Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl, Take 2

So I changed my tune, after my last Gossip Girl post.  I watched another episode with my roommate, and then became a little obsessed with it, catching up on the entire season’s worth of episodes.  I also found that it’s been pretty widely (and constantly) written about, even meriting coverage by the British press. In the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James describes Isabel Archer, writing, “She had seen very little of the evil of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt each other.”  In the class I was taking at the time, our professor pointed to that line, and said that Isabel would be encountering far greater evil, evil that would seem incomprehensible to her then, as the novel progressed.  And while I could see his point, I also thought that “women who lied and tried to hurt each other,” was no small sin.  It’s also a type of evil most people encounter, and while the antics on Gossip Girl are more than a little melodramatic, I’ve also come to find them quite compelling.  The show’s depiction of friendship-the ways in which friends can love each other very deeply, without there being a rational reason behind it-is, I think, its strongest virtue. I also started reading (and enjoying) these very loving recaps-the writer draws parallels to Joseph Campbell, among others, and it’s made me feel better about my new fixation.   Tonight’s the finale: 8 pm on the CW, so tune in! 🙂

Middlemarch by George Eliot

My sophomore year of college I was assigned Middlemarch by George Eliot as part of my Major British Authors class. Though I didn’t do this too often, for Middlemarch, I used my dad’s method of reading the beginning, middle and end, and close-reading (he could always memorize, but my brain is not as good at that) several other sections. (The professor also decided to assign this ‘big book’ over spring break, a popular move, to give students an extra week to finish it-but it’s still hard to get into when you’re vacationing on the beach!) So 4 years later, I added it to my TBR 2008 Challenge list. And this time around, I managed to read it cover to cover. Middlemarch is the provincial English town setting, and Eliot’s sprawling novel interweaves the stories of many of its denizens. Middlemarch‘s main characters include the aristocratic Brookes (particularly the religious and idealistic Dorothea), Rev. Casaubon, his young cousin Will Laidslaw, and the bourgeois Middlemarch burghers: the Featherstones, the Garths, the Farebrothers, the Bulstrodes, the Vincys (especially young siblings Fred and Rosamond), and Dr. Tertius Lydgate. Like many stories (or soap operas) with large casts-I certainly had my favorite characters in Middlemarch whose stories I was eager to get back to (and those whom I could have happily forgone). Many of the middle class villagers seemed uninteresting or extraneous to me. The descriptions of Dorothea Brooke and Rev. Casaubon’s relationship also reminded me (frighteningly) of Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond in one of my favorite novels, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady . I could see the image of “the candle and the snuffer” equally applying to Dorothea and Casaubon. I found the story lines centering on Dorothea Brooke to be the most compelling. Similar to her other novels, I found Eliot’s narrator to be too moralizing and intrusive. However, akin to Son of a Witch, I was really thrilled by the novel’s climax. The climactic scene of Middlemarch deals with a confrontation between Dorothea and Rosamond that transforms into an open and compassionate dialogue. This scene to me was so powerful because it felt like the first time in the novel where the characters were speaking honestly with each other. Writing about this depiction of the interminable force of honesty in the face of gossip, appearances and reputation reminded me of Gossip Girl, suggesting parallels between the two universes. (And there will be more to come on Gossip Girl). Other Middlemarch readers, weigh in!

Gossip Girl

Last night, for the first time, I watched the show Gossip Girl.  My roommate is a fan, and so I finally watched it with her.  Despite having a quite a few friends who are fans, I’ve held off watching, even as the hype has grown.  I remember reading about the (book) series several years ago and thinking it sounded horrible.  A series about debauched materialistic teenagers, without any moral characters-and it was a big hit? Yikes.  And so I internally groaned, when I read that it was being turned into a TV series.    I think that plays, TV shows, films, etc., as they include human actors, humanize certain plot lines-these events “really” happen to an actual person.  I think this is why filmed or visually represented violence can be so much more disturbing (and lasting in memory) compared to something you read about.  I thought that Gossip Girl was alright, but I don’t plan on becoming a regular viewer. My favorite character is ‘evil’ Chuck Bass, in part because of his clothes-extremely tight yellow jeans, a purple cardigan, with a teal and pink ascot; a bright red frock coat; an orange trench coat; in part because he seems so over the top, and because he’s played by a Brit! Have any of you read the books or watched the TV show?  What do you think?