Edith Wharton, The Beatles, and Other Things
Hello, people.
I hope you all had a beautiful October. Mine was a blur of anxiety and confusion and stress with rare moments of clarity and joy in between. During those few moments, I discovered plenty of great things and that’s what this newsletter is about!
One of the great books I read this month was The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton. I haven’t read a book that has left me quite so stumped in a long time. I wanted to sob and scream and at the same time I felt my world grow twice as big. There’s a love-triangle of sorts at its core, a trope that has been abused today to the point that it’s hard to take it seriously at all. But not Wharton’s masterpiece, no. It’s so beautiful, such a clear-eyed meditation on love, duty, conventions and their paradoxical hypocrisies and necessities, that you can place this book amongst the most intelligent works of fiction in history, adjacent to Tolstoys and Prousts of the world, and it would look as homely as ever.
The Scorsese adaptation of the novel is also excellent, Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer nailing the part of star-crossed lovers fated to die longing for one another.
The next book I read was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. A catastrophic and unwise decision given how emotionally wracking both of these works are. The Grapes of Wrath tore me to shreds and I never want to read anything like it ever again. Indeed, it should be issued with a warning. You have not experienced primal rage until you have read this novel.
As for music, I will add a playlist to all the wonderful music I discovered this month. With a special shoutout to The Ghost Of Tom Joad by Springsteen, I Me Mine by The Beatles, and Christopher O’ Riley’s moving rendition of Between The Bars by Elliott Smith.
Speaking of The Beatles, I have been watching Get Back (2021), a documentary charting the band’s journey to record Let It Be, their final album, in less than a month. A lot of their great music crystallized in these 3 weeks. Let It Be, I Me Mine, Don’t Let Me Down, Get Back. I still cannot wrap my head around it! To get to witness the creation of what are, TO ME, The Beatles’ greatest works! (There’s something to be gleaned here, for the artists who give themselves too much time to finish things. Some of us need ruthless deadlines and that’s the only way we get anything done.)
Aside from the astonishing creative productivity, there’s McCartney’s gorgeous hair, Harrison’s funky-flamboyant wardrobe, Lennon’s dry humour, and Ringo’s look of eternal, unsolvable confusion. It’s not a cut-and-dry documentary about one of the greatest musical acts but a distillation of everything their music embodied. It is fun and spontaneous and joyous and electric; it is The Beatles and I am loving every second of it!