Inverted Christmas References

Just recently, I read a book of Charles Dickens' complete ghost stories.  I had thought that it would be a good book to read right before Halloween, but actually more of the stories had to do with Christmas (including - of course - "A Christmas Carol").  One of them in particular - "The Goblins who Stole a Sexton" - had a lot of references to the Biblical Christmas story; however, it's more of an inversion of those references.

In Dickens' story, the sexton is named Gabriel Grub, and, while he is digging a grave, he encounters some goblins who berate him for doing such dreary work on Christmas.  They also are critical of his hitting a kid singing a Christmas song.  They say that he "struck the boy in the envious malice of his heart, because the boy could be merry, and he [Gabriel Grub] could not."  Then, the goblin king "laid his hand upon his [Grub's] collar, and sank with him through the earth."  The goblins show Grub various scenes - and kick him repeatedly - until "he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all."

There aren't really any large-scale Biblical references, but there are smaller, inverted ones.  Dickens' Gabriel Grub is sunk into the earth, which is sort of an inversion of Luke 1, where the angel Gabriel comes to Earth to tell Mary of the eventual birth of Jesus.  Similarly, where Dickens' Gabriel deals with death and is pessimistic, the Biblical Gabriel deals with life and is enthusiastic.

I don't think Dickens really meant anything in including these inverted references; I think he just wanted to have some sort of deeper relation between his story and Christmas, so he buried these allusions in his character.

Ishmael's Changing Narration

Because I never got to take American Literature II and I'm pretty sure Moby Dick was a required reading, I started reading it myself.  I'm almost certain that I'm missing out on things that would have been covered had I read it as part of a class, but I have noticed one thing about the narrative voice.

At the very beginning, Ishmael is clearly a first-person narrator.  The novel starts with his finding a room at a hotel and trying to find a ship to sail on.  But as the novel goes on, he becomes less and less of a first-person limited narrator.  Some scenes are written more like plays.  And I'm a bit dubious that Ishmael would have been present at them all, especially because some of those scenes occur at the same time.  Chapter 121 occurs at midnight at the forecastle bulwarks and is a conversation between Stubb and Flask.  Chapter 122 also occurs at midnight, but it's set aloft with Tashtego talking about the weather.  I don't see how Ishmael could have overheard both conversations at the same time.

He also starts referring to the crew as "the men."  Yet, since he is part of the crew, it would make more sense for him to say "us."  Because he describes the crew as something separate from himself, he doesn't seem to be physically present anymore.

So throughout the novel, the narrative voice changes from a first-person limited to a more third-person omniscient.  And I think that part of the reason that this changes may be Ahab's determination to catch Moby Dick and - more importantly - the crew's determination to go along with him.  In a way, the crew becomes less of a collection of various men and more of an extension of Ahab and his determination.  As the change in Ishmael's narration indicates, the men sort of give themselves up in order to help Ahab in capturing the whale.

EDIT (13 Sept. '13):  I finished reading the book to-day, and what I had vaguely described is explicitly stated in the book.  In Chapter 134, Ishmael writes, "They were one man, not thirty... and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to."

Empty A E

I had thought I'd already typed this post but apparently not.  So apologies if this is a bit sketchy; I thought it up months ago and have probably forgotten some aspects of it.

In the Circe chapter of Ulysses, Stephen plays the piano.  "With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths."  I think it's because I'm a musician that I figured out the metaphor here.  (I also have a blog for music thoughts.)

In music, a fifth is a distance between two notes in a scale.  The distance between A and E in the A major scale (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#, A) is a fifth.  To get a chord, you have three notes - a tonic, a third (or a minor third), and a fifth.  A major is A, C#, E; A minor is A, C, E.  (My terrible music pun is that A minor is ace.)

But what's interesting about Stephen's playing the piano is that it's only fifths.  He's not playing a major third or a minor third in between the two notes.  That's what I think the "empty fifth" means.  The fifth is not colored by a major third or a minor third.  A major third would sound happy, and a minor third would sound sad.  This is neither; it's just empty.

I used the fifth from A to E to demonstrate all of this because I think Joyce wants the reader to notice that fifth specifically.  Earlier in the novel, the other characters talk about a poet called A. E.  They criticize his poetry for being dull and repetitive.  The empty fifths - without the happiness of a major third or the sadness of a minor third - reflect that.  A. E. the poet is boring; A to E the empty fifth is boring.

