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction.” -Boston Globe, June 26, 2003

When the doors opened for the first La Cienega Design Quarter event on Thursday — the blogger breakfast at antiquarian Lee Stanton’s Los Angeles shop — there was already a long line to get in. “It’s a wonderful way to start off a day packed with informative and exciting events,” noted Elaine Maltzman, director of marketing for top L.A. designerTimothy Corrigan. One of the event’s social media ambassadors, designer Alissa Swedlow of The Good Designs, remarked that the turnout showed how important social media has become: “My last client didn’t ask for references; she looked at my Pinterest and that’s really what said, ‘This is the right designer for me.’”

The day ended as it had begun, with designers including Jane Hallworth (who has designed forMichelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst), Trip Haenisch, Jeff Andrews and Tamara Kaye-Honey crowded into Stanton’s courtyard, braving the occasional sprinkle of rain to eat, drink and mingle with “five hundred of my closest friends” noted designer Christian May, who also authors the popular blog Maison 21 and is joining Friday’s panel at Gina Berschneider, Inc. titled “The Go Go Years and Beyond: Re-creating Upholstery from Earlier Eras.”

Also, in Rosa, in the Veneto in Italy –  Sebastiano Baggio –  Italian Cardinal and President of the Vatican city State in 1984.

World Affairs: In a continuation of the hostilities between Italy and the Ottoman Empire in Libya (Italo-Turkish War, or Guerra di Libia) which was officially concluded during 1912, the Italians suffer a serious defeat by bedouin tribesmen at Sidi Garba, near Derna, in Tripoli. General Mabretti attacks what he believes to be a force of 2000 bedu, but is actually an army ten times larger armedwith cannons. An estimated 2000 Italian  lives are lost as the Italian army retreats in disarray, abandoning its dead and injured.

Science, technology and the weather:  In Falmer, Sussex, UK – the Race Hill Windmill, built in 1861, is blown down in a storm.

So, just what is it like?  It’s unique.  As you might expect, PLATO offered a lot of educational resources at all academic levels.  These tutorials (called “lessons” on PLATO) were typically created by teachers and are often surprisingly fun to use.  Interestingly, with all the talk about the shortage of women in tech that still takes place today, it seems like there were a surprising number of female teachers who programmed PLATO lessons.  So far, I’ve counted bees, learned algebra by playing a game with KAY and JAY, and gotten ready to start my own business with the aid of a module entitled PEOPLE AND BUSINESS, all on cyber1.  While I really enjoy the educational stuff, I suspect more users actually use cyber1 because of the games and notes.  Technically, games and notes are also called “lessons” in PLATO nomenclature, but most of the games are just for fun and the notes are essentially forums so don’t be deceived.  The games include classics like Asteroids and Battleship, but the most popular games are Avatar, a MUD-like RPG, and Empire, a space action game.  As for notes, you can discuss just about anything you want on cyber1 — there are dedicated notes areas for subjects ranging from ham radio to politics to specific games like Empire.

How do you get started?  Simply visit the cyber1 web site and request a signon.  It’s a slightly old-fashioned process (in keeping with PLATO itself, I guess) in that you fill out a form that is validated by a human who then emails you your login details.  This can take a few days.  Additionally, you’ll need to reply to the email you’re sent to validate you received it…otherwise your account will get canned in short order!  It’s not truly a selective process — after all, *I* got in — so don’t be intimidated.  Also, don’t worry about the “desired signon group” thing if you’re not a PLATO veteran.  The system is still fun to use even if you’re in a “modern” group.  If you find another group you want to be a part of later on, such as one of the gaming groups, you can request a second signon using the same form.  Once you’re ready to login and have downloaded pTerm, I recommend you watch the “Cyber1 Introduction” video and print out the keyboard shortcuts before you actually connect.  You’ll use some commands like NEXT, BACK, and STOP constantly so find key combinations you like!  The interface takes some getting used to, but I was surprised at how quickly I picked up on basic navigation.  That said, I know there’s still a lot I have to learn.  I’m sure I’ll be posting a lot more about cyber1 on this blog in the future.

