drewdevinecartoonist

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Someone gets hurt every moment. Someone is in delight every moment. Infinite goodness is an object with intelligence which may or may not do you a favor if you ask it to. Some people know that more than others. Hypotheses can be liberating unto themselves even if they are false.

The doctrine that samsara can be escaped is more ironclad than any given solution to an alleged illness theorized as schizophrenia. Infinite hypotheses abound in your imagination or not. You decide. Fun is at stake.

All the Hindus and Buddhists and other assholes who ever escaped samsara are lying, or schizophrenia is a problem science has solved at the psychic-social level. Discuss.

Can salvation and the escape of samsara coexist in a suffering being who also likes jokes?

Dear best thing ever, make me do the appropriate thing times 100.

The excluded middle is anything.

Heaven sounds like a good place to be unless for some reason you happen to disagree minus 12.

Q: Do you believe in Jesus? A: How could you not?

Jokes are sometimes bad. Jokes are an entire department of nirvana, heaven, and all kinds of things other than TV. Jokes are sometimes good. World peace is at stake. imagine good things until you don’t want to or can’t.

Jesus is funny. the Bible may or may not have left this out. Jesus lives and can be infinitely funny in a good way if he wants to, usually.

The usual is the usual.

Is Jesus the first or second person of an alleged trinity? Consider the pros and cons of either option and change reality according or not. Eithernesses.

Jesus was funny in the Bible if you read Greek. Everyone else without a Jesus hookup is unlucky or just waiting on the good thing--whatever it may be--to occur.

Be good. Good is relative and absolute depending. Jokes.

Is it easier to talk to goodness or to Jesus or to a person other than Jesus?

Infinity. Limit also, if.

Good is infinite, evil is a parasite on it. Some parasites are good and more necessary than others to goodness.

Infinite goodness, notice tortures and stop them at your own pace, if necessary.

Perichoressis, 0 or 1 or 2 or 3? Go dance or not!

That punk dancing on her own in Peanuts specials was beloved by the things that loved her/him. Merry Christmas Charlie Brown to your Fake Placstic Cell Phone.

Is dancing good or bad? Concepts can dance.

Infinite solutions to this “trinity problem” are out there in the infinity thing. Some people don’t like games. Why?

What are you doing and not doing for the “environment” at the same time?

Dear best thing ever, next time I fall asleep, make me even better than I have already been today, extremely eventually. Eventually as in --..

Captain Business Suit is saved by molecules who love him. His underlings get it even better. Money is the root of whatever it is the root of.

How trustworthy is Allah actually? One billion points for figuring it out definitely faster than a trillion.

There isn’t a feminism for everything, but there is a feminism for some things. Get Rid of Slimy Sexists.

Copy right or copy left? Dancing or head shoulders bees and goats?

Make a science out of a non science or the reverse. 

The infinitely good thing after the finitely in the way other thing.

Sleep heals.

Vote for or against inevitable awesomeness in general or in particular?

Forgiveness memory functions local and planetary in relative states of disrepair and dancing to yayness. 

Does God ever like to “get away from himself and be not himself?” God can do anything except be an atheist. Maybe!

Peace talks and pandas! Summon summon summon!!!!!

Non sleep heals.

Can you only do certain things while awake? That’s either life or it isn’t.

Dear best thing that can read my mind in infinity, find the next best thing and get it on the case too.

Some beings exist in a dimension where sex is always good.

Hypothesis: Money is the root of all evil! Behavior now!

There was evil before money? Yes or no? Don’t scream!

In infinity, money pre-exists evil. Other planets. Discuss finitely whether you want to or not. (A tree appears from a money thing in a rainbow dimension).

Could I discuss uninfinitely if I wanted to?

Within infinity, which part of infinity should put the funniest infinite other part on hilarious trial? The limit on infinity’s trials is love itself. Love infinite. 

Infinite love can determine me into whatever it wants to determine me into no matter what anyone may or may not think. 

Hell is avoidable by many number of factors including water.

The shapeless of going from one insight to the next. Shapes moving in a why that is tonal in some sense.

I am against being against popular music.

Intentional creeps vs unintentional creeps and protections FOREVERSVILLE. Good spies dies.