Rivers and Waters

This is the second of two posts about The Fault in Our Stars.  You can find the other one here.

A few days after I re-read The Fault in Our Stars for the second time (my third time reading it), I had already had the idea regarding the metaphorical and literal nature of the names.  In addition to what I had thought up, Hazel is explained in the novel as an in-between color, which reflects how Hazel is between life and death or even between health and incapacitating sickness.  So this got me thinking about the names, and I realized that one is never really explained:  Anna, the girl in An Imperial Affliction.

I figured that if there were metaphorical implications for both Augustus Waters' and Hazel's names, there had to be one for Anna's too.  Her context is what led me to figure it out.  An Imperial Affliction ends in the middle of a sentence, and, as far as I know, there is only one other book that ends in the middle of a sentence - James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.  I've not read Finnegans Wake yet, but we talked about it a little in the class I had on Joyce's Ulysses, so I know that the first and last sentences of the novel are the same sentence, which is just broken between the two ends.  Rivers are an important factor in the novel, and the last sentence is meant to flow back into the first one, much like a river.  Rivers are also prominent in Ulysses.  And I have read Ulysses, which is how I know that the main river in Dublin is sometimes called the Anna Liffey.  And one of the characters in Finnegans Wake is named Anna Livia, referring to the river.

So between the name Anna and the broken sentence, I'm pretty sure that the Anna in An Imperial Affliction is meant to have some connection via Finnegans Wake with rivers.  What I'm unsure of is what that connection means.

To some degree, it fits with "a desert blessing, and ocean curse."  An Imperial Affliction is one of the things that brings Hazel and Augustus closer to-gether, so it shares some responsibility in changing Hazel's view on relationships.  There's also the connection between rivers and water, as in Augustus Waters.

But I'm wondering if there isn't also a connection with life in general.  At one point, Hazel deconstructs her world and returns to "the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word."  John 1:1 explains that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  And in the beginning, "the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2).  So God is connected to water.  There's also just the fact that water is necessary for life.  This works well because of the visual connection between life and Liffey.

I'm not sure what the connection means, but I'm pretty sure that Anna is connected with rivers - both via the interrupted sentence that resembles the interrupted yet flowing sentence of Finnegans Wake and via her nominal connection with the Anna Liffey river.

Blessing, Curse, and Metaphor

About a week ago, I finished The Fault in Our Stars for the third time.  Over a few days afterwards, I had a few thoughts about it.  This is the first of two posts about them.

Near the end of the novel, Augustus Waters comments on the water that fills up in Hazel's lungs because of her cancer.  He writes that it's "a desert blessing, an ocean curse."  And while he's talking about the "dark cancer water," his phrase also applies to an-other type of water:  Augustus Waters himself.

A good portion of the novel deals with the effects of people upon other people.  Two different views on this, specifically regarding others' deaths, are presented in the novel.  At the beginning, Hazel believes that she's a grenade.  "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys [her parents] because there's nothing I can do about hurting you; you're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?"  Because she knows that her death is inevitable, she wants to prevent people from becoming invested because that investment will later cause grief upon her death.

But after meeting Augustus Waters and falling in love with him, her position changes.  The book ends with her affirming her choice in who hurts her and in whom she is invested, namely: Augustus Waters.  She recognizes that death will cause grief but also that that does not invalidate the relationships that people have.  The curse does not replace the blessing.  And because Augustus Waters is the catalyst for this change in perspective, it's fitting that the blessing/curse description is of water.

What I'm a bit unsure of is whether Augustus Waters realizes how apt this is - the literal description of the water in Hazel's lungs matching the metaphorical water in his own name and self.  He's a character who bases his actions of their metaphorical implications, so it seems unlikely (even incongruous) that he would miss something like this, but he never explicitly talks about it.

True Love & Plants

I've been reading Ovid's Metamorphoses recently.  I had started it at the end of May, but I got busy because of an online class I was taking, so I just re-started it last week.

At the beginning of Book IV is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which I had some familiarity with because we talked about it in my Shakespeare class.  I've forgotten the specific connection, but it's somehow involved with A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Also, it's what Shakespeare stole part of the plot of Romeo and Juliet from.  (After learning about everything that Shakespeare stole, I'm sort of surprised that he's hailed as a paragon instead of denounced as a plagiarist.)