The strategic principles of guerrilla theory can thus be resurrected even if guerrilla warfare cannot. But as the Red Army Faction notes, it is the very architecture of the Metropolis that is the target, as “neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg nor Mao had to deal with Bild readers, television viewers, car drivers, the psychological conditioning of young students, high school reforms, advertising, the radio, mail order sales, loan contracts, ‘quality of life,’ etc.,” Empire cannot be combatted as “an openly fascist” enemy but as a “system in the metropole” that “reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche” through the silent compulsions of the market (“The Black September Action in Munich”). Once fully rendered within this new strategic environment, cultural politics then becomes a struggle over information theory’s concept of communication, the accurate reproduction of an encoded signal across a media channel (telephony, radio, computing), which reintroduces the question of materiality. Yet it is the problems of materiality where the guerrilla first found its strategic advantage, and so it is here that the guerrilla’s three advantages reappear in terms of media effects: the accidents and coincidences of contingency plague the digital as bugs and glitches, which easily turn into errors and exploits; the swells of density that create mobility and flexibility are navigated by the opposition of signal and noise of information theory, which fights against distortion or loss; and the clutter of the Metropolis that provides the cover of camouflage is found in digital oversaturation, where spam and ‘big data’ make identification difficult.

Yet despite the pervasiveness of glitch, noise, and oversaturation, early imagery of the cyberpunk hacker as guerrilla warrior against faceless corporations has not been realized. Instead, numerous cultures have embodied these digital byproducts, with glitch giving rise to jarring video game art, noise creating a distinctive form of post-punk music, and anonymity fueling screen-based versions of cruising for a fix (Noise Channels). And the problem with these cultural expression is that are “local” and “bounded,” thus caught between either drown after being “overwhelmed by the open network ecology” of oceanic difference or get marooned on “a self-contained and self-referential archipelago of the like-minded” (Network Culture, 70). So perhaps the cyberpunk console cowboys has instead become pervasive and diffuse phenomena typified in the “evanescent and mobile informational islands” of peer-to-peer media pirates that appear and disappear, “springing out of nowhere” to send signal,”only to dissolve as soon as the frantic transactions are carried out” (70). It is thus clear that the struggle against Empire does not unfold in the antagonism between a revolutionary subject and an easily-identified occupying power within the carefully-delineated territory of a nation-state. The contrasting architecture of the Metropolis stretches out like the open system of the Internet, a common space that is simultaneously divergent and differentiated, and thus operates as a diagram whose basic function is communicative – the overcoming of incompatibilities (42). If the guerrilla then exists in digital culture, albeit transformed, it is as the strategic force of divergence. And this is not embodying divergence, as done by various subcultures of glitch and noise, but the strategizing of incompatibility as offensive escape. What remains is the question of how.

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London’s primacy in the money markets. Then, in 1914, New York replaced London as the world’s financial capital. Before 1914, the United States had been a developing country, dependent on outside investment. But with the shift of the money power from Old World to New, what had been a debtor nation became a creditor nation and central motor to the world’s economy. All in all, the English were well pleased to have us take their place. They were too few in number for so big a task. As early as the turn of the century, they were eager for us not only to help them out financially but to continue, in their behalf, the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race: to bear with courage the white man’s burden, as Rudyard Kipling not so tactfully put it. Were we not—English and Americans—all Anglo-Saxons, united by common blood, laws, language? Well, not, we were not. But our differences were not so apparent then. In any case, we took on the job. We would supervise and civilize the lesser breeds. We would make money.

Desperate to escape the burden of duty and the strictures of the court she would often travel merely to be away. Even when at home in the palace she sought respite in knowledge and books. A lifelong poet, she worshiped the ancients and took lessons in ancient greek daily while having her hair cared for.

Even the idea of going away eventually became unappealing, the only refuge left was the road itself. Destinations became bearable only because ‘a journey lies between’. After the loss of Rudolf she became lost in grief and self-affliction of loneliness.

Forever seeking the freedom of childhood lost to her when she fell into the life of Franz Josef, Sisi remains an icon of the disillusioned.

