The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody published a blog post about the connection between the 1920s and our own time – each “a glittering age of incommensurable inequality.” The blog ranges over several loosely connected topics, from Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with social life and its poetic failings to the idea that the young Jay Gatz would have made an excellent Theodore Dreiser character. (According to English Professor Veronica Makowsky, Dreiser’s work had a major influence on Fitzgerald, especially The Beautiful and the Damned, the novel that preceded Gatsby.)

The New York Times published an article about Gatsby cover art through the years. The original cover by Francis Cugat – now considered a classic design – was initially dismissed as “garish” by Ernest Hemingway, who later wrote in A Moveable Feast that he was “embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it.” Born in Spain, Cugat (1893-1981) was a well-known illustrator and set designer.

While you’re on the Times website, you might want to read a Paul Krugman blog post about “The Great Gatsby Curve,” a graph that measures the intergenerational inelasticity of income in the United States – in short, income in America is highly unequal and becoming more unequal.

There’s been a lot of press about the searchable digital facsimile of Fitzgerald’s ledger (1919-1938) that the University of South Carolina archives has made available online. Fitzgerald divided the Ledger into five sections: “Record of Published Fiction,” “Money Earned by Writing since Leaving Army,” “Published Miscelani (including movies) for which I was Paid,” “Zelda’s Earnings,” and “Outline Chart of my Life.” It’s a fascinating picture of his life.

The number of articles about the upcoming movie is overwhelming – the actors, the Miuccia Prada costumes, the Jay-Z score, etc., etc. Film buffs might try an Architectural Digest article on the sets used in the film.

Rolling Stone has provided consistent coverage of the music being produced for the film, which blends jazz and hip-hop. This overview of the performers and soundtrack is useful and there are clips available here.

The process of developing the performance has been fascinating. Students read the book over winter break and came to class prepared to talk about their favorite passages and characters and identify where they were gravitating. One wanted to explore the idea that Daisy’s voice is “full of money” – what is that vocal quality after all? Others felt drawn toward Nick Carraway, the narrator, or Tom Buchanan. As their collaborative process unfolded, they explored tensions in their performances between describing the characters or playing the characters. They had to rise to the challenge of making the descriptive passages engaging.

The performance also includes the work of a saxophonist, Colin Walters, a student in the Music Department. According to Karen, Colin’s music bridges from one mood to the next – whether through a song from the period, like “I’m the Sheik of Araby,” or through improvisation. This is a wonderfully effective way to evoke the book because references to music are threaded through the text.

There is a real dialogue between the exhibition and performance, too. Karen decided to include Patricia Cronin’s paintings of mansions, featured in the CAG exhibition, into the performance, along with realtors’ descriptions of the houses Cronin paints. A sense of place and the built environment is absolutely essential to Gatsby – whether it is those two mansions facing each other across the water, East Egg versus West Egg, or the architectural terrain of New York City, from the slums of Queens to the apartments and speak-easies of Manhattan.

The UConn community will have two opportunities to see “Gatsby Performed.” The first takes place April 15 at 6 pm in the lobby of the Art Building, in conjunction with the symposium and closing reception for “Gatsby Revisited in the Age of the One Percent.” The second will be April 29th in the Nafe Katter Theatre – a night when the theatre is dark between performances, providing a second experience of “Gatsby Performed” in a very different context.

The student actors performing include members of the sophomore acting ensemble in the undergraduate acting program: Saul Alvarez (Mr. Wilson); Whitney Andrews (Myrtle, woman); Gabriel Aprea (Gatsby, Tom); Julia Estrada (Jordan, Catherine, woman); Conor Donnally (Nick); John Manning (narrator, Meyer Wolfsheim); and Gina Salvatore (Daisy, Lucille, woman). The costumes were created by Patricia Ubaldi, a graduate student in costume in the Master of Fine Arts program,

This is the second time that Professor Ryker has developed a UConn Reads performance in collaboration with an exhibition at the Contemporary Art Galleries- her acting students created “Half the Sky: Performed” last year.

Late yesterday afternoon I was driving to the grocery store and trying very hard not to forget to get white eggs (for dyeing), which were not on my list, and which I couldn’t add to my list because I was driving and, well, you get the point.

So I was trying desperately to keep the white eggs in the forefront of my mind, which was difficult because they’re not inherently interesting, when the NPR show Studio 360 began to broadcast an episode on The Great Gatsby. What luck! I was immediately distracted.

