The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!
(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)
> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”
That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well.
(Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)
Many times it is only possible to know that post hoc. There are several books I've read that, in the moment of completing them, stand as the best I'd read in the past few years. Others I finished and figured I'd never think of them past the current month.
But books and their impact upon you can be surprising sometimes. There are some books I think about often, and that I would say have even influenced me greatly, that I wouldn't have guessed would have that impact when I read them. And others that I figured would remain "book of the decade" that barely made it to the two-year mark before being surpassed by something else.
This is a wonderful thought, I thank you for it
I think I would take it a step further though. It's not just that great literature has details and motifs that line up perfectly, it's not just that it took great effort to produce, or has some musicality or rhythm that is beautiful to take in experientially. It's that the thing that is communicated is truthful. Great fiction wipes away the noise of one's day-to-day thinking into some deep and essential truth about the human experience.
Which is difficult, because that type of truth is not mathematical, it cannot be arrived at through some standalone logical path. I think students suffer because instruction by its nature is framed as teaching a path to get to some destination. The author mentions this with the egg cracking metaphor. The reason that fiction can produce this type of truth and non-fiction cannot is that fiction relays a human experience, it's relational and personal and that is the whole point of it. And you get that transcendental truth out of it because our life experience is fundamentally relational, it is how we see ourselves in relation to others or god or nature or what have you.
Seeing fiction that way is the main difference between myself at 16 and myself today.
> Haha I had a section in this, but cut it, about how people jokingly suggest we should include one regular person in every Olympic event to show just how astounding Olympic athletes are, and this is also a good idea for art...
I've been getting into fiction writing a bit recently and learning to focus on incremental improvement is necessary, for example, getting feedback and trying to find good venues to get it is a challenge because getting helpful constructive feedback is hard
I'm beginning to wonder if, because the skill level of the creators of media the average person consumes on a regular basis is so high, it's actually difficult to get good feedback for learning from by asking them until you get to a minimum baseline of skill and improvement is constrained by finding environments that can provide high quality feedback
You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to.
But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.
So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.
To my shame I've never read Dickens, but I did read the Romanian canonical authors (I am Romanian), and a lot of them, the ones I liked, gave you a very real sense of the life of the people at the time.
Ion, for example, is basically a tragedy about the titular character scheming to marry a woman whom he doesn't love (but who loves him) because he's poor and she's "rich" (owns land). And the book really shows you how important and spiritually so it is for the main character (and therein, for the average farmer at the time) to work his own land, to sweat and toil over his land. How he collapses to his knees and kisses the dirt when he finally gets it etc.
High schoolers can get most books with adult themes, and most books require very little context, since they are filled with passages upon passages upon passages of description.
> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
Because they literally say it!
“Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people’s remarks.”
“How can I promise to be wiser … if I am tempted?”
“My father’s opinion of me does me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it.”
“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”
“To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success.”
I don't think waiting 20 years to acquire a much vaguer and much less correct understanding of the context from YouTube/TikTok/TV cultural diffusion is very wise.
I get your point, and the book does say that. It's just... For a teenager, it rarely lands. And connecting context is super important. I mean, sure Ion wanted land, but you really can't contextualize that kind of desire when your needs and desires are completely different.
Maybe you were more capable of empathy or better at contextualizing what you were reading. I sure as hell was not. And only now later in like I think I am able to read and understand books. And really get them at a much deeper level. I do wonder though if without going through the motions of reading stuff you contextualize poorly if you ever gain the capability to understand. Or if it just makes no sens to engage with certain material until mature enough, in the right frame of mind and, importantly, _interested in it_.
Basic education is weird because it has two conflicting goals. One is to get everyone to the same basic level needed to function in a society. And that's where all the incentives are - that's what you and the teachers are graded on. But another goal is to give you a taste of what's out there, so that some of the more talented kids can decide they like literature or math or physics or whatever.
That second part really requires the teacher and the student to care, but the first part conspires to make that outcome unlikely. My memories from public school are that everything I'm interested in today, I'm interested in despite the efforts of the school system to make the topics appear painful and dull.
So on some level, I don't think the problem is with the literature itself, or with the student's age. It's just that the setting often sucks and you kinda start with the assumption that if the teachers are making you read a book or learn some dates, it won't be a fun experience. And so it isn't.
