“It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.” — The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1.

This summer I’ve been obsessed with “The Great Gatsby”. Yesterday I decided to ride my bike to the towns on the North Shore of Long Island where the book is set. How closely do these neighborhoods resemble the roaring ’20s kaleidoscope I see in my imagination when I read this story? Would I find Gatsby out there?

F. Scott Fitzgerald disguised the setting of “The Great Gatsby” with the fictional town names of West Egg and East Egg, but he included enough information that anybody in the know can place them. The town of West Egg where Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby live corresponds to the real-life place of Great Neck. More specifically, the characters live in the village of Kings Point, at the end of the neck. (According to Wikipedia, Fitzgerald modeled Nick’s home after his own home at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, though in the story Nick’s house is much closer to the Sound.) The Buchanans live in East Egg, which in real life must be Port Washington, right across the Manhasset Bay, in the village of Sands Point.

I decided to hit East Egg first, pedaling my bike ride along Northern Boulevard/25A. (This is a crummy place to ride a bike, but it’s about the only non-expressway option around there.) After a few wrong turns I found my way to West Shore Road, where I passed a business called Buchanan Marine. Any relation?

Eventually I ended up at the water’s edge in Sands Point, home to meandering cul-de-sacs of discreet mansions surrounded by woods. Some have grand views that reach all the way to the Manhattan skyline.

This was satisfying. I could easily see Tom and Daisy choosing this elite alcove for their home.

From there, I pedaled on to the main event: Great Neck, or West Egg. Nick calls West Egg the less fashionable of the two towns, and it rings true when you see the homes out in Kings Point. Compared to the ones on Sands Point, they telegraph the idea of new money. Here you’ll see a lot of fake columns, decorative masonry and gilded gates. I saw one mansion with a Benz parked in the curving driveway and two oversized concrete statuettes on either side of the front door—one of Mickey Mouse, one of Minnie. Another typical Kings Point home has a grand staircase leading to the front door, framed by huge, rainbow-mirrored glass windows.

At the very end of the Kings Point, I was delighted to find that there’s actually a Gatsby Lane!

One house on Gatsby Lane in particular caught my eye—and ear. It sits facing the bay, as Gatsby’s does in the book. A line of luxury cars crawled around the driveway, just like Gatsby’s place. A party was underway there; I could see people milling around on a deck overlooking the water, possibly by a pool. “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz was playing as I rode by. Over the thumps of summer dance music, I heard a live DJ making announcements to fire up the party. A sign by the entrance said “Park on one side of Gatsby Lane. There will be big fines if you don’t!”

Wow. When I planned this bike ride, I felt mainly like a tourist/voyeur gawking at the playground of the rich. I had no expectation of finding anything this similar to Fitzgerald’s story!

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.” — The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3

This was it—a 21st-century Gatsby mansion in mind, heart and spirit. I’m sure people familiar with Great Neck know whose place this is, and who inhabits the other mansions around it. I have no idea who lives here, but I do wonder, morbidly, if they’ve read “Gatsby” all the way to the end.

But wonders aside, my curiosity was satisfied. I biked back to Queens through downtown Great Neck, passing the Long Island Railroad station probably used both by Fitzgerald and his narrator Nick Carraway.

Related post: See a Google Map of this bike ride.

This was a satisfying ride that scratched my literary tourism itch. There was one moment, in particular, when I felt a mysterious echo of the book. On a wooded stretch of road in Port Washington, between the golf courses and mansions, I heard the rattle of an old car approaching. I reached for my cell phone to snap a picture of it as it whizzed by. The picture turn out poorly, as if I were photographing a ghost. But that could be him—The Great Gatsby himself.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

Do they still teach “The Great Gatsby” in schools? They did in Maryland in the 1990s, when I read the book for the first time. At that time (9th grade maybe?) I had never been to New York City, had a girlfriend, or attended a party thrown by a wealthy strangers. The narrator, Nick Carraway, seemed unattainably cool and wise as he cruised through the high-society jumble of Manhattan and Long Island. The book was a fantasy.

Now when I read “Gatsby,” I feel like I’ve lived entire chapters of it. (Minus, you know, the tragedy.) I’ve come to appreciate it as arguably the all-time best New York City summer story. This year, as I was re-reading it for probably the 5th time, I was shocked to realize I am now the same age as Nick, the cool narrator who once seemed so out of reach.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

Today, given the path my life has taken, I can relate to Nick in strong terms. He’s an out-of-towner who comes to New York to work in finance, commuting to Manhattan from Long Island. His character is a self-sufficient bachelor who works hard, goes out a lot, and acts as a peacemaker among his friends. Also, he’s obsessed with trains.

As a setting for a story, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s New York of the 1920s might as well be New York I live in today. “Gatsby” landmarks like the Long Island Railroad, the Queensboro Bridge and the Plaza Hotel hold the same significance they did 85 years ago. And people haven’t changed much. You can almost picture Nick, Jordan, Tom and Daisy tapping away on iPhones as they’re trying not to get lost in Manhattan.

Yet while I identify with Nick, at 30 my experience with New York has been totally different from his. By the end of the book, Nick concludes that Midwesterners are so out of place in the East that they’ll be forever chasing unattainable goals, falling down, doomed to failure. The city has kicked his ass. He goes back home.

Gatsby’s green light on the pier—the girl you never got to marry, the wealth you never attained, the dream that turned out to be empty—made sense to me in high school. In college, it squared with my attitude that the deck was stacked against the little guy, and that even if you tried hard, the Man would keep you down. But today, I don’t feel that way at all. My life is hopeful.

