#The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion

[openingadoor]

Camilla Carper, Inside Out Closet 3, 2024, mixed media, 60 x 60 x 96 inches. The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion. Curated by Jennifer Minniti, Chair, Fashion, and Matthew Linde, Ph.D.

[delicatecombat]

Leg adornment by ALL-IN displayed in 'The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion' at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, February 2024

[evangelinexdubois]

— whoa! EVANGELINE DUBOIS just stole my cab! not cool, but maybe they needed it more. they have lived in the city for 19 YEARS, working as an EDITOR-IN-CHIEF FOR VANITY FAIR. that can’t be easy, especially at only 37 YEARS OLD. some people say they can be a little bit CONTROLLING and DEMANDING, but I know them to be CREATIVE and SHARP. whatever. I guess I’ll catch the next cab. hope they like the ride back to MANHATTAN! —

basics

Full Name: Evangeline Dubois Nickname(s): Eva Age:Thirty-seven Height: 5′9″ Gender & Pronouns: Cis-female & she/her Orientation: Bisexual Hometown: Peillon, France Residential Area: Manhattan, New York Occupation: Editor-in-chief for Vanity Fair Relationship status: Single (not-yet-divorced)

infertility tw

bio

Born and raised in a small rural village in France, Evangeline always dreamed bigger than that. Whilst her parents worked as farmers, making sure that they had enuogh food on the table, Evangeline wished to be surrounded by the big city lights. She wanted to be surrounded by the people, she wanted to be seen, and she wanted to be in places where life never stopped.

A chance for that came one day when she was barely sixteen. during a class field trip to one of the nearby cities, Evangeline was spotted by an agent for one of the modelling agencies. There was something about the young girl that was so fascinating, something that drew people right into her, so the offer to get her modelling gigs was almost expected. After a lot of begging and reasoning with her parents, Evangeline was allowed to take on modelling whilst still studying.

Over the next two years, Evangeline's career blossomed. Whilst she wasn't tall enough for a career on the runway, she was great for photoshoots. She was thrilled to be doing it, happy that she could see Paris, London, and eventually New York. It was New York that she completely fell in love with, adoring the city that never slept. It was like day and night compared to the rural France, and Evangeline loved it.

The moment she got her high school degree, she was off to the USA. However, modelling wasn't enough for the young woman. She had come to absolutely love the fashion world, and she hated the fact that she was only showing it all off. She wanted to be in the middle of it, she wanted to be surrounded by it, so, when years later, an offer came to work for a magazine, she happily accepted it.

Smart and cunning, Evangeline learned how to climb the path to her dream career. Whilst she was often seen as just a pretty face, that opinion quickly changed whenever the people were confronted by Evangeline's quick wit and great intelligence. Over the years her modelling gigs concluded, and her career in fashion blossomed.

Nearly ten years ago, in the most unusual circumstances, Evangeline came across her future husband. He was her complete opposite, but somehow, they fit, falling hard and deep for one another. Whilst so many of their views, opinions and just about everything else clashed, when he proposed, Evangeline did not hesitate to say yes.

That didn't stop her from continuing on with her career. No matter how much she loved her husband, her career was her first love. Overtime was a natural thing for her, staying in the office until late nights or attending many galas was an absolutely common occurence. It helped her reach what she was after, living above everyone in the city that never slept and being the best.

Five years ago, Evangeline was offered the job as the editor in chief for Vanity Fair. She was still so young, still so seemingly inexperienced, but that didn't stop her from accepting the job. Even to this day, she loves the challenge, she loves knowing that she reached it through nothing but her hard work and talent, and she's keen to prove anyone who thinks less of her wrong.

With how demanding her job was on a regular basis, Evangeline refused to slow down with everything else. Whilst her and her husband clashed, she still felt the safest around him. He was the person she could always open up to - as much as she could, and he was the only person she could imagine having kids with.

Naturally, that was exactly what they tried for. However, as years went by, Evangeline couldn't get pregnant. Failure was not an option in the woman's eyes, so when the doctors told her that her chances of having children were close to zero, she refused to listen to them. It couldn't be true, not when everything else in her life was going so well.

And yet, Evangeline refused to reveal the news to her husband. It was a horrible mistake to make, however, the woman closed off, refusing to share just about anything with him, focusing completely on her work instead. It was the one thing that never let her down, even when her own body did, and she craved for that comfort.

As expected, this caused cracks in Evangeline's marriage. Whilst her career blossomed, her name becoming more and more recognizeable in the fashion world, her marriage suffered. Going home didn't feel as good as it used to, and sharing her bed with the man who she assumed resented her was the one thing she dreaded.

So when Evangeline asked for a divorce, it as a completely understandable for her and utterly shocking to her husband. Still, she refused to accept his begging, his requests to work on their marriage. It was heartbreaking, it hurt her in so many ways, but Evangeline stood her ground. She couldn't bring herself to admit to him why she was asking for a divorce, and instead, she simply focused on her career. After all, it was always there, always waiting for her, and it made her happy.

[brian-in-finance]

Instagram 2 June 2023 ⬆️ Instagram 20 August 2015 Instagram 20 August 2015 #2

Glamour Italia: August 2015

I TRAVEL THROUGH TIME

Caitriona Balfe, the Outlander’s star, is hitting the big time in Hollywood. And after shooting with Clooney and Julia Roberts, she’s ready to return to Scotland. With specific ideas, some style tricks and few regrets.

One thinks that some things can happen only in an episode of Sex and the City. Instead you can just walk in the West Village in New York with Caitriona Balfe (pronounced Catrina; it’s a Gaelic name) to suddenly glance at your side a coach with the advertising of Outlander, where she is the leading actress, exactly what it happens to Carrie in the unforgettable theme song. But Caitriona does not stumble: she mirrors herself in her image and smiles. “Thanks to the photo editing the scene seems almost heroic”,she says. “But looking at it I can only recall that my ass was freezing that day in the mountains of Scotland”. After leaving Ireland at 15 years old, entering the fashion industry as a model, last year she has been mentioned by Entertainment Weekly among the twelve Hollywood’s rising stars. Thirty-five years, 1.77 cm tall, a perfect body, icy stare and reminiscent features as Cate Blanchett, one of the actressess she likes more.

How did you feel working side by side to George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Jodie Foster’s Money Monster?:

“They are all movie giants, I learned a lot. But in the end, when you’re there, it’s just a work, and it becomes almost a routine”.

You grew up in Northern Ireland, two hours from Dublin, not only far from the spotlight but even from the city lights. How did you end up working in fashion?

“The usual fate. When I was 18 an agent stopped me while I was volunteering for an association against multiple sclerosis. I was filling shopping bags in a supermarket. He offered me to work for an agency in Dublin. I left the college, where I studied acting, and a year later I moved to Paris”.

You have worked with all the greatest – from Karl Lagerfeld to Dolce & Gabbana and Balenciaga – at the spike of your career you were considered one of the twenty most sought-after models in the world. Is there something you currently miss of that world?

“Surely the bread with olives made by Dolce & Gabbana’s cook! I remember they always had the best refreshments. Sometimes I still dream that bread. However, it was a very funnyworld, but I think it was a suitable lifestyle for my age at that time. You can cope with certain pace, between trips and parties, only when you are twenty years old”.

Is there something you never tolerate?

“The fashion system idealize only one type of woman: it’s wrong and misleading. It forces to doubt about yourself, because it doesn’t matter if you were the prettiest girl or the smartest one at school. You are judged only upon the basis of how much you are skinnier than the girl at your side. Or if you have nicer doe eyes “.

Did you feel you would have become an actress?

“Yes, I always saw my modelling career as a temporary thing. Of course, I did not think it was a step lasting for ten years! But at the time I wouldn’t have even been able to deal with all the responsibilities requested to an actress and the roles I play”.

Such as the Claire role, the heroine of the Outlander series, adapted from the book by Diana Gabaldon. Do you see herself in her?

“The story of Claire is a radical change, a great loss, but also a renaissance (Claire is mysteriously thrown back in time; in Scotland, from 1945 to 1743.) It talks about how you can survive in front of tragic events and that you must keep living your life against all odds. She has ahuge force: she is a modern and feminist woman, not by choice, but simply because she feels to be worth as much as men. And she is so strong she can afford to make mistakes … So not only I like to think to have many things in common with her, but I hope so”.

Claire is in a love triangle. Have you ever experienced a similar situation?

“It happened that the place in my heart taken by someone I loved was not yet free and meanwhile … someone else was already entering! But I have never found in a difficult position as Claire is. I do not think, however, that neither of the two men competing for her would be right for me. The first thing I look for in a boyfriend? Certainly a beautiful head. Even if no woman would say no to the overwhelming passion felt by Claire and Jamie in the serial. I almost had to take a test of “chemistry” on the set before having the part ( she laughs)”.

You had to cope with the book fans, following the character for years. Judging from your followers on Twitter – more than ninety thousand –you convinced them.

“The reviews so far are always positive and fans are very active. The funniest part is that they send me a lot of paintings of my cat. I find them beautiful and I gave a part of them to some friends who live around the world. So, it seems to meI have a piece of home wherever I go”.

Do you like Twitter?

“The wonder of this social network is doing something good by using all the “chatter”created around my success. For example, I support an association helping children with cancer worldwide. Through Twitter I can give visibility even to them”.