A knight errant slays schizophrenia but he’s still himself.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of my main man, Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz. We know Schulz best as the creator of Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, Linus and Lucy. We know these characters for our own reasons. Maybe there was a stuffed doll. Maybe you caught the classic tv specials that had really great jazz tunes and brooding shakedowns on the bittersweetness of the holiday seasons. But some of you may wonder why I am so militantly committed to the whole Peanuts crew as an adult, given that in the age of the internet all Peanuts stuff that is televised or commercialized may seem reducible to a blasphemous cliche. All I can say is this: jam with or against the specials if you want—Snoopy has your back either way—but my zealotry is tied almost entirely to the original sacred scriptures of modern American cartooning, AKA the actual daily comic strips that appeared in newspapers worldwide. (Those strips can be bought through the various Complete Peanuts volumes put out by Fantagraphics, and I would say that the essential years for me are basically 1955 to 1970. Start in that era, or maybe if you want to mainline the Greatest Hits, a cool volume called Celebrating Peanuts: 65 Years ties the whole room together.) Issue is the toys and merchandise make you think Peanuts content is capitalist baby stuff, then the specials make you think the style is some 8/10 slow burn sadness. SOS: the original Peanuts comics are substantial suburban existential post-Beatnik angst as sliced up through wrenching Kierkegaardian sensitivity, and stylistically the golden era strips are snappy and inspiring in their Zen pop precision. Truth is, being funny every single day of your life with a complex cast of characters is hard work when you’re dealing with the depressing upheavals of the second half of the 20th century, and for real people: Charles Schulz is the ultimate G for airing out his neuroses in public for so long in such an honest and trackable way. And I just want to say, for most of my 20s I was wishy-washy Charlie Brown, but due to recent events I’m going to try and keep it pretty Linus in my 30s. Any objections? Thanks Schulz, you was a real one.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of Chloë Sevigny. Though she likes to play up the notion that she is (paraphrase) “not quite the pretty girl, not quite the cool girl, not exactly the greatest actress,” Chloë can confidently say this sort of thing only since it is obvious that her many apparently debatable “almosts” add up quite inevitably to a larger “definitely.” For me probably the single most compelling female style icon of the past 30 years, Sevigny’s career is a study in how all style really has to mean is a keen aptitude for the art of selection, whether that means the clothes you wear, the places you hang out, or the roles you choose and/or accept. Someone wishing to acquaint themselves with Sevigny’s screen work should be discouraged from starting with the agreeable half-mainstream stuff which received more immediately positive responses from critics; Chloë is most herself in roles that divide opinion, given her talent for beautifying the ugly and sanctifying the strange; her controversial work with director Harmony Korine, her many photo shoots from the 90s, and her own short films such as WHITE ECHO (2019)--currently streaming on the Criterion Channel--give the best introduction to her daringly incarnational aesthetic and vision. Despite having had a titanic impact on redefining the unwritten rules of the more eclectic side of alternative cultural and fashion standards, Sevigny is--perhaps akin to Warhol before her--a Catholic who firmly recommitted herself to her childhood faith when an intense theatrical role involving torture and murder reportedly gave her a bit more than the spooks. She is recently married to a handsome fellow with whom she has had a son. How easy it is to resist the Whore of Babylon when you have the legacy of such a thoroughly inventive punk rock Mother Mary on your side. [This cartoon and writeup has been a Tumblr exclusive.]