And I do believe the student has part of the blame here. Or at least, the culture the student is living in. Because if there is an air of "pff, school, who needs it?" it rubs on kids and they end up believing school is stupid, knowing things is dumb, and they just don't care about it. At least in my country, I just feel such an air of disdain for education, that, to me, just feels a problem of perception or cultural framing. Competency is cool. Knowing things is _actually_ cool.
So, do you design the class for the five gifted kids and risk failing the other 15, or do you get everyone over the finish line through rote repetition until they can all recite the names of the Founding Fathers for the test, knowing full well that you can't make them care about history (or, in some cases, even keep them off drugs and street crime)?
Sure, there are exceptional teachers who can keep the entire classroom engaged, but it's so rare that we make films about them. In most cases, in public schools, it's a choice that needs to be made.
But I think we also all now understand that public teaching is one of the worst ROI careers financially and how the few carrpts on the stick (tenure, fairly strong job security) have been stripped away over the decades. The way schools are funded literally rely on real estste value in that area. It's all made so maybe some rich areas get great teachers, but the hopes of using education to crawl out of poverty gets harder and harder. Unsurprising that great teachers leave before their prime or never come in to begin with.
And nope. They do not teach you that in 12th grade econ/government class.
Very much so! I'm not saying the way school approaches books is good, I'd wish there would have been be a lot more time dedicated to reading the darn things. :)
My point is that, if you find reading enjoyable and do it as sort of a hobby instead of a chore (I did, and a bunch of my friends did too, so this wasn't just a me thing), you can get a lot out of the books even at that age.
Of course you understand them more later, but it also goes both ways, you also understand life situations a bit better because you've seen them before in books.
I suggest dropping the shame; you're not missing much. IMHO Dickens is hugely overrated. Paid by the word and it shows.
I think you really need to spend a few years fighting your politics to really capture the politics depicted in literature. And many US grade schoolers simply don't do that.
A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest.
In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them.
> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.
I’ve wonder if I was taught Shakespeare too early, but see it more as an Easter egg or gift waiting for me to catch up. I think more so I was so focused on the rational I was ignoring the other parts though fully immersed in being the other part. Now I see it and appreciate so much have the right lens from early teachings with my experiences. And to your point continuing to learn.
A high school English teacher won't have time for that. There are standardized tests to pass.
The American civil war was about slavery. That's all you need to know.
FAQ:
"No it was about states rights" States rights to? Allow slavery.
"No states rights to decide for themselves" About? Slavery.
"No it was freedom of association" Why did they not want to associate with the abolitionist president? Oh right.
"It was about economic issues" Like...
"It was about agriculture" With labor provided by _____
The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.
Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.
And it absolutely worked.
This wasn't long after my secondary education --- I'd just started uni. But enough had happened that I got it.
As I've commented recently, even as an excellent reader, there's something that hits quite differently from hearing fiction (or even nonfiction) not just read but acted. Selected Shorts is an excellent source for this. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163756>.
Even in history class, when we studied key documents the teacher would often at some point show us an oral presentation of the document- like a clip of (actor portrayed) Abraham Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address. It’s such a well written speech that’s it’s exceedingly simple to comprehend when read. However, when you hear it orated it becomes evident how powerful it was and monumental moment in American history to justify learning about as it was unifying and motivating for all even in the midst of civil war. (Sorry may not be relatable reference for non Americans was just the first that came to mind)
I remember one of the characters (Macduff?) covered in blood after a battle and grinning about how he had opened up his opponent "from the knave to the chop" with appropriate gestures. I remembered that specific phrase from high school and now, instead of being an abstract comment, it had actual meaning that I could relate to.
I'm of the opinion that most plays simply shouldn't be taught in high school English class. There just isn't enough context to really understand them.
Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it
What clicked for me was after being forced to read The Merchant of Venice in grade 9, I suddenly saw all the cultural references ("I want my pound of flesh" or "All that glisters is not gold") in movies, music, etc. I remember watching Strange Brew and somebody mentioned that it's basically Hamlet and you can't unsee it once you realize which movie character is matched to which Shakespeare character.
Over the years I've been to several adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it was a ton of fun every single time.
Funnily enough I never read the translations, so can't speak as to how accurate your affirmation is, but I can see it happening for sure. I'd say it depends on the style of the translation. I've seen some try too hard to preserve the tone of the original.