The first series of Outlander was shot for almost a year in Scotland: did it was a kind of homecoming or did you feel isolated from the world?

“It was a long time since I was living in Europe … Scotland and Ireland are very different but both have landscapes with ancestral energies, magical, taking your breath away. However, sometimes we were so isolated that the mobile phone did not work for days. But that’s good – actually I hate to take it always with me on the set! Maybe the only thing I really missed was dressing up elegant to go out. It seems strange, but being accustomed to Paris or New York, where you pay attention to how you dress even to go to dinner, I felt a bit out of place in Glasgow. No one dresses to impress there, unless you go to dance”.

But your look, brown sweater, high waist denim skirt, ankle boots with a little heel, apparently, seems to reflect a simple taste …

“In New York, jeans and t-shirt are the uniform between shootings, but when I go out I want to tart myself up. My style depends a lot about how I wake up: one day very feminine, girly, the day after tomboy or even “rock and roll”. The only constant is black and a few jewels. And, definitely, high heels”.

Do you have a secret to be perfect during the long days on the set?

“Perhaps the main problem are dark circles, due to the impossible schedule. So patches help a lot, the ones you can cool down. When I am engaged during the episodes of the series I have always a bit of them hidden in the fridge of the crew, and usually my days begin with them”.

With the end of the Money Monsters’ shooting you will have to leave New York to return to Outlander in Scotland. And then? Which are your plans?

“For now, I know more or less what direction I want to go, but I do not want to have a clear strategy. If you schedule everything, you risk being disappointed, while I always took my best decisions without thinking at them. I let myself be surprised and, when there are challenges, I took them up. For the moment, they were right choices. I have no regrets..apart from a couple of ex-boyfriends!”

Outlander-Online

Remember when August 2015 seemed like only yesterday?

[dreamlyfes]

( han euddeum , thirty-five , cis female , she/her ) ⎮ would ya look who it is , iris baek in the flesh ! dude , i heard they were a senior fashion editor at jade magazine across town . yeah , no , they’re the one that’s really ambitious and progressive but my buddy said they’re super imperious and a bit judgemental too . i wonder what they’re doing over here though ? c'mon let’s go back to my place and i can show you their myspace profile , it autoplays my prerogative by britney spears when it boots up , it’s great . aesthetic | playlist

name: iris jihye baek

age: thirty-five years old

dob: october 7th, 1968

gender: cisfemale, she & her

sexuality: biromantic bisexual

zodiac sign: libra sun aries moon sagittarius rising

birthplace: jacksonville, florida, usa

residence: greenwich village, new york city, new york, usa

occupation: senior fashion editor at jade magazine, fashion model

though most people wouldn't believe the truth, iris baek was born in a trailer park in jacksonville, florida

before iris her mother crystal began her life in jacksonville, cycling through a series of failures and dead end jobs until she took up waitressing at a dive bar where she remained until her untimely death in 2000

crystal had iris when she was seventeen, the product of a deadbeat boyfriend who skated off with money from his rich parents and left crystal to fend for herself

from then on it was just iris and crystal, having been kicked out of the house by her parents

at first when iris was a child her mother seemed like superwoman, always taking them on adventures or buying her new toys but she was spending money they didn't have, racking up credit card debt and taking out loans they couldn't afford

because of her mother's youth and irresponsibility iris had to work from a young age. when she was fourteen she had a job in a clothing store at the jacksonville mall. it was here that a modeling scout discovered her and invited her to come take some digitals

though iris was wary the agent turned out to be legitimate and soon her digitals were sent off to la and new york where responses came back far quicker than expected

plenty of agencies were interested in signing her, desperate to escape the toxic loop of her mother's behavior she moved to new york into a model apartment with five other girls and started working.

by the time she was seventeen she was walking jean paul gautier and shooting international campaigns. her popularity had skyrocketed

she modeled for upwards of ten years but slowly began to step away from the industry disillusioned with the direction it was heading in the 90s and desiring to change it

that was how she landed at jade magazine. her provocative and progressive vision for the future of fashion interested to the executives. she quickly rose through the ranks to the position of senior fashion editor

her experience as a model gave her a unique perspective on where fashion was heading from the 90s into the 00s.

iris developed something of a reputation. while certainly charismatic she was exacting and expected nothing less of perfection from her department staff. if she felt you fell short she'd certainly let you know

now eyeing the position of editor-in-chief she'll do anything to push the envelope at jade and prove her worth to the position.

[alittlebirdgirl]

My previous therapist had told me that I was a child being raised by an entire village, being raised by everyone around. My current therapist tells me that I was a child raised by no one, that my many mothers did not equate to a single, whole mother. 

List of mother’s I’ve had: my biological mother, my aunt Kico, my mother’s assistants Antonella and Joanna, and my nanny Meijing. 

Meijing is beautiful, despite how often she calls herself ugly. She has a sharply carved face and a huge mouth that widens into a booming laugh so big, it grows into her eyes. She is brimming with joy, always, like a glass of water filled a little too full, that rumbles and spills her happiness everywhere she goes. But when she’s sad, she’s very, very sad. Her tears flow uncontrolled and her losses are felt heavy in the air. Meijing knows this, so she hides when she is sad. The first time I saw her cry was when I was eleven. 

She had just gotten off the phone with her daughter, or maybe her husband, or maybe her sister. I’m not sure. But it was someone from her family, in her hometown. Meijing is from a small, countryside village somewhere in Fujian, where there is no electricity or running water. I think the person on the phone with her was her husband, because he was telling her to come home. Meijing later told me that this wasn’t the first time he had called, begging her to return. Meijing had left her small village to come to Xiamen, when I was two months old. Her daughter was eight years old. She had come to make money to send back home, to take care of her family. But now, it was over ten years that Meijing had lived in the city of Xiamen, mothering and loving a privileged, mixed girl, that she said she loved more than her own daughter. 

I always knew that one day I would leave China, and therein fact, leave Meijing. I spent my life fantasizing about what America would be like, while simultaneously fearing what would happen to Meijing after I’d gone. Meijing and I would dream together, about how I would convince my parents to get her a plane ticket to New York to visit me, or when I made enough money myself I could buy her a little apartment in Xiamen. Xiamen had become her home, and I, her daughter. 

My mother mother was a busy woman. As a child, I watched her rush from work to home to a dinner party, from the airport to the kitchen to my study. She moved through everything quickly, places and emotions alike. I remember admiring this quality of hers, the swiftness in which she lived. I called her supermom at times. 

My mother mother wanted me to be famous. Heck, I wanted to be famous. She built me a makeshift stage at home, in our living room, so I could carry out my singing and dancing performances in the most dramatic fashion. I was always singing and dancing, it’s all I wanted to do, all the time. I would spend hours singing at the karaoke television, fantasizing about how one day I would go to a performing arts school, and be discovered just like Tori Vega from Victorious. I would google “Disney auditions for tweens” or variations of that. I read somewhere that the lead actor in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie got the role because he sent a letter to the book’s author. So I emailed the author of my favorite fairy-related book series Rainbow Magic and said that should the series ever become a television show, to please consider me, Isabella Chan, to play one of the Fashion Fairies. 

Despite my own unending belief, I was not a talented child. I couldn’t sing, nor could I dance. I had terrible grades. I never could and still cannot read music despite playing the piano almost everyday for seven years. I had out-of-school lessons for everything. And I sucked at most of it for a long time. 

I still sing, all the time. And my brother, as brothers do, often told me to shut up in many different ways. Sometimes he would just plainly demand it, but usually that would result in me spitefully scream-singing the song, further annoying the shit out of him. He later became more calculated in the way he told me to shut up. He made fun of the breathiness in my voice and how hard I tried to sound good. To be fair, from his perspective, he was a twelve-year-old boy that had to hear his nine-year-old sister belt out the entire Avril Lavigne album The Best Damn Thing, for several hours on end. 

Things I was put in classes for from the age of two to twelve: ballet, piano, painting, French, and cello, on top of the extra tutoring for school-related classes like math and Chinese. 

Even when I was a child, when I would ask Meijing why all the other kids would have their parents at every holiday assembly, every band performance, every science fair, I was asking in genuine curiosity. No part of myself felt like a martyr, nor did I feel a single ounce of self-pity. I only knew that if you wanted people to come to your performances, it had to be important enough and you had to be talented enough. 

I started learning ballet at the age of two. I have the memory in my mind of me learning for years, yet my body has completely forgotten, with no idea how to move in those ways anymore. I wonder what I learnt in all those years, if I had even progressed at all. Or what a two-year-old could possibly even learn in ballet class. They’re already fleshy and flexible, balls that bend into a complete split.

[travelworldfashion]

Where the Hamptons and Why it's Popular Location

Introduction

Explanation of the Hamptons

Importance of the Hamptons in American culture

Purpose of the article

History of the Hamptons

Native American roots

Colonial period and early settlers

Development of agriculture and fishing industries

Rise of tourism and summer vacation culture

III. Geography and Demographics of the Hamptons

Location and boundaries

Towns and villages

Population and demographics

Lifestyle in the Hamptons

Housing and real estate

Entertainment and nightlife

Arts and culture

Food and dining

The Hamptons and Pop Culture

Celebrity sightings and residencies

TV shows and movies filmed in the Hamptons

Influence on fashion and style trends

Economic Impact of the Hamptons

Tourism and hospitality industry

Real estate and construction

Other industries and businesses

VII. Controversies and Issues in the Hamptons

Wealth and income inequality

Environmental concerns

Traffic and congestion

VIII. Conclusion

The Hamptons, located on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, have become synonymous with luxury, opulence, and exclusivity. For decades, this small region of quaint seaside villages has been the go-to destination for America's elite, attracting the rich and famous from all over the world. But what exactly are the Hamptons, and why are they so famous?

