Fitzgerald had some problems coming up with a title for The Great Gatsby. He went through a number of alternate titles— all of which were not very good. He even tried to change it at the last second. The one that got printed is not even all that suitable. Gatsby isn’t really “great” in the traditional sense, and Fitzgerald rightly commented that the title does not allude to any of the necessary irony of his “greatness.” The title might be the only minor blemish on the whole work.
I like to reimagine titles for certain books. And if The Great Gatsby was written not in the so-called Jazz Age of the 1920s, but instead was written in the Irreverent Age of the 2010s, and if David Sedaris had written it, it might have been called Such Beautiful Shirts.
You might be surprised at how much time and thought it took me to come up with that. And that’s why I’m— and always have been— ambivalent about this whole tumblr.com thing. It’s great fun for me to take an idea and follow it out to its logical end, and it helps sharpen certain writing skills, and I love to go back and read this shit later. But the “tumblr post” represents only a small part of my thinking/writing, and when I’m tumbling, the “tumblr way of thought” tends to dominate my mind. To a certain point this ok. But it gets to be too much.
So I’m killing The Knife Business. And I’m birthing Such Beautiful Shirts. I don’t know if it will be any different than the usual shit. I don’t know if I’ll post anything at all.
I’ve been without internet for about 2 weeks. I just moved, and partially out of laziness, and partially from a personal experiment, I have yet to set up the internet. I don’t even have a goddamn laptop to take to the local coffee store. So I get on the internet every other day or so at my dad’s or at work.
Anyway, The Knife Business was a good thing for awhile. But the metaphor was ultimately all wrong. Such Beautiful Shirts is a much more apt metaphor. Because these posts are like beautiful shirts. And it probably makes you sad because you’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.