One of the interesting things about the reviews is that they seem to claim exact opposite things about the film: Where one blasts the mashup, another praises it; where one says the film is shallow, another says it carries the message of the novel perfectly, and so on. What this tells me is that people (still) don’t really know what to make of this story. It’s one of those novels that everyone supposedly read in high school; people tend to like to use it as a touchtone for their own cultured-ness, a way of showing that they have some semblance of knowledge about literature. One of my brothers used to keep a copy in the glovebox of his car on the off chance a girl happened to open it.

I have many thoughts about the success of the film (or lack thereof), though this is not meant to be a review. I will say, however, that the aspect of the novel I’m going to discuss is brought out through what I think is the film’s greatest failure. As an adaptation, the film does an incredible job being faithful to the timeline and construction of the plot as well as the dialogue, with much of it taken word for word fromt the text of the novel. With regard to the major themes, my impression was that the film, in a sometimes heavy handed way, makes it a point to alert the viewer that, through the quintessentially modernist devices of lost love and failed attempts to recover the past, this is primarily a story about empire; namely that American empire is cold, destructive, and tragically resilient. But while the film attempts to beat that into the viewer with melodrama and over the top mise-en-scène, the novel sketches a much more careful, delicate picture which has made it notoriously difficult (some say impossible) to adapt.

This brings us to the film’s greatest failure which also happens to be, I think, the novel’s greatest trick: Nick Carraway. Both novel and film are told from Carraway’s first person perspective (though the film sometimes departs.) This is obviously a very deliberate choice for Fitzgerlad: Why write a novel so heavily dependent upon the revealing of another character’s backstory in the first person? At times, the devices utilized to convey those details of the past feel stilted, contrived, usually a telling of a telling. Furthermore, a story that is so tightly centered around deception and fantasy does not lend itself well to reliable first person narration, even if it isn’t the narrator intentionally lying, and indeed, many scholars have attempted to make the argument that Nick Carraway is in fact an unreliable narrator. The film plants that possibility in the viewer’s mind right from the beginning by having Nick tell the story of Gatsby from a sanitarium where he is being treated for severe anxiety and alcoholism–an unnecessary addition, to say the least. Nick Carraway is an unreliable narrator, but not in the sense that the story he has told is false in anyway.

The trick is that while being faithful to the story that he lived, he is not honest with the readers, and more importantly himself, about his participation in the empire that destroys Gatsby and George and Myrtle Wilson by the end of the novel.

The natural effect of first person narration is that the reader or viewer begin to identify with and trust the narrator. In fact one of the effectual goals of the novel is for us to begin to think that we are Nick Carraway–to be able to see ourselves sympathetically in his shoes. I’m not sure any film adaptation carries this as well as the novel, and it is why every adaptation has ultimately come up short, seeming not to capture the elusive essence of the story.

One of the most carefully crafted details about Carraway’s character is his own privilege. It’s well concealed and very easy to forget especially since he is so often juxtaposed between Gatsby and the Buchanans. However, the novel begins with Nick relating this advice from his father: ” ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ ” It is clear that he is not Tom Buchanan, but it is because he is not that we are able to identify with him. It adds an important layer of complexity to what would otherwise be a rather banal modernist theme, old versus new, which the film hits on quite strongly. Nick seems to be set outside of that somehow and gives the impression that he is above the games being played, telling the reader, ”Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

But it is Nick Carraway’s self-ascribed honesty that actually prevents us at first from being able to see his character completely; that is, his privilege has afforded him the opportunity to be passively drawn into a story which he could break himself from at any moment. In that sense, he is actually no different from the Buchanans, Jordan Baker, or even Meyer Wolfsheim, who all treat their own lives in the exact same way. He has romanticized Gatsby’s persona much in the same way as Daisy, referring to Gatsby’s misguided attempts to repeat the past and win Daisy back as his “incorruptible dream.” The famed last line of the novel emphasizes this as well: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past,” suggesting that the never ending attempt to recover a more real, more pure past is a noble endeavor. But it is a romantic endeavor, one that Nick and Daisy both have the ability to pursue and abandon at their leisure. Gatsby never has the option to break from his dream, and both the Wilsons’ attempts to do so end in their deaths. Nick pushes the blame for all the terrible events of the novel on to Tom and Daisy, telling us, “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

But I don’t think Nick’s hands are totally clean here. The tragedy Nick sees in his story is not that Gatsby, because of the uncontrollable circumstances of his life, was considered nothing and never had any chance in the face of real American empire. Rather, it’s that his farce was ruined, and he was not permitted to continue to live out the romanticism that Nick so admired.