Introduction

To understand the significance of the Hamptons, we must first understand what they are. The Hamptons are a collection of small towns and villages located on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. The area is known for its beautiful beaches, picturesque countryside, and luxurious homes. It is a popular summer vacation spot for affluent New Yorkers and celebrities alike. 

In this article, we will explore the history, geography, demographics, lifestyle, pop culture influence, economic impact, and controversies surrounding the Hamptons.

History of the Hamptons

The history of the Hamptons dates back thousands of years to when the region was inhabited by Native American tribes. The Shinnecock Indian Nation has a rich history in the area and continues to play an important role in the community today.

During the colonial period, European settlers arrived in the area and began farming and fishing. The fertile soil and abundant waters provided an ideal environment for agriculture and commercial fishing. 

In the late 19th century, wealthy New Yorkers began building summer homes in the Hamptons as a way to escape the heat and noise of the city. This marked the beginning of the region's rise as a popular summer vacation spot.

Geography and Demographics of the Hamptons

The Hamptons are located on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, and are bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the south and the Peconic Bay to the north. The region is composed of several towns and villages, including Southampton, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, and Montauk.

The population of the Hamptons is relatively small, with just over 30,000 year-round residents. However, during the summer months, the population swells to over 100,000 people as visitors flock to the area.

The Hamptons are known for their picturesque scenery, including miles of pristine beaches, rolling farmland, and quaint seaside villages.

Lifestyle in the Hamptons

It is obvious to ask where are the Hamptons?? After knowing the lifestyle of hamptons. The Hamptons lifestyle is often associated with luxury, extravagance, and high-end living. Real estate in the area is some of the most expensive in the country, with many homes selling for tens of millions of dollars.

The housing styles in the Hamptons vary widely, from historic cottages and farmhouses to modern mansions and beachfront estates. Many of these homes are only occupied for a few months of the year, as they serve as summer vacation homes for their wealthy owners.

The Hamptons offer a wide range of entertainment and nightlife options, including world-class restaurants, exclusive nightclubs, and high-end shopping. The area is also known for its thriving arts and culture scene, with numerous galleries, museums, and theaters.

The Hamptons and Pop Culture

The Hamptons have long been a popular destination for celebrities and the rich and famous. Many famous faces have been spotted in the area over the years, including Steven Spielberg, Beyonce, and Jerry Seinfeld, to name just a few. 

The Hamptons have also been the backdrop for numerous TV shows and movies, including "Sex and the City," "The Affair," and "The Great Gatsby." The area's natural beauty and luxurious lifestyle have made it a popular setting for Hollywood productions.

The Hamptons have also influenced fashion and style trends over the years. The preppy, nautical-inspired fashion that is so popular in the area has become a signature look of the Hamptons, and many fashion designers draw inspiration from the region's aesthetic.

Economic Impact of the Hamptons

The Hamptons have a significant economic impact on the surrounding area and the state of New York as a whole. The tourism and hospitality industry is a major contributor to the local economy, with visitors spending millions of dollars on hotels, restaurants, and other amenities.

Real estate and construction are also major industries in the Hamptons, with numerous high-end homes and commercial properties being built each year. Other businesses, such as retail shops, galleries, and service providers, also benefit from the area's affluent population.

Controversies and Issues in the Hamptons

Despite its wealth and beauty, the Hamptons are not without their issues and controversies. One of the biggest issues facing the region is income inequality. While the Hamptons are home to some of the wealthiest people in the world, the area also has a significant population of low-income workers who struggle to afford the high cost of living in the area.

Environmental concerns are also a major issue in the Hamptons. The region's fragile ecosystem is under threat from development, pollution, and climate change, and many environmentalists are working to protect the area's natural beauty.

Traffic and congestion are also significant issues in the Hamptons, particularly during the summer months when the population swells. The area's narrow roads and limited public transportation options make getting around a challenge, and traffic can be a major headache for both locals and visitors.

Conclusion

The Hamptons are a unique and fascinating destination that has captured the imagination of people around the world. From its beautiful beaches and luxurious homes to its thriving arts and culture scene, the Hamptons have something to offer everyone. However, as with any area, the Hamptons are not without their challenges and controversies, and it is important to consider these issues as we continue to explore and enjoy this beautiful region.

FAQs on Where the Hamptons

How much does it cost to buy a home in the Hamptons?

   - Homes in the Hamptons can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars, depending on the location and size of the property.

Is it true that the Hamptons are only for the wealthy?

   - While the Hamptons are often associated with wealth and luxury, there are also many affordable options for visitors, including public beaches, parks, and restaurants.

What are some popular activities to do in the Hamptons?

   - Some popular activities in the Hamptons include visiting the area's many beaches, dining at world-class restaurants, shopping at high-end boutiques, and exploring the region's art and culture scene.

Are there any environmental concerns in the Hamptons?

   - Yes, the Hamptons face a number of environmental challenges, including pollution, climate change, and habitat loss. Many local organizations are working to address these issues and protect the area's natural beauty.

How do I get to the Hamptons?

   - The Hamptons are easily accessible by car or train from New York City, which is located just a few hours away. There are also several regional airports in the area for those who prefer to fly. 

Source: https://travelideasusa.blogspot.com/2023/04/where-hamptons-and-why-its-popular.html

[theyaskedmeto]

A Rainy Late Afternoon in the Bakery

pairing: kurt x blaine

summary: Icing cakes can be hard, and even more of a hurdle when there's a handsome stranger standing by the counter.

notes: This little oneshot is set in Arundel, a place I have actually been!! It's this little historic town with a big ass castle and cathedral and loads of charity shops. If you ever get the chance to go, give it a visit :)

Hope you enjoy this small thing I've finally written!

meet!cute, bakery!au

Read on AO3

-----

Cake decorating takes a lot of time and precision, which was something Kurt Hummel had discovered over the years through his passion and love for baking - cake being the primary contender for that passion.

He was reminded of that very fact just twenty minutes to closing time on a rainy Thursday afternoon, very close to tears as he hastily continued to mix the icing sugar into the buttercream, setting his Kenwood mixer to the highest speed. The icing was still much too runny to be used as a reliable implement to decorate his newly baked raspberry and white chocolate sponge, and he already knew he’d be staying up late to finish it for tomorrow’s selection of freshly baked cakes and other sweet goods.

It wasn’t Kurt’s original plan of action to move to England and start a little bakery in a small but incredibly tasteful village in the South East, but after realizing the pressure of college was too much for him in New York, he turned to a completely fresh start, and an apprenticeship in baking in the UK seemed like the perfect answer (as dramatic as it felt at the time).

It certainly wasn’t his original dream, either. Growing up, he envisioned himself as a famous designer, ordering models to change into outfit after outfit - in clothes that he designed, at that - but his dreams changed quite drastically after finally realising the realities of adult life. College was hard - the stress was too much, and he never really fitted in the way his younger self had always imagined he would have done - and through the pitiful emotions, he rediscovered baking - something that his now late mother had taught him many years ago. It was something he could control, and, although it was deflating when the design of one of his cakes he’d imagined didn’t turn out the way he’d wanted it to, it was another form of art he was able to master. Finding recipes, discovering new techniques - all of it was inspiring, bringing him ideas in a way that fashion design did not.

So he gave the fashion dream up and moved abroad. It was a big change, but he needed it greatly, devoid of the deep feeling of missing his father that washed over him with every passing day.

It was okay, though. Kurt and Burt stayed in touch regularly, and Kurt was happily able to lose himself in cake decorating rather than wallowing in his pity.

Although, it didn’t help that sometimes his career did bring him pity, as it did in a final moment of understanding after tasting his buttercream, that he was going to have to start again. Letting out a defeated groan, Kurt threw his head into his hands with his elbows leaning on the counter. Today was not his day. Far from it, in fact. Only a few customers, running low on icing sugar and then making some buttercream that was far too sweet for even the greatest sugar enthusiast to enjoy. In that moment, Kurt wished it was tomorrow. Or a few weeks later, at most.

Ten minutes till closing time. He was going to have to leave the back room and embrace the weather in all its rainy glory soon, walking through the winding streets to his house near the Wey and Arun canal. It was impractical to drive such a short distance, so before his departure to work in the morning, he was sure to bring all the necessary waterproof equipment - a precaution he wasn’t prepared to take in his first few months of living in England, because it was cold, even when he didn’t realise how much of an impact the weather would have on him here.

Just as Kurt was about to resort to adding another half a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste to his mixture, he heard the tell-tale sound of the bell ringing as a customer entered, and Kurt could even recognise the hasty movements of said customer before he witnessed them.

Walking around to the front of the bakery, through the back room and behind the counter, dusting off the remains of icing sugar powder from his artisan denim apron, Kurt finally examined the (rather wet) customer peering at the array of cakes in the small display cabinet next to the counter.

He examined his eyes first, the way the man’s lashes fanned down perfectly onto his cheeks as he looked at the cabinet. Kurt found himself slightly starstruck as he realised the beauty of the person standing in front of him - the man’s strong shoulders, his simple smile, inquisitive eyes (Kurt saw them as the customer looked up to meet the eyes of his) - he bore a kind face.