It was a terrific show, and included an interview with the writer Jonathan Franzen, who said of the book “In 50,000 words, he tells you the central fable of America…and yet you feel like you are eating whipped cream.” The Franzen interview was one of my favorite parts but there were also interesting segments on the upcoming Baz Luhrmann film and G (2005), a hip hop film version of the Gatsby story directed by Richard T. Jones. You can listen to the podcast here.

And, yes, I remembered the white eggs.

Although we can imagine it might have been rather difficult for the young Gatsby – or Gatz – to access improving books and magazines at such a fast rate on the Minnesota plains, we have no such shortage ourselves. And, in fact, our library has gathered together not only improving books but “improving resources” to support classes and individual members of the UConn community in learning more about The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald. These resources are available at this page on the library’s website. The page includes everything from reference books to useful websites to streaming versions of films.

I asked Richard Bleiler, University Librarian, about the process of putting together the page. He noted that sorting through the sheer mass of material on Fitzgerald and Gatsby to provide a reasonable overview was a challenge: “The guide attempts to offer reasonably balanced access to the various resources available from the perspective of generalists who want to give audiences an awareness of the work, the author, and the life and times in which the author lived and wrote.”

And the most interesting resources for him? An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia and the University of South Carolina’s F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary website: “The former is fascinating browsing, giving details about the Fitzgeralds’ life and works; the latter is a bit older but has been maintained and does a magnificent job of presenting Fitzgerald.”

I also asked Richard what was most surprising or unexpected about the resources the librarians gathered. “In my case,” he said, “the resources that most surprised and informed me were those that detailed the contrasting views shared by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald…. For example, F. Scott was friendly with Hemingway and considered him a good friend, drinking companion, and confidante; Zelda on the other hand saw Hemingway as ‘phony as a rubber check’ and dismissed his masculinity as posturing.”

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Princeton University Library).

I’m very grateful to the research librarians for putting this resource page together and I’ll take this opportunity to thank our university librarians and library staff for the wonderful work they do supporting research and teaching at UConn. Even as a seasoned researcher myself, I always consult the librarians when I’m working on a new project, and I require students writing papers for my classes to do the same. It’s well worth the effort.

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting with the participants in this conversation: Joseph Flora, Visiting Professor in the English Department and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Ellen Litman, Assistant Professor and Assistant Director, Creative Writing Program.

Over coffee, we enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation about the role of literature in our lives, the themes in Gatsby that we find most challenging, Fitzgerald as a writer, and more.

It’s great good luck that Professor Flora has been visiting here just at the time we’re reading The Great Gatsby for UConn Reads. A nationally renowned expert in early twentieth-century American literature, his book Hemingway’s Nick Adams won the 1982 Mayflower Award. He has also co-edited The Companion to Southern Literature and Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary, which received the 2006 Jules and Frances Landry Award.

I asked Professor Flora how he got interested in Fitzgerald. “My attraction to Fitzgerald evolved from a broad interest in American literature in the first half of the twentieth century,” he said. “His short story ‘Babylon Revisited’ sealed for me the conviction of how very good he was—even when writing a story that would first be published in The Saturday Evening Post for a popular audience. Working with Hemingway, I was repeatedly drawn back to Fitzgerald. His life as well as his fiction had much to tell us about his era and about what it means to be an artist.”

We are equally fortunate to have Professor Litman as a more permanent member of our UConn community. She is a specialist in twentieth-century Amercan literature, with an interest in Russian and immigrant literature. Her book The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories was published by WW Norton in 2007.

We talked a lot about the meaning of Fitzgerald as an author in an international context – touching on her reading of classic literature as a young woman in Russia and on Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), with its surprising take on Gatsby.

The three of us talked for a good while over coffee, but eventually classes and meetings pulled us in different directions. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversaion on the 27th and I can promise it will be a good one!

The William Benton Museum of Art, one of our campus treasures, has mounted “Millionaires and Mechanics, Bootleggers and Flappers: Speaking of The Great Gatsby,” a terrific exhibition focused on Jazz Age America as seen through the lens of the novel. Organized by Assistant Curator Ally Walton (MA ‘12), the exhibition will run through March 17. Last week I had an opportunity to view the exhibition and discuss the exhibition with Ally.