I feel like in a way we're losing Shakespeare's intended effect, because we insist on using a "language" that isn't used anymore. Yes, I understand that it's considered the same language, but a language isn't really one thing, it's more of a spectrum without sharp edges. Shakespeare is much closer in time to Middle English (which is considered a different language) than he is to our time
Watching Shakespeare has a similar feel to me as watching cartoons in Spanish as an intermediate Spanish learner. I can understand a lot of it. But I have to use so much of my brain power interpreting the language and get so distracted by unfamiliar phrases or words that I can't really get immersed in the story
I don't know, I guess it's just not for me. I think the 1700/1800's are about as far back as I can go
Not to say it will be a complete failure, but it does lose some of its poetry and power.
And smut. There's a lot of smut and double entendre in Shakespeare. An innocent modern word like "nothing" has multiple layers of meaning in Elizabethan English.
Modern audiences don't get it unless someone explains it to them.
We went through it, a bit at a time, in class. With a very good teacher. Not just helping with word and phrases, but digging in a little bit. And at the end we watched a performance of it.
I think that made it so much easier to appreciate, and it made it a ton easier to read and appreciate Julius Caesar or whichever ones we did next.
And like… that was 30+ years ago for me, but I feel like I see echoes of that stuff all the time.
The net result is that it's easier (for me) to understand a letter written by someone in a translated foreign language than one written by someone in English from the same period.
The big one for me is you don't necessarily know Elizabethan slang, but when you see the play performed, the dirty lines get delivered dirty.
I was lucky enough to have a close friend (also a teenager!) who really got Shakespeare. She would explain to me what was actually going on, and read it with the correct emphasis so you could mostly actually follow it. She is 100% of the reason that I was ever able to appreciate Shakespeare.
You would hope that most teachers could do this, but in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
Example: The song "We Are Young" by fun features the following lyrics.
My seat's been taken by some sunglasses /
asking 'bout a scar, and /
I know I gave it to you months ago /
I know you're trying to forget /
But between the drinks and subtle things /
The holes in my apologies, you know /
I'm trying hard to take it back
Projecting meaning where there is none, or where the meaning is clear, is simply not valid even for Shakespeare.
Could she explain Shakespeare to teenagers, or could she explain Shakespeare well to you. If she was in front of your class—explaining to all your classmates how she explained it to you—would your whole class get it? Or would some kids get it, and love it, and some kids bounce off it? In other words, what already happened, just with a different set of kids getting it?
Shakespeare isn't always easy to explain, and I don't think all kids get it the same way. I don't think there's any one way to teach it which will work for everyone. Instead, you're exposed to it a bunch of times, by different teachers in HS, in College, in Life, and ... hopefully everyone will be reached by at least one of those.
But then later on I saw a play version of it and suddenly it all made sense! Even if the words were identical, the context made it much easier to follow the story. I could piece together what it meant even if it wasn't modern English. You could hear the emotion in the voices and better follow what they're reacting to. I really appreciated it!
It's not like it would have cost the school anything...it was freely available online!
Plays, all of them not just Shakespeare, are written to be performed. If your teachers didn't have you perform plays and also watch professional and amateur performances they were derelict in their duties as teachers.
Performance isn't just rote recitation.
In college however, my Humanities professors were better than I appreciated at the time. They forced us to think about the material and challenged us to defend our interpretations. As an Engineering student who just wanted the class to be over, I really missed out on a lot of good stuff.
I think a lot of classic American lit is hard as an American kid because it’s removed enough from today that you don’t get the nuances and also so influential that the storytelling feels trite, even if it was revolutionary at the time.
They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter, and how you're "supposed" to stress it, but it came off to me as "technical curiosity you're supposed to memorize" not "universal experience of enjoyment" that I apparently don't share.
My lighting talk about this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZUcvP8CWhB/
Non-social media link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G58CMUDf-M4loe3MeEus-9gNA5T...
IOW, it's the difference between "these words in this poem rhyme" vs "this poem sounds nice because these words rhyme". Which, incidentally, is an analogy I make in the lightning talk to explain why this part would be glossed over: people assume that appreciation of rhyming/iambic pentameter is universal.
[1] "They taught that Shakespeare used iambic pentameter..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49378069
I think there's a lot of value in going back to examine the original text in school, but adaptations can do a lot to help students connect the idea that this story has characters and motivations that are human and resonate even outside the context of whatever the setting of the original play is.