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the 80th birthday of the great Martin Scorsese. When I was around 15 years old and was in that time of life when I could go off to the strip mall cineplex on the weekend and see whatever PG-13 film me and my group of friends so pleased, on one occasion we decided upon THE AVIATOR (2004). I had grown up in the VCR generation and memorized most of the Disney canon made up to that point, as well as dipped my toes into A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and whatever other movies happened to be within reach. I was in love with imaginary stories and characters of all kinds, and thought I understood them. But that weekend when I saw THE AVIATOR, something changed. The usual pleasures: a great drama, a great hero, a great performance. But also something else: the relative distance of the camera from the face of the actor, the recognition that sometimes the “cuts” were timed to well chosen sounds and music. Though I had already seen many movies, THE AVIATOR was my first dawning recognition that movies were actually made by people who were thinking carefully about what they were doing. That movies were work which required a sophisticated understanding of the chosen tools, the same way I knew that a comic strip was work because I had access to a pen and paper, and knew that for me those simple cartoon characters were nearly impossible to replicate. The following 12 years of my life when cinema was the center of my universe were wonderful and terrifying, and that showing of THE AVIATOR was partly to blame for the whole adventure. Today I could make a lot of generalizations about Scorsese’s common themes and style, but many others have done that, so I would prefer to just say thanks to him for making such great art, for contributing so wonderfully to cinema’s understanding and defense, and for doing so with such a palpable sense of genuine spiritual responsibility. He’s probably right, by the way, that most superhero movies are subcinematic and possibly subhuman. You can only sometimes get the benefit of saying Yes to the things that deserve it if you also know how and when to say No to the things that don’t. To Scorsese’s entire career, I say Yes.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Happy belated to the exceptionally great Neil Young. It really is something like a miracle that one can look at almost any given record Young put out in the 1970s and say “This is the one.” I know that most critics would choose this that or the other, but for me and my family, HARVEST (1972) has always had an important place in our hearts. “A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World” have had to grow on me what with the strings strangeness, but there’s no arguing with the subtleties of the rhythm section and how the kick thuds in on “Out on the Weekend,” is there? “Heart of Gold” is what it is, and “Old Man” will probably always be my favorite… until it’s not. Before I was capable of beginning to wrap my mind around the carnivalesque secrets of the great Dylan albums, I needed Young’s much sweeter and smoother harmonica to guide me into an acceptance that sometimes the singer-songwriter tradition could be as exciting as a Green Day or Rage Against the Machine song. As a guitarist, Young’s acoustic rhythm slashes are delectably tasty, and for those who might have an issue with the electric work, I can only point you to the soundtrack of a film called DEAD MAN (1995). I don’t know much about what Neil’s been up to since then, but I know I’ll eventually get to it. Thanks for all the good work Neil, I am a Southern Man who very much needs you around, but you’ll understand if these days I frankly need “Pocahontas” and “Alabama” a bit more.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of the great reformer and hymnwriter Martin Luther. For those who don’t know, Luther was—like myself—a man who was willing to die for his eccentric opinions about the relevant uses and abuses of the Bible, and famously hammered a bunch of corrections re: popular Christian theory and practice onto a rather prominent door. This has been regarded as a somewhat explosive move and the world has never been quite the same since, God save us all. If it were up to me, the ninety-sixth and ninety-seventh theses would have been: “96. Hell is likely temporary, but certain pious Hindus will probably have to go through even less purgatory than yours truly” and “97. It is seriously okay to be a mere Jew, given how many of them understand the subtleties of ancient Hebrew much more fully than Augustine.” Oh the agony these two simple additions would have prevented! Aside from giving much more than the middle finger to a particularly depraved Pope, my favorite aspect of Martin Luther was his extremely profane imagination and capacity for insult. Luther suffered from both severe demonic attack and terrible constipation (newsflash: bowel trouble is the handiwork of the dark prince) and when sitting on the toilet the great Jesusian would often loudly proclaim that while his stubborn turds belonged in the devil’s mouth, all glory and delight belonged to the Lord. Can I get an amen? He tended to drink beer and experimented with openly thinking of the sex lives of his fellow churchmen during his own copulatory sessions, two habits many of his Baptist and Puritan heirs should be forced to fully contemplate, though before you get too excited: it’s unlikely that Luther ever endorsed actual drunkenness. The man certainly has nearly as much to answer for as we have to admire in him, but hey, that’s why we have both the resurrection AND the crucifixion, right? Happy birthday Martin: Jah bless, Jah bless.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of Joni Mitchell. Most would agree that Mitchell is one of the best singer/songwriters of the 1970s, but what exactly was her energetic contribution to the great (Canadian-)American songbook? Perhaps the situation was simply that by the end of the 60s the likes of Dylan and Cohen had wrested the laurels of songcraft into directions too abstract—with arcane Biblical references twisted to nigh nonsensically abstract ends—to bear all that much sustained acclaim or kingship. With the solo work of Paul Simon and fellow Canadian Neil Young, Mitchell initiated and lent credibility to a more directly appealing approach to intelligent songwriting, with ambiguity used as a deepening tool for familiar subjects rather than placed hazily as a mystifying goal unto itself. And while the instrumentation of Dylan and Cohen could often be barebones and brittle or even abrasive, Mitchell’s acoustic guitar and piano work could be a melodic accompanying symphony unto itself, and her vocal melodies strove always toward obvious gorgeousness as a general rule, rather than as a one-off, poppy exception. Even in her biggest radio hits Joni is a great writer: will a well known line such as “It’s love’s illusions I recall / I don’t really know love at all” ever stop being iconic and start being a cliche? As for my favorite tune, it’s probably no surprise that this moody Peanuts fan most loves “River,” wherein the melody of Jingle Bells is turned into a monochromatic dirge as Joni wishes to escape the mixed emotions of the Christmas season with all its fake plastic reindeer by skating away into some icy oblivion. As we look toward a holiday season no doubt likely to be troubled by much off-camera disastrousness, political and otherwise, I’m thankful for the artists who allow us to face the ambiguity of such festivities with a little more honesty and, hopefully, grace.