Just as the man looked up, Kurt heard a sombre rumble of thunder outside the window as the rain pelted down relentlessly. Tightening his lips and smiling sourly, he looked again at the customer, before realising they were already speaking, and pointing at a cupcake inside the cabinet.

“Are those red velvet?”

Now shaken out of his reverie, Kurt responded: “Oh! Yes. They’re… not really my favourite, if I’m honest.”

It was a little awkward, the quietness of the little shop with the rain falling outside, Kurt just standing there as the man continued to examine the cake cabinet. Thunder continued to shake outside, the sound of it alarming the man in front of the counter who turned to look at the window and the small view of the war memorial on the high street, now tremendously covered in water, seemingly majestic with the quality of light shining on it.

Turning back, the customer let out a small hum and asked, “So you wouldn’t recommend buying them…?”

“Well. It’s not that I’d not recommend buying them, it’s just…” Kurt broke off his sentence slightly as he considered the lack of customers he’d had today - not enough, for sure - he shouldn’t be putting people off sales, that’s something his dad always told him. Making a compromise, he pointed at the selection of gingerbread men closest to him.

“I can recommend these, though.”

The customer pressed his lips together slightly and tilted his head. “Okay. Four gingerbreads then please?”

Kurt was a little intrigued by the way the man asked like it was a question, but promptly fetched a small paper bag (the logo decorated on it, of course) and gave the gingerbread man to the customer after rattling out the total. He thought a little about the man’s voice. It was nice. He’d never get tired of the British accent. Or, more specifically, British men with kind accents. When he first moved to England, he felt as if he was caught up in some incredibly middle-class romantic comedy twenty-four seven.

“Thank you.” The customer said after the baked goods were handed to him, and then quickly, just before he turned to leave, “Hey, if you ever want to discuss red velvet cake again I could maybe… get your number?”

For a moment, Kurt was minutely overcome with a flush of embarrassment that this person would ask him, but tried to push the feeling back. Even though he’d had a fair share of romantic experiences in college, it was still a thrill to realise someone was hitting on him.

“Oh! Sure… I’ll just grab my phone.”

As he spoke, he was already walking around the back to where he’d left his phone, hanging up in his coat pocket, and when he passed the mess of icing sugar bags and butter left out, his side jostled an open box slightly, resulting in him being covered completely in icing sugar powder.

There was now icing sugar all over his new denim apron. Cursing under his breath slightly, he made it to his phone, and unlocked it as he walked back behind the counter.

Returning to see the man still patiently waiting, fingers clasped together in front of himself with a contented smile on his face (although Kurt could had an inkling that that smile was just plastered on for politeness, which did intrigue him slightly), Kurt hastily handed him his phone, now considerably more messy than he previously was when he went to fetch it. For a moment, there was a slight sense of awkwardness where neither said anything, and Kurt only heard a quiet ‘okay…’ from the man in front of him as he entered his number into the contacts app.

Kurt found himself pressing his lips together awkwardly once again, still aware of the silence of the room in contrast to the harsh rain outside.

The sense of awkwardness and silence was quickly over, however, when the customer (Blaine was his name, Kurt noticed as he looked at the contact in his phone) handed Kurt his phone back - “All done. Great!” was what Blaine said, to which Kurt responded with a quick “I’ll… text you.” - Kurt already felt himself being surrounded by an eased aura, which wasn’t something he had really felt before.

“Cool. Send me a message.” Blaine was already speaking, and already reaching for the door as he did so. “Maybe we could meet sometime? LG cafe, maybe?”

“Of course.”

With another one of those quick smiles Blaine The Stranger opened the bakery door with nothing so much as an “Alright then,” expressed slightly softly, and soon he was leaving, out into the rain once more, the heavy door banging closed with its own weight and the bell ringing its sound, the sound Kurt recognised so clearly now as just another customer leaving his little shop.

But maybe this wasn’t just another customer.

[ashleysitalianlitblog]

My Brilliant Friend (HBO Tie-in Edition): Book 1: Childhood and Adolescence

From the famous Italian author Elena Ferrante, the story is about a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. This book is now turning into an HBO MAX show and it’s a young adult classic in modern-day Italy

The Story of a New Name (HBO Tie-in Edition): Book 2: Youth

The follow-up to My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name continues the epic New York Times–bestselling literary quartet that has inspired an HBO series and returns us to the world of Lila and Elena, who grew up together in post-WWII Naples, Italy. 

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and a source of strength in the face of life’s challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time” (The New York Times), gives us a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging, a meditation on love and jealousy, freedom and commitment—at once a masterfully plotted page-turner and an intense, generous-hearted family saga. 

Adua

The book Adua is by lgiaba Scego has historical references and looks into the life of an immigrant. The story is about Adua, an immigrant from Somalia to Italy who has lived in Rome for nearly forty years. She came seeking freedom from a strict father and an oppressive regime, but her dreams of becoming a film star ended in shame. Now that the civil war in Somalia is over, her homeland beckons. Yet Adua has a husband who needs her, a young man, also an immigrant, who braved a dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. When her father, who worked as an interpreter for Mussolini's fascist regime,  dies, Adua inherits the family home. She must decide whether to make the journey back to reclaim her material inheritance, but also how to take charge of her own story and build a future. From the choices of being an adult to a wife, the book gives us a look of the hard choices life gives us in a heartbreaking story. 

100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

An instant blockbuster in Italy that went on to become an international literary phenomenon, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is the fictionalized memoir of Melissa P., a Sicilian teenager whose quest for love rapidly devolves into a shocking journey of sexual discovery.

Melissa begins her diary a virgin, but a stormy affair at the age of fourteen leads her to regard sex as a means of self-discovery, and for the next two years she plunges into a succession of encounters with various partners, male and female, her age and much older, some met through schoolmates, others through newspaper ads and Internet chat rooms. In graphic detail, she describes her journey through a Dante-Esque underworld of eroticism, where she willingly participates in group sex and sadomasochism, as well as casual pickup

The Scent of Your Breath

Melissa P.’s fictionalized memoir, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, became an international literary phenomenon, selling over two million copies worldwide and provoking a warning from the pope. The Scent of Your Breath, the second installment in her series of confessions, is a tale of obsessive love and destructive passion.

Melissa is now a successful writer in Rome, living with her new lover, Thomas. With his soft body and feminine eyelashes, he is sensual, patient, and comforting—the antithesis of all the men who came before. But as soon as she meets Viola, a young woman from Thomas’s past, Melissa is consumed with jealousy. Written as a confessional letter to her mother, the story that follows is one of dark obsession, violent lust, and soul-destroying talent, teeming with the ghosts and dragonfly-women Melissa is convinced are trying to steal her man and bring about her ruin. The Scent of Your Breath blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy and delves deep into the disturbing yet strangely familiar mind of a teenage girl terrorized by love.

Three O'Clock in the Morning Is by Italian author Gianrico Carofiglio the contemporary heart-waring piece is about Antonio is eighteen years old and on the cusp of adulthood. His father, a brilliant mathematician, hasn’t played a large part in his life since divorcing Antonio’s mother but when Antonio is diagnosed with epilepsy, they travel to Marseille to visit a doctor who may hold the hope for an effective treatment. It is there, in a foreign city, under strained circumstances, that they will get to know each other and connect for the first time. A beautiful, gritty, and charming port city where French old-world charm meets modern bohemia, father and son stroll the streets sharing strained small talk. But as the hours pass and day give way tonight, the two find themselves caught in a series of caffeine-imbued adventures involving unexpected people (and unforeseen trysts) that connect father and son for the first time. As the two discuss poetry, family, sex, math, death, and dreams, their experience becomes a mesmerizing 48-hour microcosm of a lifetime relationship. Both learn much about illusions and regret, about talent and redemption, and, most of all, about love. This heartwarming story has captured the modern Italian audience. 

Lost Words

Winner of the Viareggio Prize, a vivid portrait of Italy on the brink of social upheaval in the 1970s.The author Nicola Gardini, writes about the Inside an apartment building on the outskirts of Milan, the working-class residents gossip, quarrel, and conspire against each other. Viewed through the eyes of Chino, an impressionable thirteen-year-old boy whose mother is the doorwoman of the building, the world contained within these walls is tiny, hypocritical, and mean-spirited: a constant struggle. Chino finds escape in reading. One day, a new resident, Amelia Lynd, moves in and quickly becomes an unlikely companion and a formative influence on Chino. Ms. Lynd—an elderly, erudite British woman—comes to nurture his taste in literature, introduces him to the life of the mind, and offers a counterpoint to the only version of reality that he’s known. On one level, Lost Words is an engrossing coming-of-age tale set in the seventies, when Italy was going through tumultuous social changes, and on another, it is a powerful meditation on language, literature, and culture.

Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

The book by Chiara Barzini describes a story about Mere weeks after the 1992 riots that laid waste to Los Angeles, Eugenia, a typical Italian teenager, is rudely yanked from her privileged Roman milieu by her hippie-ish filmmaker parents and transplanted to the strange suburban world of the San Fernando Valley. With only the Virgin Mary to call on for guidance as her parents struggle to make it big, Hollywood fashion, she must navigate her huge new public high school, complete with Crips and Bloods and Persian gang members, and a car-based environment of 99-cent stores and obscure fast-food franchises and all-night raves. She forges friendships with Henry, who runs his mother's movie memorabilia store, and the bewitching Deva, who introduces her to the alternate cultural universe that is Topanga Canyon. And then the 1994 earthquake rocks the foundations not only of Eugenia's home but of the future she'd been imagining for herself.