We did talk about these things in English class in high school. The teachers would lay out the historical/social/cultural context of each book we read. Did your school not do that?
I'd argue that it'd be worse if you could teach your book, and a 50 year old who both has rich lived experience and grew up in the time period the book was talking about has the exact same understanding of said book as a bored edgy 16 year old.
Either you're a godly teacher, or chances are the book doesn't have much depth. And maybe you are a really good teacher, I certainly wouldn't want to teach public school teenagers for a job. But while I'm charitable to teachers, I'm also charitable to the depth of novels.
I read Dostoevsky when I was 16 and I'm still learning more things about him and myself a decade later.
Often times an interesting novel will prompt me to study the cultural context independently.
There was still tremendous value in exposing myself to Dostoyevsky as a teenager. I have observed myself make the same mistakes as his characters, blinded in the moment by emotion. He had so much insight into human nature - but even if forewarning doesn't prevent us from folly, it can highlight a path to acceptance, repentance or redemption that otherwise may take a lifetime of self-reflection.
I don't mean that in a religious context, if that matters.
That said, I'm also frequently amazed at the stuff some people didn't learn that I clearly remember being covered in school...
Honestly, this is why at the conclusion of many books we would watch the movie (when available). Many movie adaptations are period pieces in terms of fashion and depicting struggles/victories that contemporary readers may not be able intuitively grasp.
Most of my time was spent on grinding stem subjects
There's all manner of things I'd Studied in School (primary, secondary, uni) which only became clear to me many, many decades later.
I'm helping an older friend with their one remaining pastime, audiobooks, many of which are re-readings of works they'd first encountered as a teen or young adult (now in their 10th decade). As TFA notes, there's a thickness to many of these works, and even having read them several times already, there's a reward in hearing them again, 60 or 70 years after first encountering them.
I listen in on some of the books. They've covered over 2,000 titles, which is impressive for anyone. One aspect that stands out to me is that I now catch the references to many of them: Herman Hesse commenting on Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Beata Beatrix" (at the Tate), several references to Erewhon, and numerous places, people, and historical events of which I now have far more context.
I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.
In contrast, in high school, when a student has sufficient mental maturity to understand algorithms abstractly, it suffices to have the student do a few integrations by hand (say using the integration by parts technique) and then hand them a computer algebra system.
If problems were properly designed the students shouldn't even need calculators. In math the specific numerical value of a result is far less important than how it relates to the inputs. Raw calculation doesn't develop the intuition of when one operation is more appropriate than another.
I'm tempted to say that history and literature classes should just be combined, gradually working in books from (or about) the period and place being taught!
It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off.
I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context.
Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions.
However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect.
Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful.
To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises":
a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and
b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me.
Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting.
So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well.
As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.
I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.
That being said, there is important literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that should be introduced early, even if they won't really grasp it for decades. Most would be early philosophy and mythology, along with their best refutations. Learning how to read, think, and discuss them is the skill you're really looking to impart on the students to prepare them for real reading as adults.
Unfortunately, the education system is designed to train children to the minimum requirements of their predestined jobs and no further. It's no surprise that schools have made reading and thinking so unpleasant that most people are too traumatized to do it on their own.
I agree with this premise - but the arts and humanities are a big part of how we learn these things in the first place!
In other words, you have to start somewhere. Context builds on context.
Well, you probably had some history classes, maybe watched a movie or two, heard something, maybe asked your parents or the teacher, etc. Also the books usually do set the scene by describing the environments, so you can infer from them.
It also works the other way, after reading that book it gives you some foundation for when you consume other media related to that period/place.
I think this depends on who is reading it, but not the "obviously" type of depends. I'd imagine a teenager from America reading it would have a different take than someone from the UK (possibly Europe at large as well). A lot of that understanding will come from the context of living in the same area. A lot of history is learned/absorbed without formal teaching. Kids just ask questions about various buildings and the why? type of questions that start forming that kind of context.
You could read in a history book - in the few sentences your locality's curriculum can spare for Victorian England - that there was a lot of urban poverty in London after the industrial revolution. Or in a geography book, that that area is prone to smog if you build coal-burning factories in it.
But are you really going to get it in the same way as someone who reads and imagines young Oliver Twist asking for "more", or about the smoke and the mud and the fog crawling down over rooftops in Bleak House?
