What folks often forget is that the world didn't remake itself to look like Radio City Music Hall on January 1, 1920. Rifling through my not-insignificant collection of 1920s knitting books, I realized that an authentic pattern wasn't going to cut it. The past doesn't always look the way you want it to. Getting all those knitters back to 1923 was a piece o' cake.īecause here's the thing: the past doesn't always look the way you think it did. No, it's not that blue thing from Doctor Who, but it has reclining leather seats. I live in Chicago, so I know my way around. So for my leg of the tour, which embarked this month, the knitters and I went to Chicago in 1923. "What I want from you," said Babs, "is time travel." Or, in the case of my tour, that time and place. As a souvenir you're given a yarn and coordinating pattern evocative of that place. Each installment guides you through a different destination. Not literally, but in the comfort of your favorite chair. Lots of dyers have yarn clubs, but Miss Babs runs the only club that sends you places. Miss Babs is a dyer, one of the best and she has a yarn club. It was this sketchy idea that I recently had to evoke in doing a piece of work for Babs Ausherman–known better to knitters all over the damn place as Miss Babs. They felt like Fitzgerald's descriptions of the roaring twenties, which in time became the American popular imagination's sketchy idea of the roaring twenties. Luhrman's sets and costumes weren't "correct," but they felt correct. They reminded me of why the book had sporadically carried me away I fell asleep during the second half, but before that I was surprisingly contented to just stare at the parties, the houses, and the clothes. This summer, after swearing I wouldn't, I went to see Baz Luhrman's film. What I did (and do) love about Gatsby was the parties, the houses, and the clothes. I admire Fitzgerald in a chilly way, but if you banished me to a desert island with limited space on the raft for books I doubt that Daisy Buchanan and pals would make the cut. I will not lie and say the experience turned me into a Fitzgerald fan. I do remember that I bought a copy of Gatsby with my babysitting money and read it as a silent Fuck You to the teacher. I honestly don't remember what I picked for the class. It was for the juniors, said the teacher. Forster, said the teacher, was a sick homo. Men didn't choose to read books written by women. Emma, said the teacher, was written by a woman. As this was a Christian Brothers school, "free choice" was of course relative. (Real men, we were told, love shooting and being shot at.)Īnd we were allowed one "free choice" book.
OBAT DISENTRI DI APOTIK FULL
We read The Red Badge of Courage, which was full of battle scenes we were meant to find alluring, not revolting. I still remember the blurb on the back cover insisting that ".no boy who reads it can ever fail to be thrilled." (I failed.) We read the Odyssey, in a ridiculous prose translation that reduced Homer's epic to something less compelling than a Hardy Boys adventure.
In keeping with the rest of the curriculum, it was intended to mold boys into men. During my first of two years at the former, I was force-fed the Irish Christian Brothers' approved course of literary blood and guts. I went to two high schools–one horrible, one merely mediocre. Like fifty billion other Americans, I first read The Great Gatsby in high school.
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