The rest of this contains spoilers, both for Pyramus and Thisbe and the folk song "Barbara Allen."

Because of parental disapproval, Pyramus and Thisbe decide to sneak out and meet in the woods.  While Thisbe is waiting, a lion surprises her, and as Thisbe runs away, she drops her cloak.  The lion chews up her cloak, and, since it's just eaten a lamb, it leaves blood on the cloak.  Pyramus shows up to see the bloody cloak and the lion's footprints and presumes Thisbe dead, so, in his overwhelming grief, he stabs himself.  Then Thisbe re-appears and - noticing that Pyramus is dead - stabs herself.

This all happens beneath a tree.  As Thisbe says, "And you, O tree whose branches weave their shadows / Dark over the pitiful body of one lover / Shall soon bear shade for two."  After Thisbe's death, the narrator explains that "the ripe fruit of the tree turned deep rose colour."

Which has a similarity with "Barbara Allen."  Because of its nature as a folk song, there are many different versions, but the one I'm most familiar with is the demo that Simon & Garfunkel did (titled "Barbriallen"), which was released as a bonus track on Sounds of Silence.  (Roger McGuinn also includes it in his Folk Den.)  William is dying because he slighted Barbara when he was drinking at the tavern.  He has his servant call her to him, but she seems indifferent about his death, remarking merely, "Young man, I think you're dyin'."  At his funeral procession, she feels bad about this (presumably) and then also dies.

They buried sweet Willy in the old church yard
And Barbara in the new one
From Willy's grave there grew a rose
From Barbara's a green briar 

They grew and they grew on the old church wall
And could not grow no higher
And there they tied in a true love's knot
The rosebush and the briar

The interlinking of the rosebush and the briar is what I'm calling attention to because it's the same sort of thing that happens in Ovid's account of Pyramus and Thisbe.  After Pyramus and Thisbe's deaths under the tree, the fruit changes color, and after William and Barbara's burials, the plants that grow from their graves intertwine.  In both cases, plants acknowledge the love that each couple had for each other.

Sherlock Holmes and the Murders in the Rue Morgue

Last night, I read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" for the first time.  I remember reading somewhere that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" as an inspiration for the Sherlock Holmes stories, but now that I've read it, I can actually see how many similarities there are.  This is a brief account of a few of them.

1. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is not narrated by Dupin in the same way that most of the Sherlock Holmes stories are not narrated by Holmes.  For both, this narrative distance allows the reader to feel more suspense and be more surprised when the solution to the mystery is revealed.
2. Early in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Dupin traces the narrator's thoughts.  Holmes does the same thing to Watson at the beginning of "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box."  He even references Poe's work - "'You remember,' said he, 'that some little time ago when I read you the passage in one of Poe's sketches in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion, you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour-de-force of the author.'"
3. A direct quote from a newspaper article lasts for about six pages in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."  The inclusion of primary sources frequently occurs in the Sherlock Holmes stories too.
4. The mystery in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" revolves around two murders in a locked room, which is a situation that also occurs in a few Sherlock Holmes stories.
5. Like Dupin, Holmes has a relationship with the police that is not exactly official but that does provide more access than a regular citizen would have.
6. At the very end, Dupin places an advertisement in the newspaper, which is a tactic that Sherlock Holmes also uses rather frequently.

I also noticed a vague connection between the settings of the Sherlock Holmes stories and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."  In "A Study in Scarlet," Watson describes London as "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."  In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the narrator explains that he became acquainted with Dupin after they were both searching for the same rare book.  In both cases, the setting is central.  London is the center of the British Empire, and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" seems to describe Paris as the center of intellectuals.  Later in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," international shipping becomes an important factor, which illustrates Paris as an important world city, much like London.

Obviously, Doyle did come up with a lot of his own ideas for the Holmes stories and expanded upon the original influence of Poe, but there are a lot of similarities between the two.

For the Ambiguity of Case

A few days ago while reading Les Misérables, I came across this sentence:

He wore his working-man’s waistcoat, brown linen trousers, and his cap with the long visor hid his face.

