The Top 5 Litverse Essays (Anniversary Edition)
Revisiting the archives to kick off Year 4
Today marks the third anniversary of Litverse and the official start to Liverse Year 4. Since then, I’ve published 95 different essays and explored a lot of themes. Since Substack reminded me that today was the anniversary and it’s easy to do a round-up style post, I figured… why not? Also, it’s always fun to look back on essays. By putting this list together, I learned new things and, especially, old things that I forgot.
On June 16, 2022, I started Litverse for two reasons:
I was having a hard time remembering all the books I read. I was getting frustrated that, after a month, I would only remember the contours of the book instead of the details. I blamed this, as I do most things, on myself. I was doing a bad job of integrating the information. I integrate information by writing stuff down. So Litverse was born.
I was reading books I knew that no one else would read. During the lockdowns of 2020, I bought Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. I was blown away by the brilliance of Tocqueville’s observations and became morose thinking about how so few people in modern culture would read the words. I decided I could summarize the parts I found cool and publish them for anyone who wanted an overview. I decided I could do that for a lot of obscure books I read. So Litverse was born.
And now here are the essays that I think get to the heart of the last three years of Litverse:
1
Watterson didn’t want a Calvin and Hobbes holiday special or shirts or toys or stuffed tigers. He didn’t want a Saturday morning cartoon character to imitate Calvin’s voice. He was the last of the newspaper comic generation who viewed newspaper comics as a form of art. He retired after ten years and went to paint landscapes in Utah.
But what does art become when the form goes extinct?
I more or less learned everything I know about life from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. In the nineties, newspaper comics served as a crucial bridge for childhood literacy by matching pictures and words to context and actions. Calvin and Hobbes introduced a world of wonder and imagination with complex language and adult issues and stayed funny, no matter how much of it you understood.
Bill Watterson was adamantly against merchandising the comic strip into toys, TV, and everything else. That’s why there’s a Garfield movie and no Calvin and Hobbes movie, and every kind of Peanuts plushie known to man. Watterson’s stance is very much a product of the nineties, when individuality with compromise and without commercialism was the ultimate virtue.
In this essay, I explore the downsides of Watterson’s choice. In an increasingly illiterate world, Calvin and Hobbes will fade into irrelevance. The tragedy is not that we can’t buy Hobbes toys, but that the toys won’t encourage new generations of kids to find Calvin and Hobbes on their own and unlock all the language and life lessons in the comic strips.
Read “The Death of Calvin and Hobbes.”
2
How Steve Jobs Got It Wrong
Write in long-hand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs - and technology - lied to us. Technology is a tool that is more commonly used as a trench, a trough, and a tunnel. Granted a library of infinite knowledge and a worldwide workshop resplendent with revolution, the cave-dwelling primitives living in our bones are predisposed to gorge rather than forge.
Steve Jobs is famous for a lot of quotes. He may be the most-quoted guy on the planet in certain business circles. One of my favorites is from a very old interview where he explains that he thinks computers will be like a “bicycle for the mind.”
Technology, Jobs explains, will expand our capacity to think and do things faster and better than ever. If you believe this in the year 2025, you have to avoid a lot of unfortunate facts.
In this essay, I talk about how technology is not just a tool - it’s a trough where we stuff ourselves full of information and entertainment. This was during my most radical, um, design phase. Hence the floating pig next to a bunch of circuits. But the point still stands: Jobs was wrong in the long run. Technology is a magical tool, but it is much more often used as a muddy trough.
Read “How Steve Jobs Got It Wrong.”
3
Why Fitzgerald and Hemingway Are Literature's Greatest Frenemies
Between artists, the balance between admiration and jealousy is acrobatics. When art is life, another artist’s success can seem like an invalidation of your own life instead of a triumph to be celebrated. The chemistry between vastly talented people and the rapid-fire exchange of begrudging respect can be dazzling, whether it’s academics, writers, digni…
Hemingway, a decorated World War I veteran, was hypnotically assured about his future fame and fortune and stood at a broadly shouldered six feet as opposed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s five-foot nine. Fitzgerald, who wrote so many short stories that nakedly longed for wartime experience, made no attempt to hide his wish that he had been granted some similar token of validated masculinity.