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of Courtney Barnett. Among the most very exciting singer-songwriters and especially lyricists to gain fandom in the second half of the 2010s indie rock scene, Barnett’s vibe has the same holy mixture of straightforwardness and eclectic brio as a 60s Dylan—just modify the master’s sharp post-Beat masculine trickstering and substitute in humane, good natured conversation with none of the creativity or visionary element lost. I first heard Courtney through the NPR Tiny Desk Concert where she performs “Avant Gardener” in a stripped down acoustic version which I still greatly prefer to the exceptional studio cut. The line that got me was “The paramedic thinks I’m clever cause I play guitar / I think she’s clever cause she stops people dying.” Her collaborative album with Kurt Vile features one of my most revisited go-to tracks over the past five years, “Over Everything,” an extremely peaceful and extended jammy song that radiates relaxation, collegiality, and healing warmth. My favorite aspect of Barnett’s growing discography is the sense that she wants to expand beyond the well-exhausted tradition of music as self-expression and strives to tap into the sometimes seemingly lost art of music as friend. Serious insight, brilliant craft, good fun.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of the great and often overlooked American writer Nathanael West. He is most well known for the novellas MISS LONELYHEARTS (1932) and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1939) which can be bought together in one slim New Directions edition. I am a passionate admirer of LONELYHEARTS in particular—it’s only about 58 pages long, and it’s one of the weirdest, funniest, most wickedly and heartbreakingly insightful works of literature you are ever likely to read. Ostensibly about a newspaper advice columnist who initially started his job as a joke but soon found himself moved to depression and misery over the desperation and communicative helplessness of his devoted readers (who he knows he is powerless to help), the short novella is a perfect encapsulation of the difficulty of achieving any kind of compassionate or actionable social love amidst the kind of brutally cheapened and superficial form of consciousness that the mass American media often enforces upon the public. The situation is of course even worse these days. The writing style is clear and sharp while also being expressionistically distorted and nightmarishly hilarious in uncomfortable and illuminating combinations. Pick it up if you’re bored and you want something to really shock and satisfy you; we could all really use a great work of art which both entertains and endarkens these days.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of the great filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan. Though widely heralded as an essential voice in the unofficial genre of “grown up movies with grown up problems,” Lonergan has to date only directed three films, each of which are very highly acclaimed. For my own part, I consider the first two—YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000) and MARGARET (2011)—to be knock-down drag-out masterpieces, and it is on their basis alone that I write what I am about to write (his most recent film is one that I have yet to fully grasp). For me Lonergan’s films are best appreciated for a multitude of elements: their unostentatious visual styles which serve character and story and emotion rather than distract from or beef them up… their deep intellectual and emotional intelligence in portraying a wide array of different sorts of people with compassion and operatic insight… their overall sense of balance, fairness, and scalpel-blade exacto healing of the subtly hidden parts of the human soul. You know, the sorts of things you want art to do? Those first two films in particular are vivid and warm, moving and eloquent, passionate and precise. They have beating hearts but also allow any human being with common sense to really stop and ponder: what exactly is this game we are all playing as a society? just what are the intricacies of right and wrong, maturity and innocence, naiveté and sophistication? There aren’t always answers to these questions, but there are soppy cries… tears which make you feel glad for being older, glad for being wiser, and glad for being alive. My personal favorite is MARGARET, which is preferable in the longer director’s cut; I was never bored with its runtime, and sometimes wish the thing had been made into a much longer miniseries. Next time you are tempted to start binge watching some mediocre Netflix show, watch this amazing three hour movie instead. You should be astonished.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of Fred Nietzsche who is fun to draw and even more fun to disagree with and about. Wasn’t “God is dead, and we have killed him” always a bit premature? Many decades later we do finally live in a (Western) world truly shorn from the dominant claims of any one view of God or No God. This is not due to postmodern philosophers or the apparent dominance of liberal media; it is just the natural result of living in a highly connected global world which makes everyone digital neighbors with just about every other belief system imaginable. God may be alive or dead, but He/She/It is certainly not what we thought He/She/It was or is, and the Internet has made that basic existential truth a mainstream fact of life. But how impressive was Nietzsche as an atheist? Some say ignore Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins: Nietzsche is the real Jesus crushing game in town. I’m sympathetic with this since Nietzsche was a definite genius and the others may or may not be, but it also seems off the mark: the New Atheists are truly trying to prove to America that there is no God and the Bible makes no sense. Nietzsche doesn’t really care about whether the Bible makes logical sense or if there is a God, he just happens to think the Prince of Peace had it backwards and he demands to tell you why he's doing it his own way instead. Maybe this tantrum is a challenge for certain American Christians for whom Jesus is just a moral credit card with which to behave like a corrupt cowboy pagan anyway; not much of a problem for those who genuinely prefer the values of the Beatitudes to those of The Iliad. Fred's problems with Jesus are wrong but understandable; the Lord had nearly impossible standards of behavior and spiritual rectitude if you actually bother to consult them. But Nietzsche’s issues with all of womankind, on the other hand, have never made much sense to me, and are of course abhorrent to the Sleater-Kinney fan responsible for this missive. To sum up… Nietzsche: read him or don’t. He’s probably important or something, and he’s surely responsible for more than a few great metal bands.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