I really like this sentence because of its grammatical structure.  As far as what it's saying, it's not too interesting, but the underlying structure is fascinating and says a lot about English's relatively simple case arrangement.

In this sentence, cap is simultaneously the third in the list and the subject of the second clause.  You could just as easily write, "He wore his working-man's waistcoat, brown linen trousers, and his cap with the long visor" and "His cap with the long visor hid his face."  But the two clauses are combined.  And since his cap with the long visor works both as direct object and subject, it gives the whole sentence a nice, uninterrupted flow.

I got thinking about this some more, and I didn't know whether to attribute this to Hugo or the translator C.E. Wilbur.  Then I realised that the grammatical structure could give me a clue.  English doesn't inflect its nouns to indicate case.  You could come across a word like cap, and you wouldn't know whether it's in the nominative case or accusative case (or any other case).  In some languages, nouns are inflected to indicate their case.  But since it's been about five years since I last took a French class, I couldn't remember if French did this or not.  So I looked it up, and it turns out the French doesn't (though, like English, it does inflect its pronouns to indicate case).  So I still couldn't tell if this grammatical structure was the work of Hugo or Wilbur.

However!  This still illustrates something.  Since I started learning about languages that inflect their nouns to indicate cases, I've come to view those that don't (particularly English) as, well, sort of inferior.  After all, one of the points of grammar is to communicate clearly, and when the language you're using doesn't differentiate between cases, your sentences can be interpreted in ways that you hadn't intended.

But this sentence kind of argues against that clarity.  The ambiguity of cap's case creates this wonderful flow between the two clauses.  With a language that differentiates cases, that would not be possible.  It's only because English doesn't inflect its nouns to indicate cases that something like this is even possible; in a language that does, the two clauses would have to be split because you could not inflect a noun in two different ways simultaneously.  Here, that ambiguity of case creates an uninterrupted rhythm.

The Common Gatz

This post contains spoilers for The Great Gatsby.

I saw The Great Gatsby movie a few months ago when it came out, and I was annoyed at some of the parts that didn't make it into the movie.  At the time, I didn't really know why I was so annoyed, but I think I figured it out this morning.

I really liked the part in the book after Gatsby's death when his father comes.  Specifically how Nick constantly and erroneously calls him "Mr. Gatsby" instead of "Mr. Gatz."  I think Gatsby's changing his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby is a really significant point that the movie should have included.*  It simultaneously changes and hides who he is, and Gatsby's appearance and reputation are huge aspects of the story.

He changes his first name from "James" to "Jay," shortening it.  In a way, by doing this Gatsby rejects his past and the poverty that it includes.  He wants to be this rich, impressive guy in order to win Daisy's love, and completely switching over to opulence and wealth is one way to do that.  He changes his last name from "Gatz" to "Gatsby," embellishing it.  Again, this functions as a way to appear elite.  "Gatz" sounds normal, but "Gatsby" sort of makes you pay attention to it.  (Though that could be just because it's been coupled with "great" for so long....)

In any case, Gatsby's changing his name is just an-other example of how he changes himself.  He rejects the common and strives for the extravagant in his attempt to impress Daisy.  In the novel, after Gatsby's death, the reader finds out that he wasn't really Jay Gatsby, he was just James Gatz.  That heightened persona is totally deflated, showing Gatsby for who he really is.  But the way it's done in the movie, Jay Gatsby just disappears into death, and his true identity is never really revealed because Nick never meets Mr. Gatz.  I think it's a more tragic ending to have the self you tried to hide exposed than it is to just be ignored.

---
*I saw the movie once three months ago, so it may have included this and I've just forgotten about it.  In any case, I still feel that Nick's meeting Mr. Gatz illustrates Gatsby's change in a way that no-thing else does.

Lunar Weaving

James Joyce's Ulysses doesn't have very much in the way of plot, but it's certainly full of allusions.  When I read it, I think I placed more importance on figuring out the allusions than figuring out what was happening.  While writing my final paper for the class I had on it, I discovered something else interesting.

In the penultimate chapter, Molly is compared to the moon.  Among other things, the narrator mentions "her satellitic dependence:  her luminary reflection:  her constancy under all her phrases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning."  Molly is set up to be a figure who - in some respects - controls time.