On the other hand, art class can teach personal creation to young folks, before it gets optimized away as you grow older in favor of consumption.
Right, and then you went and got a job and the torture continued?
It's almost as if the torture is intentional. If only there were books in libraries, freely available to find out the origins of the school system and the society you live in.
To give context to your life, let alone some old dusty pages about a time long gone.
My daughter, fortunately, did not make that mistake and got exposed to a great deal of art and history and literature that I had denied myself. Now I love history and I'm trying to make up for the gap.
So I think it’s useful.
If there is one thing I miss about my adolescence, it is the vast amount of free time. I have never again been able to devote hours upon hours to reading. I used to be able to finish entire books in a couple of days, or a week at most.
Giving as much experience to students provides a way to decide their own life.
I still am not fond of arts, and literatures, started digging it a bit.
I don't know any 50+ year who really looks as young people as anything other than filtered reflections of themselves who will learn on their own..
is innocence unwise and experience embittered? Perhaps but that is a Judgemental and cynical perspective - we need more perspective in this world..and we must expose our best art early so that conversation can begin...The young will get there.
That suggests a need for better cooperation across subjects. In college I learned calculus at the same time as physics and the two reinforced each other. We should be aligning English reading requirements with what's being taught in history class.
It was not until working after finishing Universities, I started to get back to understand those topics. It also became much more enjoyable once I had the contexts. And learning the contexts is a actually a bigger part of the fun
I don’t remember if the area of a triangle in my geometry homework was 5 or 7 and it genuinely doesn’t matter. What I do remember is that formulas are generalized way to solve problems.
Nobody needs to remember the content of fictional literature. But malleable brains do need to examine it critically so they can examine anything critically.
A book report is simply a demonstration that you can ingest and comprehend non-trivial information. That’s it. The content is irrelevant.
A book report on Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels serves the same purpose. But your instructors need to be familiar in order to assess your competency so they stick with the classics.
Having completed book reports on any topic at all better prepares you to study history (or any topic) later in life because it is literally just “how to internalize information”.
And it's kind of like that, but overwhelmingly what I'm really doing is "I find technology to be endlessly fascinating and exciting and important, and here is both how and why, let me see if I can transfer this excitement to you."
If that's there, the learning just happens, that's the easy part.
Here's a seminal work of literature. Instead of taking your time and reading it, write an essay about something you don't give a shit about that's tangentially related to the book.
Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis.
Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.
100%, and just to give an example, she finds good art is excreted (her words - perfectly chosen) rather than created, and I think her example was how the immaculate constructions of somebody like Flaubert lose a certain impact and potency, precisely because they betrays some sort of methodological process. And this cannot yield Truth.
To me, reading this now, that sort of analysis struck me rather as very much dated, and an example of that flippant iconoclasm of modern literary criticism, basically, of the hippies.
Because, really, who is she to throw Flaubert so casually under the bus? (im joking) Mme bovary is perfect, in a way a classical music composition is perfect, it is the oppressive knowledge that perfection can be willed into the world and it's the artist who has the task to will it in the world, no matter the devotion and commitment required. Causally dismissing this, is at its base adolescent posturing (like the hippies). But more importantly, and this is why I say "dated", is that we now, after 60-80 years very much have witnessed what sort of art we get when creating art should be more akin to some physiological evacuation. It's just no good, and it's being rejected more and more.
This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)
Doesn't particularly sound like their English teachers are owed an apology.
Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."
But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.
Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.
Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.
But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.
The problem is that too many pieces require experiences that the majority of the classroom just doesn't have.
It's not that students don't venture far enough into the cave to find the treasure, it's that the treasure literally isn't treasure to them yet.
The venturing that needs to happen for them to find the treasure isn't time spent in the material, it's time spent gaining life experiences.
Ex - there was nothing you could have done to make a book like "The Great Gatsby" good for me as a 15 year old. It's filled with themes that I had no experiences to connect with - no lost romances, no wealth (or even really a sense of wealth and money), no major life regrets, nothing at all to make this book hit. It's a dreary book about miserable, unlikable people when read from the perspective of a 15 year old student.
So why are we asking 15 year old students to read this book?
And that doesn't mean we can't throw students in over their heads every now and then (ex - exposure to the unfamiliar is fine). But if that's all you give them... they decide reading is pointless. You have to strike a middle ground with material that hits home.