I'll Steal You Away

Italian literary superstar Niccolò Ammaniti’s novel, I’m Not Scared, prompted gushing praise, hit international bestseller lists, and was made into a smash indie film. In I’ll Steal You Away, Ammaniti takes his unparalleled empathy for children, his scythe-sharp observations, and his knack for building tension to a whole new level. In a tiny Italian village, a young boy named Pietro is growing up tormented by bullies and ignored by his parents. When an aging playboy, Graziano Biglia, returns to town, a change is in the air: Pietro decides to take on the bullies, his lonely teacher Flora finds romance with the town’s prodigal son, and the inept janitor at the school proclaims his love for his favorite prostitute. But the village isn’t ready for such change, and when Graziano seduces and forgets Flora, both she and Pietro’s tentative hopes seem crushed forever. With great tenderness, Ammaniti shines light on the heart-wrenching failures and quiet redemptions of ordinary people trying to live extraordinary lives.

Heaven and Earth: A Novel Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat, centuries-old olive groves and families who have lived there for generations. She spends long afternoons enveloped in a sunstruck stupor, reading her grandmother's paperbacks.

Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the farm next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern—the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate, and seemingly unassailable bond.But no bond is unbreakable and no summer truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers.Because there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern—the enigmatic, restless gravitational center of the group—commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.

An unforgettable story of enduring love, the bonds between men, and the all-too-human search for meaning, Heaven and Earth is Paolo Giordano at his best: an author capable of unveiling the depths of the human soul, who has now given us the old-fashioned pleasure of a big, sprawling novel in which to lose ourselves

[openingadoor]

ALL - IN Studio at The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion. Curated by Jennifer Minniti, Chair, Fashion, and Matthew Linde, Ph.D. via ig.

[nuttystrawberrysalad]

All About Knitted Hats

Quarantine has sparked plenty of new at-home hobbies. Maybe you picked up a paintbrush and tapped into your inner artist. Or, you might have transformed your kitchen into a bakery. For some, perfecting their knitting and crocheting skills even led to a business — which is why you're likely seeing the knit hat trend unexpectedly taking off on Instagram.

For Delsy Gouw, founder of Brooklyn-based label Its Memorial day, crocheting started out as a fun activity. "[It] originally started as an online Depop vintage shop [in 2019] but when Covid hit, I wasn’t able to source any goods," she tells TZR. "I also lost my job and found myself with a lot of time on my hands." Gouw picked up the old hobby of hers and began making items for friends, and then her friends' friends were requesting pieces, too. She then began crafting knit hats because she believed the demand was there. "I started with bags but when I posted them so many of my friends and followers asked when or if I’d be open to making hats and taking customs for hats," Gouw tells TZR. While trends typically fade away and come back later on, Gouw hopes this style will stay long-term. "[I] can’t speak for knitting, but the way crochet is done is truly so intricate, unique, and is made to last," she explains. "Crochet can only be done by hand so I think there is something special about having an accessory that is unique and handmade." Fans of Gouw's emerging brand include influencers like Reese Blutstein, Jo Rosenthal, and Ella Emhoff.

Who knows when the first person decided to put something over their head to keep it warm, but knitters know that knitted hats for women are some of the most fun and easy things to knit.

When they’re worked in the round there is little in the way of shaping, except when you get to the crown.

Most hats are worked from the bottom up, with stitches cast-on and worked in a snug stitch pattern such as ribbing, or in stockinette for a rolled bring hat, using a smaller size needle than is used for the head portion of the hat.

In many hat patterns, the hat is worked straight for the desired length of the crown, then nearly all of the stitches are evenly decreased over the course of just a few rounds.

The yarn is cut, the tail threaded through the remaining stitches, pulled tight, and fastened off to the inside of the hat.

The hat can be topped with a pom pom, i-cord, tassel, or whatever embellishment strikes your fancy.

A great book for learning to make hats is Ann Budd’s Handy Book of Patterns, from which some of the material on this page is excerpted. There are chapters on basic hats as well as the type of hats called “tams.”

There are several types of hats, but the most popular knitted hats for men are beanie-type caps, tams (sometimes called “berets”), slouch hats, earflap hats, and tuques.

Beanies: These hats can be super simple or dressed up with a lace or cable patterns. In cooler climates, they’re wonderful gifts for knitters to make.

Tams/Berets: There are so many different stitch patterns to use in this style. Tams and berets can be plain stockinette or intricate Fair Isle. This style of hat is really flattering on just about every face shape, too.

Earflap Hats: These hats are popular in cold climates. They’re great for keeping ears warm and they’re fun to knit. The knitters of Peru specialize in these hats, as shown in the photo at right.

Often a knitted hats for children will have a finished size that is smaller than the average adult head. That’s because hats meant to fit closely at the brim need a bit of negative ease to help them fit snugly and keep them on the head.

The amount of negative ease refers to the difference between the finished size of the object and the size of body part on which it will be worn. A hat that measures 19″ (48.5 cm) around and is worn on a 22″ (56 cm) head has 3″ (7.5 cm) of negative ease.

A beret-type hat might have negative ease at the brim, but a few inches of positive ease in the body of the hat. The extra fabric is what creates its loose, flowing shape, while the tighter brim keeps it fitted to the head.

Hats are a natural for circular knitting (or knitting in the round). This project for circular-knit adult hats offers three brim styles: hemmed, ribbed, and rolled stockinette. Whichever brim you choose, the directions call for shaping the top. Work this hat in plain stockinette stitch in a colorful or fashion yarn, or customize it by working the colorwork pattern included here. But don’t feel tied to those two options — use this hat as a canvas to express yourself.

If you knit the hat on one 16-inch circular needle, you’ll need to switch to double-pointed needles (or one of the other methods) at some point during the crown decreases because the stitches will no longer reach comfortably around the needle. It is easiest to knit hats using the magic-loop method with one long circular needle.

Choose a size

Determine the circumference you want for the hat. Most hats should be knit with negative ease (. Measure around the widest part of the intended wearer’s head and subtract 1⁄2 to 1-1⁄2 inches from that measurement to calculate the hat circumference.

A hemmed brim is not as stretchy as a rolled or ribbed brim, so it’s best not to include too much negative ease when using this hem.

Choose yarn and determine the gauge

Yarn for adult hats can run the gamut from practical to frivolous and fun. If you want a warm winter hat, for example, choose a yarn that is warm and durable, and knit it at a tighter gauge than recommended on the ball band. This results in a denser fabric that better retains heat. If, on the other hand, you are creating a fun accessory, you might choose a fashion yarn that adds a little flair. Because this hat is such a simple shape, it’s a great way to show off variegated or self-striping yarns.

To keep cool but stay warm during winter, you can’t skimp on great outerwear or outfit-making boots. The same goes for cold-weather accessories too: Because for the majority of the season, coats, boots, and, in this case, winter hats do most of the talking when it comes to bundling up while keeping things stylish. In order to break free from your standard winter-outfit formulas—and to keep your looks from looking like, well, everybody else—consider accessorizing functionally and fashionably this season. Here, find four headwear trends not to be missed, and shop 24 of the best winter hats, inspired by the most stylish women on the streets, from New York to Paris.

Buckets and Beyond

After runway debuts at Fendi and Loewe, the winter-ready hand knitted hat took over the streets last February—and this season the ’90s trend has continued to gain momentum. From shaggy faux furs to fuzzy angoras, from shearling to sherpa styles, the winter bucket hat is one of the cutest and coziest accessories of the season.

The ribbed-knit beanie has earned its place as a winter style staple for everyone from downtown urbanites to alpine skiers. New Yorkers might prefer sleek styles in a neutral color palette like black and speckled gray. Meanwhile, a pop of color would bring the perfect amount of joyous street-style-inspired Scandi chic to any drab winter look. And for those who wish to channel a bit of après-ski flair in their daily commute, look no further than one with a floppy, fluffy pom-pom.

The trapper hat is no longer just for the rugged outdoorsman or Elmer Fudd. Not convinced? The trapper has been deemed stylish enough for even the Parisians—in fact a black faux-fur version was spotted on the streets topping off a geometric-print coat, leather pants, and blue ankle booties for the ultimate in warmth and style. Et voilà! Not to mention everyone from classic winter-weather brands to It labels are backing the trapper trend—Heurueh, Kule, and R13 to name just a few. You heard it here first: The trapper is the ultimate winter hat for women this season.

On the tiny Peruvian island of Taquile, a man's worth isn't measured in his ability to hunt or fish, but in his ability to knit.

Alejandro Flores Huatta was born on the 1,300-person island, which is located on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, a three-hour boat ride from the nearest city of Puno. The 67-year-old learned how to knit the iconic chullo (a tall, floppy Andean hat) as a child, with his older brother and grandfather teaching him by using the thorns of a cactus as knitting needles.

"Most of the people learn by looking, watching. Because I don't have a father, my older brother [and grandfather] taught me to knit. So by watching, I learned little by little," he said, speaking through a Quechua translator.