Molly's parallel in The Odyssey - Penelope - also controls time in a way.  She delays her suitors by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes.  They agree to wait until she's finished, but she unweaves her work at the end of the day, which extends the completion for a few years.

So both Molly and Penelope are presented as figures who aren't under the strict progression of time.  Penelope is able to delay the inevitable by unweaving her shroud, and Molly is described as constant "under all her phases."  Furthermore, in the section from her perspective, specific times are not seen.  Things are relative or vaguely described.  Where both Bloom and Stephen would probably be very specific about times, Molly just says "it was 1/4 after 3."

But the connexions between Molly and Penelope do not end there.  Also significant is that they are women, which means that they can weave.  The weaving is seen literally in the case of Penelope's weaving the shroud, but the weaving is also a metaphor for creating and sustaining life.  "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.  ...  the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time."

Molly resembles Penelope through her distance from time and her ability as a woman to metaphorically weave and create life.

Recursive and Allusive Fathers and Sons

I finally started re-reading Hamlet this week.  I've been meaning to get to it for a couple of months since Hamlet plays a big rôle in a chapter of Ulysses, which I just had a class on.  I had a notion of reading both The Odyssey and Hamlet so that it would be easier to understand what was going on in Ulysses (allusion-wise), but I made it through only The Odyssey.  So now since school's over, I decided to re-read Hamlet.  The last time I read the whole thing (which was also the first time I read the whole thing) was the summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school, which was about five years ago.  (I was supposed to have read the whole thing in my introductory English class during my freshman year of university, but I got the act and scene numbers mixed up and didn't read as much as I should have, and I never felt bad enough to go back and finish it.)

Before I actually got to start the play, I read all of the introductory material in the front of the book.  That's where I learned that Hamnet Shakespeare - Shakespeare's son whose death in some way inspired Hamlet - was born on 2 February.  Things clicked to-gether in my brain, and I actually had to stop reading because I got so excited about this.

James Joyce's birthday is 2 February.  Supposedly, so is Stephen Dedalus' - one of the main characters in Ulysses.  But what was really interesting about learning this was the whole author/book and father/son relationship combining.

In the Hamlet-centric chapter of Ulysses, Mr Best makes a pun about Hamlet and Shakespeare in French.  Hamlet is "un pièce du Shakespeare."  The play is a piece of Shakespeare in the same way that Hamnet is a piece of Shakespeare.  This involves the ideas of consubstantiality between father and son and metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) that are central to Ulysses.  (And which I wrote my final paper about.)  Different father/son relationships are constituted by a variety of means:

• Leopold Bloom and Rudy (actual father and son) - like Hamnet, Rudy died
• Simon Dedalus and Stephen (actual father and son) - a big deal is made of their eyes' being the same, which is one of the main examples of father/son consubstantiality
• Bloom and Stephen - Bloom sort of adopts Stephen as a replacement son for Rudy; they are also described in the same way by a cabman; and Ulysses incorporates their rôles as Odysseus (Bloom) and Telemachus (Stephen) - a relationship which also resembles King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet in terms of heredity and royalty
• Paddy Dignam and Paddy Dignam (actual father and son) - this also plays with the Hamlet paradigm as both father and son have the same name and the elder of the pair dies shortly before the main action

In the paper I wrote for my class, I had intended to tie all of this father/son, consubstantiality, and metempsychosis stuff back to literature itself, but it got confusing and I never attempted it.  But from the relationship among Shakespeare, Hamnet, and Hamlet, one can see that literature acts as either a substitute or a continuation of father/son relationships.  This same type of idea is presented in The Divine Comedy, which Ulysses has many allusions to.  Virgil the poet acts as a guide to Dante.  Depending on how one looks at it, Dante could be guided by an actual person - a mentor - or he could be guided by literature itself.  Ulysses has that same idea:  people and literature can play similar rôles.

But learning that Joyce's birthday was the same as Hamnet's takes this all a step further.  Shakespeare's creation of Hamlet to - in a way - replace Hamnet is mirrored by Joyce's creation of Ulysses.  Shakespeare creates his progeny in literature because his real son has died, and then Joyce - who shares Hamnet's birthday - writes about father/son relationships and their replacement in literature.

This is the type of recursive and allusive paradigm that makes Ulysses both great fun to read and really frustrating.

