EppsNet

I am learning to bring into [my voice] that polite acerbity that makes people feel that far from being welcome they are not even tolerated and are under continual and scathing analysis at every moment.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

• What's better on a hot summer afternoon — iced tea or lemonade? Thanks to Arnold Palmer, I don't have to choose! #
• "AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group. I was never a joiner." — F. Scott Fitzgerald #

I posted something on Twitter about helping my son with The Great Gatsby and got what you might call a spam reply from this girl, who said “have u tried http://shmoop.com for The Great Gatsby?”

Evidently Shmoop, which I’d never heard of, has people hanging out on Twitter waiting for someone to mention a book, at which point they send back a “have u tried …” reply.

Lest you think that’s a totally ineffective thing to do, I actually did click over to the Shmoop entry on The Great Gatsby, which starts off like this:

The Great Gatsby is a delightful concoction of MTV Cribs, VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of…, and HBO’s Sopranos. Shake over ice, add a twist of jazz, a spritz of adultery, and the little pink umbrella that completes this long island iced tea and you’ve got yourself a 5 o’clock beverage that, given the 1920’s setting, you wouldn’t be allowed to drink.

So it’s a little bit more hip than Cliffs Notes. I haven’t seen enough of it yet to know if I really like it, but I like it . . .

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

This is the epigraph to The Great Gatsby, which my son is reading for school. So beautiful, so sad . . .

(Thomas Parke D’Invilliers is a character in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, used by him here as a nom de plume.)

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

That we pursue something passionately does not always mean that we really want it or have a special aptitude for it. Often, the thing we pursue most passionately is but a substitute for the one thing we really want and cannot have. It is usually safe to predict that the fulfillment of an excessively cherished desire is not likely to still our nagging anxiety. In every passionate pursuit, the pursuit counts more than the object pursued.

— Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do