Journal 3/9

This week, you will be working on your response project to The Great Gatsby. For you blog post, you may write about anything that you want, as long as it is appropriate for your audience and is substantive enough to begin a discussion.

This weekend, I lost 800+ pictures from the past four years, all of my school documents from this semester, 80 GBs worth of movies, as well as a handful of other things on my computer. To begin to explain how this happened, I’ll need to start with how I save things: I don’t really use backups. No document copies in iCloud, no flash drives, no external hard drives. I would soon learn the error of my ways, when on Saturday the little rainbow pinwheel came up while I was loading a page on safari. I thought to myself, “no big deal. It’s just loading the page, nothing to worry about.” Well, once that pinwheel’s presence over my cursor reached the two-minute mark, I knew that something was definitely wrong. I decided to restart the thing and go get a drink while it did its business. When I came back, the usual user selection screen was gone, replaced by a “Mac OS Utilities” page with a solid gray desktop background. It gave me a few options: use a backup, which I didn’t have; repair the disk(s), which did nothing but tell me that one of my disks was beyond repair; and reinstall the operating system, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Well, the latter option was what I ended up doing, even though I could’ve bought an external hard drive and backed up my data at this stage (and then reinstalled, but I didn’t because I was tired and impatient). This weekend was already lame enough, and losing all of this really added to that. I mean, I can still retrieve a lot of it, but some of that information can’t be re- downloaded...like the pictures. Those aren’t coming back, and since I don’t take many, they were fairly valuable. Definitely backing up my stuff from now on.

Journal 3/2

Choose any topic of interest that we have discussed in class (or not discussed, if you have a new one)  in relation to The Great Gatsby and explore it further. Use textual evidence to support your ideas.

One thing that I’ve thought about all throughout reading The Great Gatsby is how closely the movie follows it. I saw the movie when it first came out in theaters, in the summer of 2013, and it was a pretty great experience. The film definitely takes style over substance in a few places, often coming off as grandiloquent, and doesn’t really deliver the exact same message as the book (a part of me doesn’t care, though, simply because Baz Luhrmann did such a great job with it). With that said, the instances that I can recall in which great changes were made that compromised the general story were few and far in between- points serving to illustrate the disillusionment of the young members of high society or things like that in the book would be shrouded by unspecificity in the movie, as words can explicitly describe emotions and other things that imagery just can’t. There were also shortenings of certain scenes to keep pacing tight- one that I distinctly remember is the gossip and small talk that takes place at Tom and Daisy’s house in the first chapter. The reason that Myrtle runs out in the street is also changed in the film. Just by those two examples, you can see how little there is to pick through- it’s a faithful, well-made adaptation of a significant piece of American literature.