And there's a range of teacher quality here as well - some are genuinely good at pushing students towards understanding the value in material, even if they lack experiences. But most aren't (at least in the US educational system I went through, which was a mix of decent public schools and expensive private schools)... they're passionate and well intentioned, but fail to empathize with the emotional maturity and world view of their young students.
> Erasing the line between the thick and the thin has left us defenseless against slop at the exact moment of its onslaught. Everyone can sense there’s something amiss with the prose that comes out of the machines, but we lack the language to talk about it, and so we’ve converged on the idea that slop simply means using too many em dashes, bullet points, and line breaks.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
TIL Gemini can respond to rot13
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
But life is often more complex than that and it requires great skill to accurately reflect that complexity in creative works. When you're struggling with an experience that is difficult to talk about and understand, a creative work that seems to "get it" can be really valuable in sorting out how to think about that experience. I rarely need help in describing how much I like coffee, but I welcome good writing on the subject of "how should one understand the mixed experience of being very close to someone who you often disagree with."
Is it the complexity itself people value, or the rewards of things that are complex? IME, the most valuable things are complex. Maybe that's because there is not enough capacity in simplicity to contain exceptional value (speaking very generally and loosely - we really need to define terms).
Also, I certainly think people value complex things, but I strongly disagree that they are over-valued. All the best things in my life seem complex.
I could imagine that complexity stimulates the brain in a different way and that adds to reward.
I've thought something similar but never put it into words. It's nice when someone else puts your thoughts into words so clearly that you go, "That's exactly how I see this topic!"
> I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them.
> But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.
Surely the literary field has its cranks that believe they have made something deep, but have just made something nonsensical? What's the literary equivalent of TimeCube or chemtrails?
Of course, this is also true in engineering disciplines as well. Perhaps the greatest software engineering work is the Linux kernel. Open the repo, and navigate to a random line in a random file. The odds that you will understand exactly--and I mean exactly--what occurs on that particular line on your first read without an explanatory comment is relatively low. If, however, you consider header files, libraries, how the file fits into the broader kernel, language features, and additional contextual information, your ability to understand that line of code increases significantly.
I've gone back to re-read some of the books I read in school and disliked and I find myself wondering constantly "why didn't the teacher point that out?" or "why didn't they give me the context to understand that?". I feel cheated in a way. And I had good teachers (I think), I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the right mind-space to understand or appreciate it or what.
Oh sure, they'd talk about symbolism and all of that but it always felt a little like BS to me as a kid. Like they were deriving meaning from thin air. I unfortunately cannot remember specific examples or I'd love to go back and re-read the book in question to see if I could understand/see it now. It felt like they never "grounded" the book in the context I needed to "get" the joke or understand the reference/metaphor/etc. I'm sure there were countless clever passages that went right over my head and instead of it being explained I was just supposed to understand that this was a metaphor for XYZ (something I'd not experienced yet, was well before my time, etc). It felt more like I just needed to memorize what they said and parrot it back since I wasn't getting that from what I had read.
I have (and continue to) re-read books from school and find myself amazed to find myself enjoying books that I remembered disliking or merely tolerating. Did I need more life experience? Was I just too focused on "more important" things? I don't know. I look back on most of my education and wish I could re-do it with my current eyes/mindset, I feel like I'd get way more out of it.
But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do."
This is so true. I should re-read this weekly and not feel like some ultra-philosopher trapped by his own laziness... I can just... not feel guilty, the ideas are not that good... yet.
As a kid, that was how I read them too.
Only after I started working did I realize how perceptive some of the character writing was. Murong Fu, for example, is genuinely capable, but his ambition is even greater. Everyone around him, friends, followers, even people who love him, is ultimately someone he is willing to sacrifice for his goal. I have met people who seem to reproduce almost the whole arc: the ambition, the triumphs, the disappointments, the pain, the struggle, and sometimes even the madness. Suddenly Murong Fu no longer feels like an exaggerated fictional character.
The book never changes. I had finally acquired the experience to see what was already there. That feels like thickness to me.
In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).
The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.
Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.
Maybe that's the point?
unfortunately a lot of people in tech tend to think in terms of technology - looking at this from one solution - not looking at the problem holistically. turning their brains into slop brains.
And that's because when Hokusai sat down to print that fourth draft, people had recently started exporting prussian blue dye to Japan; prior to that point, he just straight up didn't have access to that striking blue colour that dominates the print.
