The Great Gatsby

As some of you might know, I am obsessed with fashion. I also love literature, which isn't surprising, considering both of them are high art forms. Never would I have thought that they would combine! Ralph Lauren, one of my most favorite designers, designed the costumes for the 70s production of The Great Gatsby. Below is a clip from the movie.

Now, this season, Ralph has brought the classic, French-inspired romance of The Great Gatsby to the runway, below.  I haven't read The Gatsby yet, but am going to start right away. Lovely!

Who's The King Of The Jungle?

So recently, I've started reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, and the extreme use of imagery astounds me. The gory, precise, terribly exacting detail Sinclair goes into... it's like watching a great episode of Downton Abbey. One of my favorite scenes is the wedding.... the way Sinclair describes it, it's like you're looking through a window- the surroundings and the character's emotions and actions are vivid and complete- almost like you are experiencing it yourself. Love this kind of writing!

Disabled People Are Like Giant Bugs.... maybe.

So, in Lit class, we all had to pick a "book-of-literary-merit-which-basically-has-to-be-written-a-bazillion-years-ago-and-is-all-about-life-love-and-death" book. Seeing the smallest of these on the table(which turned out to be Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis), I snapped it up. If I hadn't grabbed that one, I would have chosen George Orwell's 1984, since I love, love, LOVE dystopic society novels. Doesn't everyone love them? I mean, there's the Hunger Games (favorite book series ever!), and Twilight (oh, wait..... Twilight isn't a dystopia. Well, it depends on your viewpoint.)

Anyway, Kafka's book. It's pretty backwards of most books; since at the beginning, when the main character, Gregor, wakes up one day, he finds himself turned into an oversized cockroach- the climax. *Spoiler alert!* And so, he spends like half the day trying to get out of bed, and his family is all freaked out because they can't unlock his door and his voice sounds strange and he's taking FOREVER to get out of bed. When they finally discover what he is, they pretty much slam the door in his face and continue on like he never even turned into a cockroach. Only his sister takes some time in her very busy day (filled, hectically, with a crammed schedule of practicing the piano and fainting.) to blindly, eyes covered, grope her way into Gregor's room and drop a few morsels of food on the floor. Their parents just continue on like nothing ever happened.

*SPOILER ALERT!* Gregor ends up dying in the end (from malnourishment, a rotten apple stuck in his shellish-back-thingy, and most possibly heartbreak); and then, the parents are HAPPY. They're all like, "Oh yay! One child's done... just one to go!" And so... the ending is very anticlimactic in a sense because he dies and the rest of the family gets on a train. The end. But no... I think Kafka wanted us to get something else from it- an example of extremes. For example, when someone in society has something different or ugly to deal with, like a disabled person; we tend to just tuck him or her in a corner and throw a few morsels of pity in their direction. Maybe- is this what Kafka wanted us to understand? The ending is so anticlimactic... I can't know, or even tell if Kafka even desired it to be, or intended it to be, an ending... maybe it's more like a release, or a rest.......