In the early days of Litverse, I spent a lot of time with Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
When it comes to Fitzgerald, I wrote about:
At The Movies with F. Scott Fitzgerald: Reflections on Fitzgerald’s half-finished final novel, The Last Tycoon, and how he came to die at a loss for himself in Hollywood.
6 Ways to Drink Like Fitzgerald: A step-by-step guide to how Fitzgerald drank like no one else and a brief overview of his relationship with Zelda Fitzgerald.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Poison of Potential: How Fitzgerald became too famous too fast, and what came after.
The Art of Regret: A look at regret and guilt through the eyes of The Great Gatsby, Don Draper, and Proust.
I also touched on Hemingway’s macho love for cats and one of his lesser-known books about the Great Depression and the Florida Keys.
Litverse’s most definitive piece about the two ties all of this together and foucses on the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. This essay is all about finding out whether Hemingway and Fitzgerald really were friends and what that friendship - frenemyship? - looked like.
Read “Why Fitzgerald and Hemingway are Literature’s Greatest Frenemies.”
4
How (and Why) to Avoid Death by Notification
Most teenagers get 200+ app notifications a day. Any generation can relate: across emails, texts, comments, DMs, shares, likes, and a thousand one-off app notifications, there are too many things for anyone to have time for any thing but responding to other things.
The embarrassingly personal relationship we have with our phones shows that we prioritize the dreams in the device over the dreams we can live in the present. But it’s when we daydream that we get our true inspirations and find our real purpose. In the silence of the self, rather than the sharing of it, we can discover something within that helps us with everything without.
Like everyone, I have a love-hate relationship with technology. It can seem like a miracle one moment and an apocalypse the next. But one thing that I try to always be conscious about is how much time I actually spend wasting away on apps. Instagram has been my poison, as well as X. I try to keep them deleted on weekdays, so they don’t waste any more of my time. It works half the time.
After using the apps, I try to remember what I just saw. It’s harder than you think. Try it. If you can’t remember anything, then what was the point of scalding your time in some social media soup of sedated sensation?
In this essay, I focus on the impact of technology on younger generations and how we all get hundreds of notifications a day and how, as author Karl Ove Knausgaard, said, life can feel like it’s slipping away when it’s so often mediated by modern technology.
Read “How (And Why) to Avoid Death by Notification.”
5
A Millennial Sees Chapell Roan and Thinks About Pascal's Wager
I’m thirty-six. Today, music festivals are full of bands I don’t know and genres I don’t understand. My favorite acts tour with gray hair, playing their most popular albums from decades ago, and fans pay a thousand dollars for a seat on the far cliffside of an arena.
Pascal would argue that a Chappell Roan concert isn’t exactly an “infinite and immutable object” like God. The concert isn’t infinite. Anything from the material world is turned to nothingness by the vacuum. God, in being infinite, is the only thing that can really fill the space in our hearts. Headed home in a state of deflationary elation with the breaking masses, I wondered how we to try and fill the vacuum of our hearts in a secular society. Because Chappell Roan reminded me that we are as religious as ever. It’s part of human nature to find something to worship. We’ve just changed up rituals.
Chapell Roan. Blaise Pascal. Name a more epic duo.
In this essay, I talk about how “believing” in something has changed and what Blaise Pascal would make of our new gods. In Pascal’s view, we all still needed to feel the divine in some way and, in modern culture, we tend to find obsessions, passions, and pathologies to do it. In this essay’s view, I break down five ways we try to reach the divine in a secular society, starting with music.
Read “A Millennial Sees Chapell Roan and Thinks About Pascal’s Wager.”
It’s been a great three years and I’m looking forward to Year Four!
This year, I started off by reading a lot of sociology and psychology. Especially about divorce. But then I veered dramatically into economics. And now, art theory. Who knows where we’ll get to next?
Stay Lit to find out!