#thereisnodeath? #lifeisonlyadream? #wearetheimaginationofourselves?

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of the late great John Lennon. Well known to nearly everybody as the darker, more literary of the two most prolific Beatles, the spirit of Lennon still haunts our cultural dreams so palpably that I do wonder if in some very silly sense Paul is in fact the dead one. Sprung from a nasty childhood which gave him a cynical eye, a sharp sense of humor, and a hunger for a wide world of strange possibilities, I sometimes think we still don’t give Lennon enough credit for how quickly and forcefully his work with The Beatles expanded the palette of colors and ideas that pop artists had to draw from. John’s most famous and possibly prettiest solo song remains “Imagine,” and its lyrics sometimes feel as divisive today as they were in 1971. As a fellow dreamer, I guesstimate that if he could speak to us directly today he would turn his wistfully negative visions of abolition into fervently positive dreams of creativity: we need bigger heavens, shorter hells, truer religions, and better, more cooperative countries. Maybe that’s just my two cents? Here are some alternative song recommendations for those who wish to spend today in a festively remembering mood: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “Norwegian Wood,” “Rain,” “Because,” “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” “Instant Karma,” “Gimme Some Truth,” and maybe my favorite, “Dear Prudence.” Powerful stuff that I know inside and out but still don’t tire of. Thanks for all the good work John. I hope you don’t mind that I disagree with you about the afterlife; it’s only because I hope to have a good long chat with you in mine.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of Thom Yorke, frontman of Radiohead and numerous other projects. For most alt rock radio listeners, Radiohead are often remembered through the unforgettable ballad “Creep”—essentially the well known story of Charlie Brown and the Little Red Haired Girl now all grown up with his unrequited love inflected into the key of electro-nightmarish Kurt Cobain horror. To his legions of true followers, Radiohead are known for having one of the deepest and most sonically adventuresome discographies in all of album rock, helpful for navigating the increasing techno-capitalistic conquest of our souls. Theirs is a vision as informed by Noam Chomsky as it is by Neil Young, Aphex Twin, and Talking Heads. OK COMPUTER (1997), KID A (2000), and IN RAINBOWS (2007)—the latter of which the band essentially gave away for free—are all often cited as their greatest album: my tendency is to think that the group just gets better and better as they go along. For me the most interesting aspect of Yorke’s personal trajectory is that while he is often still pigeonholed as the great paranoiac depressed bard of alternative music, I sense within his lyrics an expanding hopefulness and human solidarity even as the global situation becomes ever more apparently dispiriting. His newest project with fellow bandmate Jonny Greenwood, ambiguously titled The Smile, is the latest testament to how even the worst nightmares can be transformed into stabilizing dreams. Today I am rocking “Speech Bubbles.” Yorke practices yoga and meditation and is the father of two children.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