In this way, Nick participates in the resiliency of American empire that is made explicit in his indictment of the Buchanans. And he has drawn the reader unwittingly into that participation. We revere Gatsby for all the wrong reasons and his story suggests that there are only two ways to really participate in the empire: be born into it or be a self-made criminal tycoon like Meyer Wolfsheim. [Aside: In the novel, after Gatsby's death, Wolfsheim tells Nick that he made Gatsby what he was, that he gave Gatsby everything he had.] The rest of us, the Nick Carraways of the world, will hate that, we’ll actively despise it, go so far as to insult it and see ourselves as better than it [Nick says of his last encounter with Tom, "I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child."] Yet we will have no problem romanticizing individual efforts to overcome it, even when they fail, if we are privileged like Nick to be able to do so. Our privilege affords us the pseudo-active ability to be outraged from our living rooms and behind our computer screens, bringing no real change to the problems that have outraged us. And American empire continues to thrive.

One of the interesting things about the reviews is that they seem to claim exact opposite things about the film: Where one blasts the mashup, another praises it; where one says the film is shallow, another says it carries the message of the novel perfectly, and so on. What this tells me is that people (still) don’t really know what to make of this story. It’s one of those novels that everyone supposedly read in high school; people tend to like to use it as a touchtone for their own cultured-ness, a way of showing that they have some semblance of knowledge about literature. One of my brothers used to keep a copy in the glovebox of his car on the off chance a girl happened to open it.

I have many thoughts about the success of the film (or lack thereof), though this is not meant to be a review. I will say, however, that the aspect of the novel I’m going to discuss is brought out through what I think is the film’s greatest failure. As an adaptation, the film does an incredible job being faithful to the timeline and construction of the plot as well as the dialogue, with much of it taken word for word fromt the text of the novel. With regard to the major themes, my impression was that the film, in a sometimes heavy handed way, makes it a point to alert the viewer that, through the quintessentially modernist devices of lost love and failed attempts to recover the past, this is primarily a story about empire; namely that American empire is cold, destructive, and tragically resilient. But while the film attempts to beat that into the viewer with melodrama and over the top mise-en-scène, the novel sketches a much more careful, delicate picture which has made it notoriously difficult (some say impossible) to adapt.

This brings us to the film’s greatest failure which also happens to be, I think, the novel’s greatest trick: Nick Carraway. Both novel and film are told from Carraway’s first person perspective (though the film sometimes departs.) This is obviously a very deliberate choice for Fitzgerlad: Why write a novel so heavily dependent upon the revealing of another character’s backstory in the first person? At times, the devices utilized to convey those details of the past feel stilted, contrived, usually a telling of a telling. Furthermore, a story that is so tightly centered around deception and fantasy does not lend itself well to reliable first person narration, even if it isn’t the narrator intentionally lying, and indeed, many scholars have attempted to make the argument that Nick Carraway is in fact an unreliable narrator. The film plants that possibility in the viewer’s mind right from the beginning by having Nick tell the story of Gatsby from a sanitarium where he is being treated for severe anxiety and alcoholism–an unnecessary addition, to say the least. Nick Carraway is an unreliable narrator, but not in the sense that the story he has told is false in anyway.

The trick is that while being faithful to the story that he lived, he is not honest with the readers, and more importantly himself, about his participation in the empire that destroys Gatsby and George and Myrtle Wilson by the end of the novel.

The natural effect of first person narration is that the reader or viewer begin to identify with and trust the narrator. In fact one of the effectual goals of the novel is for us to begin to think that we are Nick Carraway–to be able to see ourselves sympathetically in his shoes. I’m not sure any film adaptation carries this as well as the novel, and it is why every adaptation has ultimately come up short, seeming not to capture the elusive essence of the story.