Taquile is famous for its textiles and clothing, and while women weave and tend to the sheep that provide the wool, men are the ones who exclusively produce the island's knitting cap for baby. The chullos are seen as culturally significant, playing a key role in the island's social structure and allowing men to show their creativity while also displaying their marital status, dreams and aspirations – some men even use it to show their mood. It's a tradition that islanders are working hard to preserve.

Residents were relatively cut off from the mainland until the 1950s, and the island's isolation has helped to keep its heritage and way of life intact. Locals abide by the Inca code of "Ama sua, ama llulla, ama qhilla", (Quechua for, "Do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy"). Taquileans are farmers traditionally; the six island communities take turns to rotate crops of potato, corn, beans and barley in terraces on the mountainsides. They raise sheep, guinea pigs, chickens and pigs on the land and fish in the lake. Tourism kicked off in the 1970s, giving locals a source of income with tens of thousands of visitors drawn to the island annually to tour the villages and surrounding lake. Visitors typically stay with locals in humble, family-run accommodations; lend a hand-harvesting crops; try local specialties like fried trout and potatoes with rice, beans and mint tea; and purchase the island's famous handmade textiles.

Hats reveal men's marital status, dreams and aspirations

In 2005, Taquile's textile art was deemed so valuable that Unesco deemed it an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Alejandro is one of the seven men on the island recognised as a Master of Textiles, along with the island's president, Juan Quispe Huatta.

The tradition has been around for the better part of 500 years, with roots in the ancient civilisations of the Inca, Pukara and Colla peoples. The Inca in particular, used their headdresses in a similar way to the Taquilean chullo, to display the specific insignia of their particular province – but that’s where the similarities end. The Taquilean chullo and the Inca headdresses look vastly different. The elders of the island tell of the chullo design arriving with the Spanish conquest in 1535, and Alejandro's grandfather passed on stories of the early conquerors wearing similar hats that were white with ear covers, "but not the same patterns or symbols," Alejandro said.

[cheese-greater-official]

The Great Gatsby .. I think antibucci Summary: Literally just the great Gatsby. Nothing else here. Absolutely no changes. Definitely use this for class, or reference. The Great Gatsby is public domain now after all. Anyways here's the totally unaltered and complete book of the Great Gatsby. I swear nothing was changed, most definitely. Of course credit to F Scott Fitzgerald for writing this commentary on both his life and the world he was in. A lot of this can still relate today, so keep an open mind when reading. Notes: I'd like to preface this by saying... This is really I mean REALLY just the Great Gatsby. I swear. There is nothing going here that is out of the ordinary! Nothing at all! Chapter 1 Chapter Text Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!” - Thomas Parke D'Invilliers. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the

wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day. I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why — ye — es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had him for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. “How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all. It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented

rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that. Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. "Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. "I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. Turning me around by one arm

he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore. "It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside." We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.) At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me. "Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically. "The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore." "How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby." "I'd like to." "She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?" "Never." "Well, you ought to see her. She's—" Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. "What you doing, Nick

?" "I'm a bond man." "Who with?" I told him. "Never heard of them," he remarked decisively. This annoyed me. "You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East." "Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else." At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. "I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember." "Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon." "No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training." Her host looked at her incredulously. "You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me." I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. "You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there." "I don't know a single—" "You must know Gatsby." "Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?" Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind. "Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it." "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed. "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?" Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger. "Look!" she complained. "I hurt it." We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue. "You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—" "I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding." "Hulking," insisted Daisy. Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?" I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way. "Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The

Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?" "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. "Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—" "Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things." "We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun. "You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair. "This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?" There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. "I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?" "That's why I came over tonight." "Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—" "Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker. "Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position." For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing. "I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?" This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house. Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. "This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said. "Don't talk. I want to hear what happens." "Is something happening?" I inquired innocently. "You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew." "I don't." "Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York." "Got some woman?" I repeated blankly. Miss Baker nodded. "She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?" Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table. "It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety. She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked

outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?" "Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables." The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police. The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee. Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl. "We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding." "I wasn't back from the war." "That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything." Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. "I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything." "Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?" "Very much." "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." "You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated—God, I'm sophisticated!" The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand. "To be continued," she said, tossing the magazine on the table,

"in our very next issue." Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. "Ten o'clock," she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. "Time for this good girl to go to bed." "Jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow," explained Daisy, "over at Westchester." "Oh,—you're Jordan Baker." I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. "Good night," she said softly. "Wake me at eight, won't you." "If you'll get up." "I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon." "Of course you will," confirmed Daisy. "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—" "Good night," called Miss Baker from the stairs. "I haven't heard a word." "She's a nice girl," said Tom after a moment. "They oughtn't to let her run around the country this way." "Who oughtn't to?" inquired Daisy coldly. "Her family." "Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her." Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence. "Is she from New York?" I asked quickly. "From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—" "Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—" "Don't believe everything you hear, Nick," he advised me. I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait! "I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West." "That's right," corroborated Tom kindly. "We heard that you were engaged." "It's libel. I'm too poor." "But we heard it," insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. "We heard it from three people so it must be true." Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in

his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. Chapter 2 Summary: Just chapter 2 of the Great Gatsby Notes: (See the end of the chapter for notes.) Chapter Text About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. "We're getting off!" he insisted. "I want you to meet my girl." I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred

to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. "Hello, Wilson, old man," said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. "How's business?" "I can't complain," answered Wilson unconvincingly. "When are you going to sell me that car?" "Next week; I've got my man working on it now." "Works pretty slow, don't he?" "No, he doesn't," said Tom coldly. "And if you feel that way about it, maybe I'd better sell it somewhere else after all." "I don't mean that," explained Wilson quickly. "I just meant—" His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice: "Get some chairs, why don't you, so somebody can sit down." "Oh, sure," agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. "I want to see you," said Tom intently. "Get on the next train." "All right." "I'll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level." She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door. We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. "Terrible place, isn't it," said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. "Awful." "It does her good to get away." "Doesn't her husband object?" "Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. "I want to get one of those dogs," she said earnestly. "I want to get one for the apartment. They're nice to have—a dog." We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed. "What kind are they?" asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window. "All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?" "I'd like to get one of those police dogs; I don't suppose you got that kind?" The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck. "That's no police dog," said Tom. "No, it's not exactly a police dog,"

" said the man with disappointment in his voice. "It's more of an airedale." He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. "Look at that coat. Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold." "I think it's cute," said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. "How much is it?" "That dog?" He looked at it admiringly. "That dog will cost you ten dollars." The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. "Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it." We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. "Hold on," I said, "I have to leave you here." "No, you don't," interposed Tom quickly. "Myrtle'll be hurt if you don't come up to the apartment. Won't you, Myrtle?" "Come on," she urged. "I'll telephone my sister Catherine. She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know." "Well, I'd like to, but—" We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. "I'm going to have the McKees come up," she announced as we rose in the elevator. "And of course I got to call up my sister, too." The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me. Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed i

Feel free to delete the first one. I would do anything for you if post this. The Great Gatsby in all it’s glory

im aware i was probably supposed to read the whole thing to find out if you changed anything and tnhen find out you hadnt and id wasted an hour of my life but i am way too lazy to do that

[alittlebitoftruthcan]