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic here. I don't think the slop-acalypse is held back by taste or an appreciation for "thickness". I think there's already very successful slop media in the world (e.g. see microdramas). In other words, it is happening, but like anything else, it's happening in a non-evenly distributed way.
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear,
> when people will stop looking at anything
> made by humans and only look at things made
> by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
Are you an artist? A woodworker? Metalsmith? ... start recording your work and post it to youtube. I guarantee people will be willing to pay extra for the thing you built (I certainly would).
(edit: formatting)
Code can be thick, but it's really the value and conscientiousness of the thing being created that will be judged as "thick".
One hope I have when the wave of AI acceleration comes smashing down to reality is that it will force people into being deliberate, measured, and "thick" with their designs, approaches, attitudes, etc.
Sure you were too young to appreciate great literature natively. That is simply a function of the human condition. You were not failing at anything, no matter how great the great things actually were that you did not appreciate.
There should be like one of the responsibilities of adults is to show kids what's actually so great about greatness. There can even maybe be a profession where the, let's call them "teachers" are specially trained to be aware of the limitations and stages of development of children such that they know how not to drop a heavy advanced things on a hyper 10 year old like a bag of sand, but show them one example concept or facet that they can appreciate, and also in the process show them that there are such things as great things that you don't yet grasp but they are there and when you get there you will find them great.
That sounds like the entire purpose of a teacher to me. So if none of them did that, then I don't think it is you who owes any of them an apology.
Art.
I have a quibble, that does not detract: This is about consuming art, and the appreciation of great art. Part of the pleasure of art, is making art.
In a community we appreciate each other's art in an altogether different way. We cheer on our comrades and they cheer on us, and we make (not very thick) art
Bless. Thick art is truly awesome, and makes the world a better place.
Remember the core of Punk: DIY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
There were issues with rockism, but I still think the wrong side won that fight.
Verbosity without substance is tiresome. But so is hand-waving and vagueness over complex topics (the hallmark of conspiracy theorists and absolutist fundamentalists).
Providing a rich exposition of a rich topic is indeed a divine sort of thickness.
Without the ultimate postmodern truth that there is none, that deep skepticism of power especially and always of oneself, how do people decide what to embrace? Whatever is effectively sold to them, no questions asked. There isn't an instinctive worry about but an almost survival-level embrace of mass messaging - the way is to be safe in the crowd, not to doubt it or to worry about its power in society and its effect on you.
And without believing in the Enlightenment vision of the transformative power of our minds to make a better humanity, expressed especially in art as the pinnacle of human expression and acheivement, art is ruled out and actually threatens your worldview (and that reactionary messaging) of powerlessness and survival.
> If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”
I don't agree with this statement. Being a snob and/or elitist means looking down upon others. If you appreciate these 'secret treasures' without being a dick about it, everybody wins.
It's almost as though the author thought about and cared about the content and exact words he chose. "Thick or Treat" and "Thickening agents" and "Slim pickings" even immediately evoking imagery of a thin slop gruel in my own head.
By using an unexpected word I think I thought more critically about it, in fact. Had the author used depth I would've immediately had more superficial imagery in my own head.
Possibly riffing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description?
This doesn't hold for all things - I would, for example, describe a wine as having "depth" but probably not "thickness" because in the case of potables "thickness" also implies a particular sort of textural feel, but I do like the idea of a piece of art as being thick with meaning as opposed to deep. A book which is deep can be reread multiple times, but a book which has thickness just sounds like a book that can live on your bookshelf and be paged through year after year for decades, with not only the content to support it but also the sturdiness to hold up to the use.
> This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.
There's nothing more to be said. This right here is what slop enthusiasts will never get, because they equate thought with a thought-shaped object.
First, as a point of style it makes no sense for the author to have chosen “thick” rather than the more common adjective “deep”. They describe the same thing, and “deep” even works much better for the cave analogy which is central to the author’s argument.
Deep also has ties to game theory, where increasing depth introduces exponential complexity. The deeper you calculate in chess for example, the more likely you are to find emergent ideas and refutations. Thick is simply an odd choice.
Now to the analogy of literature to caves. It’s highly flawed: unfalsifiable, and its actual supporting evidence is easily refuted by existence of tradition. If you haven’t found the treasure in the cave, you just have to keep looking. It’s definitely there, right?