One of the most carefully crafted details about Carraway’s character is his own privilege. It’s well concealed and very easy to forget especially since he is so often juxtaposed between Gatsby and the Buchanans. However, the novel begins with Nick relating this advice from his father: ” ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ ” It is clear that he is not Tom Buchanan, but it is because he is not that we are able to identify with him. It adds an important layer of complexity to what would otherwise be a rather banal modernist theme, old versus new, which the film hits on quite strongly. Nick seems to be set outside of that somehow and gives the impression that he is above the games being played, telling the reader, ”Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

But it is Nick Carraway’s self-ascribed honesty that actually prevents us at first from being able to see his character completely; that is, his privilege has afforded him the opportunity to be passively drawn into a story which he could break himself from at any moment. In that sense, he is actually no different from the Buchanans, Jordan Baker, or even Meyer Wolfsheim, who all treat their own lives in the exact same way. He has romanticized Gatsby’s persona much in the same way as Daisy, referring to Gatsby’s misguided attempts to repeat the past and win Daisy back as his “incorruptible dream.” The famed last line of the novel emphasizes this as well: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past,” suggesting that the never ending attempt to recover a more real, more pure past is a noble endeavor. But it is a romantic endeavor, one that Nick and Daisy both have the ability to pursue and abandon at their leisure. Gatsby never has the option to break from his dream, and both the Wilsons’ attempts to do so end in their deaths. Nick pushes the blame for all the terrible events of the novel on to Tom and Daisy, telling us, “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

But I don’t think Nick’s hands are totally clean here. The tragedy Nick sees in his story is not that Gatsby, because of the uncontrollable circumstances of his life, was considered nothing and never had any chance in the face of real American empire. Rather, it’s that his farce was ruined, and he was not permitted to continue to live out the romanticism that Nick so admired.

In this way, Nick participates in the resiliency of American empire that is made explicit in his indictment of the Buchanans. And he has drawn the reader unwittingly into that participation. We revere Gatsby for all the wrong reasons and his story suggests that there are only two ways to really participate in the empire: be born into it or be a self-made criminal tycoon like Meyer Wolfsheim. [Aside: In the novel, after Gatsby's death, Wolfsheim tells Nick that he made Gatsby what he was, that he gave Gatsby everything he had.] The rest of us, the Nick Carraways of the world, will hate that, we’ll actively despise it, go so far as to insult it and see ourselves as better than it [Nick says of his last encounter with Tom, "I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child."] Yet we will have no problem romanticizing individual efforts to overcome it, even when they fail, if we are privileged like Nick to be able to do so. Our privilege affords us the pseudo-active ability to be outraged from our living rooms and behind our computer screens, bringing no real change to the problems that have outraged us. And American empire continues to thrive.

https://www.facebook.com/events/241905895952638/242442445898983/?notif_t=like

LISTEN LIVE @

Like our Facebook Page too! https://www.facebook.com/INSOMNIACRadioNET

Join your Host Ozzy for this show packed full of the best songs in ROCK! Tweet your requests to @INSOMNIACLive and spread the good word about INSOMNIAC Radio’s NEWEST Show “The Rock Show” ONLY on Tuesdays @ 3pm E.S.T on http://www.shoutcast.com/Internet-Radio/Insomniac

A sermon three years after Deep Water Horizon on love, freedom, and caring for each other, the oysters and the crabs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Accidents: In Glendevon, Scotland, shale miner Charles McQueen is killed from an underground fall of shale.

World Affairs: Major Herbert Garland, a British scientist, soldier and explosives expert, is elected a Fellow of the (British) Chemical Society. At the outbreak of war he will join the “Arab Bureau” and operate alongside T.E Lawrence supporting bedouin insurgency against the Turks in Western Arabia. Lawrence once commented: “Garland is much more use than I could be… he is an expert on explosives and machinery. He digs their trenches, teaches them musketry, machine gun work, signalling, gets on with them exceedingly well and always makes the best of things and they all like him too”. [Daily Telegraph, 20 July 2010].