‘Beloved Osho, have you anything to say about ‘channeling’? Supposedly a spirit being speaks through a willing human host. This is a growing phenomenon that is happening right now, particularly in California and New York. There are famous ones—Seth, Ramtha and Lazarua. But now they are springing up everywhere—people claiming to channel Kwan Yin, beings from other galaxies, etc., etc. A common theme seems to be that they have come to help the planet evolve right now. The word ‘channeling’ is about as common as ‘Coca-Cola.’ Even some sannyasins are claiming to channel this one or that one. There is almost an attitude that if one is not channeling someone, one is not open to spiritual possibilities. Is channeling a real phenomenon? Why is this springing up right now, and why are people so attracted to channeled beings and information? Is there anything for our spiritual growth in this?’ David and Kaveesha, California needs all kinds of idiotic ideas. It seems all the idiots of the world are born in California. It is the land of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Everything is possible in California. But it remains only for a few years—three years, four years at the most; then the fashion changes. In California everything is a fashion—and when something is in fashion everybody is involved in it, because not to be involved in it means you are out of date, lagging behind, not belonging to the contemporary world. Channeling is simply a new name for an old disease. In the past they used to call it ‘being possessed by a ghost.’ Channeling is the new name for being possessed. Then the ghost speaks—but that is a very old idea, not very appealing. In old countries, it still continues to happen. There are people in villages in India who become possessed, and when they are possessed you can ask questions and they answer—and they answer in such a way that you can make anything out of it. It is never a certain, meaningful statement. Channeling is an American translation of the old idea of being possessed. There are many people in America—particularly in California and New York—who become possessed and start talking to you, answering you. And certainly their language is different from the old; it is more scientific. The very word ‘channeling’ has come from television—channel number one, channel number two… Now, the poor old countries cannot think of channeling, that word is not yet meaningful to them. And the idea of channeling has given a scope… you are channeling to a certain planet, a certain galaxy—and you can say any nonsense, there is no way to prove it right or wrong. Even scientists know nothing about galaxies. There are at least fifty million galaxies. Scientists are still working with very refined instruments to count how many galaxies there are. And one galaxy means… One sun and the planets that are attached to the sun is one solar system. A galaxy means millions of suns, millions of solar systems—which are moving around a certain unknown center of gravity. Each galaxy is so huge… Science has not been able to find out all the facts about even one galaxy, the galaxy in which we live. Now there are the cunning and there are the stupid, and there are idiots who are channeling to other galaxies and bringing messages to humanity. Books are printed with their messages. But the whole thing is that a person goes into a deep hypnotic sleep—if it is authentic. Out of ten, nine are not authentic. If somebody is authentic, then all that happens in reality is that he relaxes, his conscious mind goes to sleep, and from his unconscious mind, collective unconscious mind, cosmic unconscious mind, things start coming up. You can say they are coming from ghosts. You can talk about them in psychological terms and say they are coming from the unconscious. Or you can talk about them in Californian terms: they are coming from channel number one, channel number two. But they are all coming from your own unconscious mind. This is about the authentic cases. And when so many people are channeling, it becomes a competition. If somebody else is channeling, why can’t you channel? No talent is needed, no intelligence is needed; all that is needed is insincerity, cunningness, fraud. Every year in India, Mohammedans have their holy festival, Muharram. And during Muharram, holy spirits possess people. Those holy spirits—because Mohammedans, just like Christians and Jews, believe only in one life—those holy spirits will always be around until the last judgment day, which goes on being postponed, and I don’t think it is going to happen ever. I had a center in Jabalpur near a Mohammedan graveyard. And they reported to the collector that because of our meditations, the spirits in their graves were very much disturbed. The collector called me: ‘Why are you disturbing their spirits?’ I said, ‘This is strange. What report have you received? Who has come?’ He said, ‘Mohammedans—and it may create a riot unnecessarily.’ Jabalpur was one of the most vulnerable cities in India for Mohammedan and Hindu riots, any excuse… And their excuse was that because when we were doing our meditation we would use the Sufi mantra ‘hoo.’ So the Mohammedans had said, ‘Because they say, ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo’ the Mohammedan souls lying in their graves wake up. These are dangerous people—because nobody has ever heard of such a meditation. And after one hour these people are gone, but those spirits roam about and torture Mohammedans, and many are becoming possessed.’ The collector said, ‘You stop. At least this ‘hoo’ mantra should be stopped because it can create trouble. And in your own book you have explained that ‘hoo’ is part of ‘allah-hoo’, it is a Sufi mantra. So they have certain grounds against you, that you are disturbing the souls. They are sleeping well, and you ‘hoo, hoo’ every morning, and they get so disturbed that they start torturing Mohammedans.’ So I had to close that center. In my childhood in my village… Each time that Mohammedans celebrate the holidays of Muharram, some people are ‘possessed by the holy spirit.’ The holy spirit is called WALI. There are a few people who are thought to be very saintly—they are possessed by walis—and they dance and they shout, scream, and you can ask questions. And they should not run away, so their hands are tied with ropes, and two persons keep them in control. There are many walis, and each wali has his own crowd, and people come with sweets and fruits—somebody has received a blessing last year and has got a boy, a child; somebody has got married, and somebody has come to get a blessing for the future. Only Mohammedans participate in it. But I always enjoyed every kind of entertainment. My parents used to tell me, ‘Listen, that is the Mohammedans’ festival, and you are not supposed to be there.’ I said, ‘I am neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Jaina nor anybody. What do you mean—that I cannot enjoy anything? All festivals belong to some religion. In fact, I belong to no religion so I can participate in all festivals.’ So I would go there. Once I managed to hold the rope of one wali who was just an ordinary man and a fraud. I had told him before, ‘I will expose you if you don’t allow me to hold your rope.’ He said, ‘You can hold my rope, and you can share a few sweets also, but don’t say anything to anybody.’ We both used to go to the same gymnasium—that’s how we became friends, and he himself told me that it was all fake. So I said, ‘That means I am coming; if it is fake, you have to share it.’ I went there with a long needle, so I could make him jump. He became the most famous wali because no other wali was jumping so high! He could not say anything about what was happening—because he is possessed by the wali and the wali cannot be afraid of a needle. So he could not say anything, and I went on sticking him with the needle. He managed to get almost four times more sweets, more fruit, more rupees… more people came to get his blessing. He said, ‘That is great, but you tortured me so much!’ I was in such demand from that day—every wali wanted his rope to be given to me. Because whoever got me as his assistant would become the greatest wali—immediately, the very same day. For ten days the function continued, and no wali wanted me again the next day! They would say, ‘I will escape from town if you come again!’ I said, ‘There is no need. I am in so much demand by other fools who don’t know what is happening… You just give me half your share—because you will still have double.’ And I found that almost everybody was a fraud—because I could make everybody jump with my needle. Not a single one in the whole town was an authentic person who was possessed or anything. They were just pretending—shouting, screaming, saying things that you cannot understand, but you have to make sense out of it. And the MAULAVIS, the Mohammedan scholars, will explain to you what the meaning of it is—‘You have been blessed, your desire will be fulfilled.’ And who bothers about whose desire is fulfilled or not? If a hundred people come, at least fifty people’s desires are going to be fulfilled. These fifty will come back, and these fifty people will spread the idea. The other fifty will also come back—not to the same wali, but to other walis who are there, because the first wali they went to doesn’t seem to work: ‘Perhaps he was not powerful enough.’ And my walis were the most powerful, and their power was decided by how high they jumped, how much they screamed, how much they shouted. And everybody asked me why my walis were making such gestures towards me… I said, ‘That is a spiritual language—you will not understand.’ In California, Kaveesha, you can start a new game. Don’t bother about this channeling—within two years it will be past. California is good. It has money, it has the young generation, unemployed, and it has a tradition of changing everything—changing the job, changing the wife, changing the town, changing the house. In two or three years they become bored. So rather than being worried about their channeling… It is absolute fraud. And if there is someone sincere, that means he is relaxing to the point where the unconscious mind starts throwing up its repressed contents. It has no spiritual value. But it will be good to check. Go to any person who is channeling with the galaxies, but keep a good needle with you! With the needle, the person will start dancing, jumping, and his galaxies will start going higher—from one channel to nine channels. You can check: if your needle does not work, that means the person is at least not a fraud, but is simply falling into unconsciousness and allowing his unconscious to reveal its contents. But they have no spiritual value. But before you leave, try the needle—particularly on the famous ones!

Osho (Sermons in Stones)

[lisawilsonlisa]

Furniture Designer, Sculptor, and Artist Paul Evans

Paul R. Evans popularly known as Paul Evans was the main figure in the mid-century American studio and brutalist furniture development. Evans reliably pushed limits with his imaginative ways to deal with metalsmithing and furniture production. Paul Evans furniture has a special attraction. His otherworldly works, which challenged what regular items resembled and how they were made, keep on uncovering the entrancing crosscurrents among figure and plan. Evans started working with metal in the mid-1950s—first at the Rochester Institute of Technology's School for American Craftsmen (SAC) in Rochester, New York, where he concentrated under the persuasive American silversmiths and fashioners John (Jack) Prip and Lawrence Copeland, and later at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Evans at that point moved to Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, where he functioned as a full-time skilled worker, showing different silversmithing strategies at Old Sturbridge Village, a living gallery that re-makes life in provincial New England during the eighteenth and nineteenth hundreds of years. In 1955, looking for a difference in landscape, Evans moved to Lambertville, New Jersey, a notable asylum for specialists and experts, and opened a workshop in a previous chicken coop.

He before long got to know the self-educated furniture creator, Phillip Lloyd Powell, who urged Evans to take his metallurgy abilities and apply them to furniture. For the following ten years, the team shared a display area in close by New Hope, Pennsylvania, and worked together on pieces that merged Powell's wood ability and Evans' metalworking abilities. The last part of the 1950s and 1960s was an unfathomably significant period for Evans as his workshop activity proceeded to develop and he started creating a portion of his most praised structures. In 1964, Paul Evans turned into an included creator for the furniture maker Directional Furniture, an affiliation that fundamentally affected the nature and extent of his creation. As a result his style became so popular that now there are Paul Evans furniture auction and sales held times and again.

Evans pieces were often marked, and a portion of the custom things suffer a heart attack and a date. Evans' mix of handcraft and innovation expected the restricted release craftsmanship furniture of today. The craftsman's relationship with Directional Furniture set a one of a kind norm for innovative assembling by demanding each piece be made by hand, wrapped up by hand, and regulated by the craftsman at each progression of creation, each piece in turn.

Evans presented a few lines, including the Sculpted Bronze arrangement (the mid-1960s), which included applying epoxy gum over a pressed wood base or steel outline, molding it by hand, and covering it with atomized bronze; the Argente arrangement (late 1960s to mid-1970s), which highlighted aluminum and color mixed metal surfaces welded together (a cycle that was considered profoundly harmful and immediately deserted) to make unique structures; and the well-known Cityscape arrangement (1970s), which was motivated by the Manhattan horizon. Flaunting smooth, rich surfaces made of metal and chrome, the Cityscape arrangement contrasted enormously from Evans' etched steelworks of the 1960s, which were painted and exceptionally finished. The Cityscape arrangement earned huge acknowledgment for Paul Evans furniture and set up Directional Furniture as quite possibly the most remarkable mid-century configuration organization of the 20th century. In 1966, Evans moved to Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania, where he opened a bigger workshop. Free of his work for Directional, Evans kept on making models, produce commissions, and specialty his commended design front screens, sideboards, arrangements, seats, and tables, which highlighted high-alleviation, hand-manufactured beautiful components. In 1979, Evans opened a second display area in New York City. Evans passed on of a coronary failure in 1987, not long after resigning to Massachusetts.