I asked her how she approached the exhibition. “I had read the book in high school and loved it,” she said. “And I had a lot of memories of it. I started a ‘soft’ checklist, focusing on images of New York City and parties in the Roaring Twenties. Rereading the book, there were new things that stood out to me.”

She organized the exhibition around several key themes: the changing nature of femininity in the early twentieth century, race and class tensions, the urban scene, and the visual culture of the time. The Benton’s collection is particularly rich in works by early twentieth-century American artists, and Ally noted that the exhibition could have been much larger.

As a viewer, I appreciated the very careful way the works of art were chosen to resonate with the book. I encourage visitors to spend time reading the labels that Ally wrote because she pulls references from the text and makes thoughtful and revealing connections to the images.

A case in point is Ilse Bing’s photograph of the Queensboro Bridge. German-born Bing was an avant-garde artist who lived in Paris in the 1930s and spent three months photographing in New York City in 1936.

Ilse Bing, Queensboro Bridge Exhit with One Car, 1936.

When researching images for the exhibition, Ally noted that Bing’s photograph perfectly captures the famous moment in Gatsby when Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway drive into the city over the Queensboro Bridge. Ally’s label quotes Bing’s description of her impression of the cityscape – “I did not find the New York skyline big like rocks. It is more natural than that, like crystals in the mountains, little things grown up.” – and connects it to Fitzgerald’s image in The Great Gatsby: “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

I was especially pleased to see this photograph in the exhibition because it had been purchased for the Benton by my 2010 graduate seminar in museum studies. Over the past few years, with the generous assistance of Acting Director Dr. Thomas Bruhn, the class, as a curatorial exercise, has built a collection of pre-1950 photography for the museum, with the idea that these photographs could be relevant to many different exhibitions and classes at the university. Ally was actually a member of the seminar that purchased the Bing photograph, so it’s an image we both like and were pleased to see in this context – although we couldn’t have anticipated such an exhibition when the purchase was made two years ago.

A more troubling connection between text and image comes to the fore in Adolf Dehn’s We Nordics (like Fitzgerald, Dehn was born in Minnesota, but lived and worked in Europe and New York City).

Adolph Dehn, We Nordics, 1931.

The print shows a group of white patrons at a nightclub reacting with fear and uneasy fascination to the African-American performers on stage, who seem to hover above them like a nightmare. In her label, Ally draws a connection between the racism explored in this image and the white supremacy emphatically espoused by Tom Buchanan, who declares to Nick, Daisy, and Jordan Baker: “This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and… And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

Ally notes that Dehn’s depiction of the performers shades into negative stereotypes of African-Americans. To make this point visually, she placed next to Dehn’s print a photograph by James Van Der Zee, an African-American photographer whose images documented the cultural fabric of Harlem and the emerging black middle class in New York City.

" width="300" height="243" class="size-medium wp-image-323" /> James Van Der Zee, Harlem Beauty Parlor Operator, 1929.

Students from Bloomfield High School viewing the Gatsby exhibition at the Benton.

I had an opportunity to chat a bit with a group of young men viewing the Gatsby exhibition. One noted that this was his first time in the Benton, although he had visited campus on several other occasions – he said the museum was “intriguing” and made him think hard about the “purpose and message” of the art. These students noted that they hadn’t read The Great Gatsby yet (they expect to read it in eleventh grade) but were interested in the images of the 1920s for their historic value.

All in all, my visit was a perfect demonstration of the value of a university museum as a place to explore art, culture, and history in a scholarly and interdisciplinary way; as a professional training ground for students and young curators; and as an important educational and cultural resource for the community. It was especially nice to see UConn Reads working as a catalyst for bringing all these different elements into play.

Porter and Fitzgerald were contemporaries, both ambitious Ivy Leaguers who craved artistic and social success. Porter enjoyed plenty of each, thanks in part to his own wealth and that of his wife. Fitzgerald and Porter met in France through mutual friends, the stylish American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy. (The Murphys served as the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.)

Gerald Murphy, Ginny Carpenter, Cole Porter, and Sara Murphy, in Venice, Italy, 1923.

So, what essay contest, you ask? Let me get to the point.

This year President Herbst is sponsoring a UConn Reads essay contest for undergraduate students. The first prize is a semester’s worth of textbooks at the Co-op. The contest poses a simple question: what makes Gatsby your classic? Why is it a book with enduring value for you? You may choose your own approach or focus on some of the key aspects of the American experience addressed in the book – e.g., conflicts of class and culture; the nature of the American dream and its price; the complexities of romantic love and marriage; truthfulness, fidelity, and cheating in their many forms; American regionalism.