I’ll probably keep re-reading “Gatsby” every few summers, but now it feels a little different. I still enjoy the story, and reading Fitzgerald helps me be a better writer. But I may have I learned all I can from Nick Carraway.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This week I read that Sesame Workshop is publishing some free e-books for children. One of them is “The Monster at the End of This Book,” first printed in 1971. I have dim memories of this book being read to me by my mom.

According to one article, this is the best-selling Sesame Street book of all time. When I read it this week—probably for the first time in 25 years—it struck a powerful chord of nostalgia. It’s a hoot, with funny illustrations of lovable, furry, old Grover freaking out about the supposed monster on the last page. The more pages you turn, them more uptight he gets. At the end of the book, he realizes there’s no reason to be scared—the only monster is himself. Go check it out.

All books for young children are secretly books for young parents. “The Monster at the End of This Book” is great for kids, of course. It has bright pictures and simple words and the kind of humor that makes children laugh. Even as a kid, it’s empowering to bust through some arbitrary rules set up by someone with no authority over you. (“I would just like to see you TRY to turn this page,” Grover dares the reader.)

But I think adults might identify with Grover. Just like Grover, we’re scared of our own monsters. They’re the internal doubts telling us we’re flawed, incapable people. No matter how good we try to be, our worst qualities will prevail. Horror of our own creation lurks just out of sight. Part of growing up is finding the confidence to face down the monsters.

Maybe I’m over-thinking it, but I can imagine my 30-year-old parents reading this book to my brother and me and getting that message out of it.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

So what, right? Here’s what: Amazon is making a recommendation based on a book I purchased in September 2000—Nine years ago!

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that Amazon never forgets what you’ve ordered. This might seem creepy, but making recommendations based on purchase history is a pretty benign idea, and a smart business strategy. But do people really have the same interest in books after nine years? In this case, no. I bought a book about Venezuela for a vacation I was taking then; I have no plans to take another vacation there today. (If it could, I bet Amazon would make travel book recommendations based on plane tickets people buy.)

Realizing that Amazon keeps such meticulous records, I wondered: What’s the first thing I ever bought from Amazon?

The answer: The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual (1998 Edition) (Spiral-bound), which I ordered on July 20, 1998. It set me back $9.75, plus $3.95 shipping. I bought this book for school, but I still use it today. It’s one of about six reference books I have within arms reach at my cubicle at work. Maybe it’s time to buy a new edition.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I especially like it when a reader has corrected a mistake, or made a sophisticated editing judgment:

(This example is from a Brooklyn Public Library copy of “The Year of Living Biblically” by A.J. Jacobs, which I’m currently reading. Thanks to my friend Amy for recommending the book.)

(Hey, it just occurred to me that notations in library books are kind of like blog comments! Except notes in library books are more likely to make sense, seldom attack other people who have written other notes in the same book, and rarely accuse the book’s author of being boring, lazy and ethically bankrupt.)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

A week ago, a reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review discovered that Anderson committed plagiarism in his upcoming book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. In at least seven passages, Anderson fills in his argument with background paragraphs he copied from Wikipedia.

Anderson says the passages got into the book by mistake. He wrote on his blog: “In my drafts, I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL.” But last-minute editing changes led to the passages being published without significant rewrites, and without citations. Anderson adds:

“This was sloppy and inexcusable, but the part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all. That is, among other things, an injustice to the authors of the Wikipedia entry who had done such fine research in the first place, and I’d like to extend a special apology to them.”

Anderson has plenty of supporters. One fellow writer says in a comment:

“I think many non-fiction writers share the same nagging fear that their source notes will accidentally get mixed into the manuscript without proper attribution. Because it’s so easy to copy and paste, this kind of thing is going to happen to other writers. I’m working on a book now and I really hope I haven’t screwed up!”

Has everybody lost their minds? Anderson didn’t just make a careless mistake. He committed an act of supreme intellectual lameness. He disrespected every reader who will buy his book on the promise that it contains original thoughts from a gifted communicator.

What Anderson did here is not typical for writers, and the fact that he owned up to his goofs and apologized doesn’t make it much better. A book is supposed to be your best work, not a mash-up of notes you cribbed from the Internet.

I often rewrite information from other sources (such as press releases) when I’m writing short stories, but I’m careful with attribution. For a long-form story, however, that’s totally out of the question. I keep notes I’ve gathered from electronic sources strictly segregated from working copy. Like everybody, I make mistakes and get lazy sometimes. But the worst stories I’ve ever written are at least in my own words.

Anderson was already skating on thin ice. His under-performing magazine is on everybody’s death-watch list. His Free book, which was conceived before the credit crisis, already sounds quaint and dated. Malcolm Gladwell savaged it in The New Yorker (a Conde Nast publication that always gets more respect from the corporate mothership than Wired).

I’m making a big thing out of this because Anderson is one of the very few people in my field whom I idolize. Some day, I’d love to have my name atop the masthead in a magazine as good as Wired. I like Anderson’s style—he’s incredibly good at spotting trends that are just beginning to crystallize and putting them into words. I like to hope that after a decade or two of practice and hard work, I’ll be as good as he is.

And then this happens.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Of course, I have a bias, given that I used to work with Saïd and his now-wife Karen. I met Saïd soon after I moved here in 2002. A fellow cyclist, he taught me the rules of the road for bike riding in New York City. (Rule 1: Buy the $100 bike lock, or your bike will get stolen.) In 2004, he and I organized a series of low-stakes office bets on the outcomes of the presidential primaries. (We both predicted Howard Dean would be elected.) He was one of the good guys at our office.

I’m really pleased to see Saïd’s name on such a high-quality book!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

There might be cheaper ways to do this, but the speed, quality and ease of Lulu was impressive. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who needs a book printed.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.