The Great Gatsby: Party On Christmas 2012

 

Spring hasn't yet sprung but we already know what we want for Christmas.  On December 25, 2012, Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge! and Australia, brings Jay Gatsby back to the Big Screen, this time in 3-D.  With Tobey McGuire as Nick Carraway and Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Leonardo DiCaprio will play the iconic role previously played by Robert Redford.  Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for the 1974 release and Mia Farrow played the girl  with the voice "full of money."

Actually, Fitzgerald already gave us his classic in 3-D.  Published in 1925, the book then and now relates to audiences with its complicated characters and carnival-colored world.   Most consider the book the Great American Novel and it continues to top lists world-over as one of the greatest books ever written.   Nick narrates: "There was music from my neighbor's house through those summer nights. In his enchanted gardens, men and girls came and went like moths, among the whispering and the champagne and the stars. I believe that few people were actually invited to these parties. They just went. They got into automobiles that bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Come for the party with a simplicity of heart that was it's own ticket of admission."

 We love Gatsby because he believed in the green light.  He saw America as a land of promise.  Like Nick, we recognize that "there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.… [Gatsby had] an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again."

Celebrating hope, Party On.

Classic Coup Gatsby shirt/Jenny Mandeville Photographer

Classic Coup Gatsby shirt/Jenny Mandeville Photographer

 

Birthday Boy Charles Dickens: The Big 200

Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life, sends this letter to the Birthday Boy.  In it she describe to "Mr. Dickens" the 21st century as still the "best of times and worst of times." Always for the underdog, Dickens wrote the first classic novel I read and loved in high school, Great Expectations. Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham,  like the man who created them, are unforgettable. But while some of Dickens' darlings and the author himself escaped poverty, the children Charles championed in his fight against social injustice still exist in multitudes. Proving there's still much work to do, The National Center for Children of Poverty at Columbia University profiles the poor in the US here.

John Steinbeck on Love

John Steinbeck's advice to his son on love..."If it is right, it happens -- The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."

The letter to his son is here.

Cyber Monday Specials from Classic Coup

On sale today are our 3 newest shirts. They retail for $24 but TODAY ONLY are $20. They are NOT on the website for purchase yet, but you can buy them by sending me an email at clmccain@comcast.net for more information. For other designs go to www.classiccoup.com.

Referencing To Kill a Mockingbird...

Our signature shirt with a running list of beloved classics:

And for those writers/lovers of the written word, our "Twain" shirt, worn here by T. A. Barron, NYTimes/International Best Selling Author:

Rebel Reads on the Road Less Traveled

Classic Coup...The European Tour





Classic Coup on Tour: North and South America, Alaska, Middle East

Classic Coup Featured on Funky Finds

See what Funky Finds, a blog dedicated since 2006 to promoting independent artists and designers worldwide, has to say about Classic Coup. You can also register for two of our shirts to be given away July 19 by going here: Funky Finds.

Global Book Groups via Skype

Classic Coup is about more than reading books.  We're about talking books.  Lit is life, evoking global  discussions and reminding us of human connections.   This year we sent The Great Gatsby,  Night,  Glass Menagerie,  A Separate Peace and Romeo and Juliet to high school students in an English class in Quito, Ecuador.  Via Skype students in South America discussed A Separate Peace and Romeo and Juliet with peers in Nashville, Tennessee.  Friendship, love, and marriage made hot topics.

A couple of months later, their teacher, Sherry Coyle, wrote this:  "Without the Romeo and Juliet books you provided for my seniors this year, they would have graduated never having read a Shakespeare play.  And...without having read the play, one of my students would have never had the chance to take first place today in a local Shakespeare speech competition." Way to go, Andrea!

       Sherry and Andrea Spring 2011

      First Book Discussion:  Ecuador and Nashville, Fall 2010