For full details on the essay contest, see the UConn reads website.

And for Artie Shaw’s classic swing version of “Begin the Beguine” see this video. Jo Stafford’s smooth delivery brings out the nostalgic tone in this version. And of course I can’t resist Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition, with her distinctive phrasing.

In his 1936 essay “The Crack-up,” a rumination on his emotional breakdown, Fitzgerald noted that he “avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.”

We won’t be avoiding Fitzgerald this semester. We’ll be confronting him, and Gatsby, in classrooms, exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and reading groups both live and virtual. I suspect Fitzgerald and his book will cause a great deal of “trouble” for us.

Although they don’t have much of a place in the novels, the parties of Christmas and New Year’s set the stage for a number of Fitzgerald’s short stories. This makes sense – Fitzgerald wrote stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and other outlets as a way to generate much-needed income, and holiday stories are marketable. Fitzgerald’s holiday stories vary in quality: some contain a few distinctive moments in an otherwise undistinguished story; others distill the themes and issues of his novels in a powerful and often poignant way.

A Fitzgerald holiday takes place among the young and, only secondarily, their elders. For his characters, especially the striving young men, the holiday season is marked by glamorous parties, of course, but also by a yearning for love and connection, by the search for a secure place in the world and, often, by disappointment, unhappiness, and alternating moments of intense social and emotional engagement and isolation.

A sense of that happy destiny just beyond reach is captured in the story “A Freeze-Out,” published in the Saturday Evening Post on December 19, 1931. The protagonist, Forrest Winslow, is “handsome, popular and rather spoiled in a conservative way,” and, after going East to school and then college, he finds working for his father’s firm in a large Minnesota a let-down. Forrest fantasizes about the emotional excitement to be found in the holiday season: “…at the Christmas dances among the Christmas girls he might find the ecstasy and misery, the infatuation that he wanted. By autumn he felt that his predestined girl was already packing her trunk in some Eastern or Southern city.”

Forrest’s critical moment actually comes at a ball on January 3rd, hosted by the Rikker family, which is trying to reestablish its respectability after a financial scandal. He attends, in spite of his parents’ disapproval, and ends up falling for the lovely and cultured Alida Rikker. Resisting his parents’ stuffy and somewhat disingenuous attitude, Forrest is inspired by his great-grandmother’s selfish desire to become a great-great-grandmother even if it means he marries “the daughter of Al Capone” – in other words, he decides to live by his own principles and, unlike many Fitzgerald heroes, finds his happy ending.

In fact, browsing Fitzgerald’s short stories for New Year’s themes, I noticed the prevalence of the phrase “after New Year’s.” A number of times, Fitzgerald writes not about New Year’s itself, but about the days before or after. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s understood that we all know what happens on New Year’s in Fitzgerald’s world – is the holiday itself such a blow-out that nothing truly worth writing about happens? Or maybe it’s Fitzgerald finding meaning and interest in the margins of things and in the smaller moments and gestures. West Egg rather than East Egg.

Inspired by the occasion, I decided to see if F. Scott Fitzgerald had ever made a reference to gingerbread in his writings. I have to admit that I wasn’t hopeful, but a short story titled “More Than Just a House,”” published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933, includes this reference:

At the Gunther house they served tea, hot or iced, sugar buns, gingerbread and hot rolls at half-past four.

This tea service is emblematic of the tired gentility of the Gunther family, their heavy heritage and lack of vitality – they clearly aren’t serving cocktails at five to the smart set. To underscore this, it is the grandmother who offers the story’s protagonist a second serving of gingerbread.

The amazing gingerbread creations at the UConn celebration were in no way a symbol of our lost vitality, but an expression of our sense of community, our energy, and our spirit of fun and creativity. I hope we’ll bring all of these qualities to the experience of reading The Great Gatsby together.

I’ve been working with President Herbst, the Steering Committee, and various members of the UConn community to develop programs for the Spring. We have a lot of exciting events in the works, including an exhibition of 1920s prints at the Benton Museum, an exhibition of contemporary art called “Gatsby Revisited in the Age of the 1%” at the Contemporary Art Galleries, a performance by drama students, a jazz concert, and a panel discussion with English department faculty. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions or suggestions for UConn Reads.