Sherlock Holmes as Actor/Author

One of the stories I had to read in my Sherlock Holmes class this past semester was "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier."  It's unique in that it's one of the few stories written from Holmes' perspective (I believe the only other one from his perspective is "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane").  But between Holmes' perspective and specific traits that the characters had, I got the feeling that Holmes had made up the story.*

At the very beginning, he writes that "for a long time [Watson] has worried me to write an experience of my own" and "'Try it yourself, Holmes!' he has retorted."  He then explains that "Watson has no note of it [this adventure] in his collection."  It's also significant that Watson is not present in the story.

Even from the very beginning of the Holmes canon, Holmes is rather dismissive of Watson's accounts of their adventures (though this aversion does seem to lessen to some degree as the stories progress).  He calls them too romantic and chastises Watson for not focusing on the useful parts - parts that could help other detectives.  As with everything else, Holmes takes a very didactic view of literature; in "A Study in Scarlet," Watson explains that Holmes "would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object.  Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him."  "A Study in Scarlet" also mentions Holmes' prodigious knowledge of sensational fiction.

Holmes' previous statements regarding literature make it hard for me to believe that he wrote the story purely to chronicle his adventure.  There has to be some pragmatic purpose for it.  While "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier" could be useful to other detectives in the same way that sensationalist fiction is to Holmes, I don't think that that's the primary purpose.

The two soldiers in the story - Dodd and Godfrey - resemble Holmes and Watson so closely that I don't believe it's a mere coincidence.  Godfrey - like Watson - was shot during the war and had to return to England.  Dodd - like Holmes - has an intense loyalty to his friend.  At the beginning of the story, Holmes writes, "It was in January, 1903, just after the conclusion of the Boer War, that I had my visit from Mr. James M. Dodd, a big, fresh, sunburned, upstanding Briton.  The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association.  I was alone."  Here, Holmes resembles Dodd (or Dodd resembles Holmes) more specifically:  they are both lacking their friends.  I also find Holmes' remark "I was alone" interesting.  He states that he had a visit from Mr. Dodd but also that he is alone.  If Holmes did make up this story, and Dodd is purely a caricature of him, then he is alone... with himself.

I think Holmes has two purposes in making up this adventure and passing it off as true.  First, it's an-other way that he can practise his acting.  There are multiple instances in the Holmes stories where Holmes uses disguises to fool people into thinking that he's someone he isn't.  I think manufacturing this story is just an-other facet of that.  Instead of using wigs and different clothes, he's using words and playing on emotions.

Second, I think the story functions as a retribution of sorts aimed at Watson.  Holmes disguises his intense friendship for Watson in Dodd's intense friendship for Godfrey - who even goes so far as to confront Godfrey's father in order to find out what happened to Godfrey.  Couched in his adventure story, Holmes is telling Watson how strongly he feels about him and how Watson's marrying Mary Morstan feels like an abandonment.

----------
*(This is a stupid footnote that explains an obvious point but just to make it clear:) I realise that Holmes is fictional.  What I'm saying is that within the world that Doyle has created - one in which Holmes and Watson have adventures and then Watson chronicles them - Holmes has made up a story to resemble Watson's true accounts.

Extra-Textual Stories: The Great Gatsby

[This is the first in a series of posts where I talk about the extra-textual stories that my books have.]

Because there's a movie of The Great Gatsby coming out in a few weeks, I dug out my copy of the book to re-read it.  I'm the type of person who likes to read the book before seeing the movie.  I haven't read The Great Gatsby since my junior year of high school - four years ago.  I started re-reading it a few years ago, but I evidently stopped before reaching chapter seven.

I got my copy of The Great Gatsby from my grandpa's basement about five years ago.  Apparently, a lot of the books he had down there were bought at garage sales.

There are hand-written notes (in pen!) in some parts of the book.  I think they were there pre-garage sale, as none of the hand-writing looks familiar to me.  (Though I'm not that familiar with any of my extended relatives' handwriting, so I could be mistaken.)

But the most interesting thing is the computer punch-card that was in the back of the book.  Because it's so associated with the book for me, I don't want to take it out, so I use it as a bookmark.

The reverse side contains a reminder to call either Steve Liedenbach or Steve Wiedenbach.  Presumably, it's Steve Wiedenbach because the W is written with pen over the completely pencil Steve Liedenbach.