In the 21st century, Evans' work climbed in standing, making it among the most collectible in the plan market. Gwen Stefani, Lenny Kravitz, and Tommy Hilfiger were accounted for to be among devoted gatherers. Evans cupboards and bookshelves started to sell for more than $250,000 at closeout. In 2014, the James A. Michener Art Museum, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, arranged a review of Evans' work. In 2017, an Evans bureau sold at sell off for $382,000. Interested people can find Paul Evans furniture for sale online.

[galaxierowls]

The Great Gatsby

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!"

—THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why—ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

"It belonged to Demaine the oil man." He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. "We'll go inside."

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.

"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there's a persistent wail all night along the North Shore."

"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. Tomorrow!" Then she added irrelevantly, "You ought to see the baby."

"I'd like to."

"She's asleep. She's two years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"

"Never."

"Well, you ought to see her. She's—"

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

"What you doing, Nick?"

"I'm a bond man."

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

"You will," I answered shortly. "You will if you stay in the East."

"Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry," he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "I'd be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else."

At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely!" with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

"I'm stiff," she complained, "I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember."

"Don't look at me," Daisy retorted. "I've been trying to get you to New York all afternoon."

"No, thanks," said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, "I'm absolutely in training."

Her host looked at her incredulously.

"You are!" He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. "How you ever get anything done is beyond me."

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done." I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

"You live in West Egg," she remarked contemptuously. "I know somebody there."

"I don't know a single—"

"You must know Gatsby."

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

"We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

"All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly. "What do people plan?"

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

"Look!" she complained. "I hurt it."

We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.

"You did it, Tom," she said accusingly. "I know you didn't mean to but you did do it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—"

"I hate that word hulking," objected Tom crossly, "even in kidding."

"Hulking," insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"

"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."

"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

"This idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. "—and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?"

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

"I'll tell you a family secret," she whispered enthusiastically. "It's about the butler's nose. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?"

"That's why I came over tonight."

"Well, he wasn't always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—"

"Things went from bad to worse," suggested Miss Baker.

"Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position."

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

"I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he?" She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. "An absolute rose?"

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh!" in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

"This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor—" I said.

"Don't talk. I want to hear what happens."

"Is something happening?" I inquired innocently.

"You mean to say you don't know?" said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. "I thought everybody knew."

"I don't."

"Why—" she said hesitantly, "Tom's got some woman in New York."

"Got some woman?" I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

"She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?"

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

"It couldn't be helped!" cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom?"

"Very romantic," he said, and then miserably to me: "If it's light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables."

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

"We don't know each other very well, Nick," she said suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You didn't come to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war."

"That's true." She hesitated. "Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything."

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

"I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything."

"Oh, yes." She looked at me absently. "Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?"

"Very much."

Thank you.

[fromirelandtokorea]

Lesson #118: Events That Shaped Modern Korea:

 It’s fair to say that modern day South Korea is a technological paradise, with incredibly vast buildings, booming global businesses and a magnificent culture. However, the country we all grew to love wasn’t always this way. From class differences, foreign occupation and war, grew a cultural phenomenon that we study and appreciate continuously in the 21st Century.

 So, what was South Korea before all of these things we have come to know today? Here are some breakdowns of major events in Korean history that have influenced the life, culture and society that we see today, along with some book titles that you may find interesting and insightful! This was an essay topic of mine for university, so most of this is a breakdown of that essay I wrote.

1. The Invention of the Korean Alphabet Hangul (한글) (1443/1444): For anyone who is studying Korean, you will be familiar with this beautiful writing system called Hangul. It is a syllabic writing system that was introduced by King Sejong the Great during the 15th Century Joseon Dynasty. Before the introduction of this project, Korean people (mainly the rich and upper class) primarily wrote with Classical Chinese (Hanja/한자). To improve the literacy rates in the country, Hangul was designed and introduced so that even those with little education, such as common people, could learn to read and write. A famous saying goes "a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days." Although this faced criticism and opposition Hangul remains the wonderful writing system for the Korean language today. October 9th, known as Hangul day, celebrates the introduction of this writing system which boosted education in Korea to include all people.

2. World War II (1939-1945): One of the most large scale events to ever touch Korean soil was the outbreak of World War II in the post colonial period. The extent of Japanese rule in Korea during the war meant that citizens were pressured to “assimilate” now more than ever. This period from the late 1930’s to 1945, showed an almost backwards approach to new ideology and social norms introduced in the 1930’s. The decade just before this international conflict had seen an elevated social position for women in terms of responsibility, education and entertainment. The “modern woman” became an everyday appearance for Korea, as Western fashion trickled into the daily wear of women across the country and the education of women was an important topic at the time. However, this new found liberation and power for women soon took a turn when the outbreak of war at the end of the colonial period saw “a full scale mobilization of the entire population into the war efforts”. As well as having a majority of its population forced into contributing to the war effort on the behalf of Japan, people of prominence such as businessmen and writers who had been mobilized were forced to turn to their own people and encourage them to join the war effort and pressure citizens into making “the ultimate sacrifice”. “They were mobilized in the name of an imperium (Japan) in which they remained, at best, second-class citizens, at worst, draft labor, cannon fodder, or sexual slaves.” Women who had once been adjusting to a new found liberation a mere decade earlier, became the victims or survivors of a cruel act and faced a stigma surrounding prostitution that still heavily remains today in modern Korea - these women became known as “comfort women���. The effects of this era are still felt especially by women in Korea today.

3. The Korean War (1950-1953): The Korean War was undeniably another major life altering event for the Korean people after enduring the woes of World War II. After thirty-six years of colonial rule under Japan, the question of Korea’s independence or lack thereof, was still a back and forth argument across the peninsula. The situation seemed to carry the bitter remnants of the previous travesties done to the Korean people, as unfortunately “Japan’s defeat in World War II did not lead to Korea’s independence but led, rather, to the arbitrary division of Korea into halves occupied by the United States and Soviet Russia”. An example of one of the most harrowing events to take place over the duration of the Korean War is the massacre on Jeju Island not even a year after the beginning of an uprising by civilians. “On January 1949, a massacre swept the village of Pukch’on on Jeju Island, nine months after the Jeju Uprising of April 3 1948. The massacre was carried out by the South Korean military in revenge for the deaths of two soldiers by armed guerillas”. (Hwang, 2016, p.26) The massacre wasn’t the only killing to take place after the uprising but “what happened in Pukch’on epitomized the pattern of  violence in Jeju that resulted in deaths of thirty-eight thousand”. This event is one of many horrific acts to take place on the Korean peninsula during the Korean War, that left hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead, as well as leaving the survivors with a trauma they would carry for the rest of their lives. The devastation caused by the Korean war destroyed cities and towns, which required massive rebuilding led to the modern buildings we see today alongside the remaining traditional buildings which create a wonderful contrast in Korea. 

4. The Gwangju Uprising (May 1980): It is evident that Korea has experienced its share of travesty and has come back with spirit. The uprisings in Korean history show how people did not settle for less than satisfactory circumstances and above all else demanded justice for its country. The Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, “was the biggest event in contemporary South Korean history after the Korean War. Its aftermath and meaning, as felt by Korean today, are immeasurably heavy”. The uprising began as “students held daily rallies from May 14 to 16 in Gwangju and issued a series of statements, in lucid language, calling for democratization. Starting on May 18, however, paratroopers were sent to the front gate of Chonnam National University, and then to the intra-city bus terminal and Geumnam Avenue. They started slaughtering people, and students, and citizens fought back, resulting in immense casualties. This extreme violence changed language a great deal”. These protests held by students were to show the leaders of the country the dissatisfaction towards authoritarian rule and the desire for democracy in the country. The removal of Chun Doo-hwan who was in power, was the aim of protesters and soon after the beginning of the uprising, emotions ran high and the question of what would happen was up in the air. This event was the start of a movement towards democratization, that claimed the lives of several hundred civilians and police, the exact number of which is unknown to this day. This event was played down by the media and press, who were under the control of the military at the time to brush it under the rug and hide it from the world. However, the impact of the Gwangju uprising is still being felt everyday by Korean citizens who lost loved ones, who were involved in this incident or who resonated with the immense emotional motivation of the people involved in the rallies and uprising. Nearly forty years on, we can see the political changes Korea has gone through since 1980, and now stands as the democratic country these people fought for years ago. However, the cruelty shown to citizens is still felt by Koreans today, some of whom struggle to find the right words to express the horror of the May uprising, but fortunately, this event has inspired a new generation of outspoken justice seekers.

Books: -Choi, Jungwoon (1999). The Gwangju Uprising: The Pivotal Democratic Movement That Changed the History of Modern Korea. Translated from to Korean (Yu, Youngnan) Korea: Pulbit Publishing Co. -Hwang, Su-young (2019). Korea's Grievous War. 1st ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press -Lee, Jongsoo James (2006). The Partition of Korea after World War II: A Global History. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan -Lowe, Peter (1997). The Origins of the Korean War. 2nd ed. New York: Longman Inc. -Robinson, Michael E. (2007) Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey, A Short History. 1st ed. Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press

All of these events have shaped the Korea we know today and it is important that those of us who study the language also study its culture and the impact of the country’s history on it’s people. Thank you for reading,

Caitlín xo