LIT AF

Most of THE GREAT GATSBY is timeless. Love and the nutty things we do for love happens in/to every generation. It has for centuries, and it will until we cook ourselves off the planet. Fitzgerald focuses on the characters, the immediate settings, and the dialogue without much connection to real people or events that would locate the book in time. Apart from scattered, vague references to the war,...

Daisy said she never loved Tom. But then she said she did. Tom says he loves Daisy. But he was diddling Mrs. Wilson. Gatsby does seem to really love Daisy.  He shouldn't have let her drive. By the end of this chapter, Mrs. Wilson is dead, Tom is grieving, and Gatsby is keeping watch over Daisy's house. But accidentally homicidal Daisy is now depending on Tom, and it's starting to fe...

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"  We all think back on moments that are lost to history: decisions we made, things we did or didn't do, all our private to be or not to be's that gave us the stories we tell about ourselves today. And, if we're not careful, instead of learning from those experiences and designing our to...

We are now over the halfway point of the book. It's worth remembering how most people encounter Gatsby the first time. However amazing they may be, most high school students simply don't have the life experience to understand what some of these characters - and definitely the author - are experiencing in their lives and marriages. And, not for nothing, school is the most toxic brand in h...

Chapter 4 begins with young ladies making wild guesses about Gatsby. He's a killer. He's second cousin to the devil. When we don't have information, we make assumptions. When we have a little information, we go way positive or way negative. If you don't believe me, have a look at online reviews. At one level, these schema (categories of thinking) can help us when we encounter n...

Many people talk about Gatsby's parties, and how he used them to lure Daisy - but there is more to partying than meets the eye. What attracts us to each other? Can we account for this with attachment theory, or neuromodulators? Is it just dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, or estrogen? We know isolation is problematic, but we've also made relationships complicated - when is relying on an...

Did school teach you to achieve your goals, or just keep setting new ones to make yourself constructively miserable? Philosophers, drug dealers, and late stage capitalists all know the  secret - you're never going to be happy as long as you want what you don't have. Welcome to Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby.

Meet the new guy in town. Narrator Nick Carraway introduces us to Tom, Daisy, and the man himself in Chapter 1 of The Great Gatsby.

You've arrived at Ground Zero for the LIT AF podcast. Classics works of literature are classics because they tattoo your heart. The writers who are insightful, brave, and talented enough to share their sense of loss, love, death, sex, pain, and triumph speak to us, for us even, and they let us know we are not alone.  People in every generation understand this. The classics are timeless.  But...

Many people describe THE GREAT GATSBY as boring and overrated.  They're wrong. But it does take some life experience and an intimate familiarity with pain to understand the book. Apart from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the two men who knew the book best considered it a masterpiece. They were two of the most badass writers of the 20th century, and they both blew their own brains out. This episode of L...