October 3 was the birthday of M. K. Gandhi (what can I say, it’s Libra season, I am a Libra, some of us have our issues with laziness; please forgive). Any South Park guys out there remember when Kenny descended into hell and found Hitler and Gandhi both waiting there for him? A pretty simple joke, a pretty simple point; but I really do think that Matt and Trey may be even more sophisticated than you might think. I personally have thought about it a lot and I hate to break it to you but Gandhi may very well be in the worst circle of hell even now. Really, imagine Gandhi being coerced into the pearly gates by a choir of very sneaky angels before the great man finally snapped and said to St. Peter: “Look, I just happen to know I am needed somewhere else very very badly—I’ll get back to you when I want some R&R.” Poor Hitler… (that’s Gandhi, do some Googling on the letters between those two). Can’t you imagine some white South African jock telling Gandhi to “Go to hell!” for some insane reason and Gandhi just smiling back at him and thinking “Have I not just descended quite horribly from England to here? What more do you want?” Turn the other cheek, yadda yadda yadda, Jesus of course would want it no other way. Anyhow, Gandhi’s work: the Wikipedia article is cool, the old 80s biopic is awesome, a slim little number called THE WIT AND WISDOM OF GANDHI (1951) is Great. I suggest you try and buy it anywhere other than Amazon if you can manage it. How good is poor Alibris doing these days? Peace out. ;)

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Happy belated to Michelangelo Antonioni (sorry Mike, you seem like a HIGHLY organized and …possibly prompt person, but you’re also an artist and, well, you know how it can be). As I’m sure we are all quite aware, every film that Antonioni made between 1960 and 197whatever is exceedingly easy on the eyes, to put it mildly. So easy on the eyes that even I as an old Film Studies guy sometimes have issues keeping up with the subtitles. Just what exactly is upsetting Monica Vitti in RED DESERT (1964)? Maybe I’ll finally get it together and really pay precisely the right kind of attention on my fifth try. Until then my solution is to focus on the English language works; they have kept me busy for a while… really not that big of a problem, is it? Monica would get that. And I wouldn’t say this to just anyone, but given the state of the world I am going to put my foot down and hazard a guess that those of you here in the states might want to start with and/or return to ZABRISKIE POINT (1970). I really do have a bone to pick with Susan Sontag over this: her brain, her ideas, what all the LA and NY critics did to that film: where’s the viciously sensitive screed about THAT situation? (Speaking of Sontag, talk about someone who really must be summoned down from whatever Town Bloody Hall [1979] they’re having up at Mount Olympus. Bring some lightning bolts, Suze.) It’s like, I have a clue about the symphonic depths of LA NOTTE (1961), but given recent history it just reminds me a bit too much of spaces and places in which more than a few ex-presidents may have been up to no good. These days I’m more interested in the existentialism of deserts while gazing at various logos and architectures and imagining precisely whatever non-violent explosions they do or do not deserve. Anyway, BLOW-UP (1966) and THE PASSENGER (197…5). Eventually another guy makes a film called BLOW-OUT? Kaboom. Need I say more? Cheers? Gross.

[drewdevinecartoonist]

Today is the birthday of the late F. Scott Fitzgerald, about whom I have an axe to grind. Like Salinger after him, Fitzgerald is one of the great American writers simultaneously overrated and underrated, both famous and taken for granted, and, as is usual in such cases, high school English classes are more to blame for the situation than is the writer himself. More people have been “taught” THE GREAT GATSBY (1925)—as in, they have had to understand the Green Light, the difference between West and East Egg, and the decadence and hope of the Jazz Age—than have actually read it. High school books which deserve to be high school books aren’t very well written; they are reducible to big clanging   symbols and simplistic themes. Great books like GATSBY can’t be understood that way, but they can be unfairly taught that way, and too many people let the SparkNotes get in the way of the actual work in their memory. For me GATSBY is most essentially not about any of these symbolic cheat codes, but about how Fitzgerald imagines love in the American context as a complicated mental balancing act between a radically yielding tenderness and a careful discernment and ambition; a question of when it’s appropriate to let that kind of love feed into impossible hopes and when to move into a more tragically realistic frame of mind. Fitzgerald’s prose style is not just gorgeous, it’s a careful yet powerful embodiment of those values at a sentence by sentence, word by word level. Whether you were taught to appreciate that or not, whether you remember the way you were taught the book or not, the time to read GATSBY is in adulthood, after your heart has been torn out and stomped on enough to make you question what you even want out of a country such as America. The trick is that Fitzgerald is actually quite easy to read; it’s just that he’s easier to understand when read raw, sans clunky intellectual training wheels, and I suspect not enough people have tried that.