I’ve made it fairly apparent that I love all things Gatsby, and about 80% of my posts on Vernacular have some sort of reference to The Great Gatsby. Well, I have recently been catching up on (read: developing a healthy addiction to) The Wire. I know, I know, I’m a little late on the awesome train. Considering my affection for the book, you can probably imagine my reaction to a scene with prison inmates engaged in a literary discussion of Fitzgerald’s novel. Drug dealing gangster D’Angelo Barksdale offers this reading:

He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go thought it all, this shit matters. Like at the end of the book, ya know, boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right, you can say your somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don’t matter that some fool say he different cuz the things that make you different is what you really do, what u really go through. Like, ya know, all those books in his library. He frontin with all them books, but if you pull one down off the shelf, none of the pages have ever been opened. He got all them books, and he hasn’t read nearly one of them. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And cuz he wasn’t willing to get real with the story, that shit caught up to him. That’s what I think, anyway.

You can watch the clip here, also. I will try to keep this brief because I haven’t watched the entire series yet, and also because I don’t think anyone wants another rant about the importance and timelessness of good literature. I do, however, think Gatsby’s relevance is so lasting because no matter how much the world changes, Jay Gatsby’s American Dream remains fairly constant. I’ll stop (rather abruptly) there, because I am planning a longer piece about The Great Gatsby and The Wire as soon as I finish the entire series.

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