I’ve been doing a lot of re-reading this summer.Yes, A, it’s still
summer in NOLA, alas. I gleefully plowed through the entire Robert Caro
LBJ series, and recently re-read The Great Gatsby for the first time in
many years.This is my favorite passage:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things
and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other
people clean up the mess they had made.”

Every time I deal with careless people, and I’ve done more than my share of that recently, I think about Tom and Daisy. Carelessness, like malakatude, knows no class limitations although being part of the 1% makes being careless even easier. I’m not the only one who’s obsessed with this image. There’s an entire book by Sarah Churchwell centered around Fitzgerald’s careless people. Maybe I should read it before going to the movies and fuming about the douchebag who thinks live tweeting the new DeNiro/Pfeiffer flick is okay. That’s either high tech or low brow carelessness, I’m not sure which.

That is all.