Further, I am not persuaded by the actual examples the author gave of “thick” art. The nonsense music written on the butt of a subject of a painting is an Easter egg. Ok, the painter doesn’t like secular music, but is there any deeper consideration of why a chromatic scale is fundamentally more sacred than a 13 note scale or a 120 note scale? It’s an anachronistic detail.
The example with Hamlet and ears is even worse. The author says “thin art has no answers, thick art does” then in the very next paragraph concludes no one knows if the recurring theme of ears in Hamlet means something or it’s just something Shakespeare felt like adding.
And this was my entire problem with finding “themes” in books. This exercise was often an exercise in finding patterns where there are none:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Ok, Shakespeare had a thing with ears, so what? I’m sure you can find countless patterns, intentional and unintentional in all sorts of books. Who cares if they mean anything. Now please find three of these “themes” (the more obscure and irrelevant the better, because your teacher has probably already found the real ones) and sandwich them between an opening and a concluding paragraph for your five paragraph essay.
> This kind of quality can only be proven by longevity. Which answers another question I had when I was scowling in the back of English class: why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff? And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good. Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on. If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it. We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention.
The fact that the books on the library shelves this year are mostly the same as last year isn’t a statement about the quality of old books. It is a statement about library budgets. Same thing with museum inventories and English literature curriculums. Jane Eyre is going to feature prominently in AP Lit essays this year not because it is a good book (it was one of the worst things I have experienced) but because teachers know it, the library has it, and the curriculum is written already.
The fact that some things are considered classics is not a mercenary logistical concern. Some movies are considered classics and this has nothing to do with library budgets. Standing the test of time indicates that it’s not just a product of the cultural trends of the time and speaks more universally.
It's mixed. It's both true and false.
There are a great many books out there, but there's also countless pointless turds.
Then something has to be said about your teacher forcing you to read a great book in a language that is not the author's native language. Some do translate well (Dostoevsky for example) but for many others it simply doesn't make any sense. A great book is not just a story: the writing itself is an art form and that cannot be translated.
Then many books are just bland, naive, with a ridiculously laughable "message" they try to pass.
The problem is a teacher shall force you to read either indistinctly. At least mine was.
I could be forced to read great literature just as I was forced to read the latest fart from whatever author was fancy in the city atm for his parents owned a bookstore.
Another way to see it is this: how many books (novel books) are there out there? Like, literally, how many? The number is gigantic. How many great novels are there?
If you were to pick one at random, which probability that you'd end up on a great one?
What's the probability your teacher will pick great ones?
In my case, the odds were basically as you'd expect: I remember very few of them because most didn't warrant being remembered.
closed tab.
And you'll need to add an apology for using that phrase too.
But especially funny and bewildering in this case is that you have this in your About section of your HN user account:
> A journey from the liberal arts to hacking the latest gadgets or statistics.I just felt like the article wasn't particularly well written.
Just because AI can produce slop, doesn't mean humans don't either.
Here is a privacy setting: leave the "about:" field blank in your profile, if you don't want anyone reading it?
It's one click away from every one of your comments; no digging required.
TLDR: AI and generic pop culture artifacts have something in common - a lack of a certain type of depth that makes art great.
I think slop-pocalypse misses one thing. AI's time of thinking is very different than ours.
A "thick" argument that could take a lifetime in human terms could happen in minutes of AI.
You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 shades of grey" as a treatise on existentialism and the human spirit- it's all up to you!
-Reduces explanatory power (if Moby-Dick and 50 Shades are the same, why has one been lauded for 100 years, minted the careers of countless academics, etc.?)
-Makes the world less interesting
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
On the second point, I vehemently disagree, and I'm curious how you think a larger, more complicated world can be argued to be less interesting? Does the fact that your hallucinations and delusions are vacuous, and that they don't sit alone in a dark void, paralyze you with fear?
But take Hamlet, for example. You can say that it's about revenge destroying the one who takes it. Or you could say it's about failing to seize the moment ultimately making you pay a much higher price. Or you could say it's about insanity, and whether sane people are insane and insane people are sane. And none of those is wrong!
You could even say it's about how tedious it is to have to listen to pompous old windbags, and you'd be at least partially right.
But if you said it was about body thetans, then no, you are objectively wrong. There is no honest reading of Hamlet that reaches that conclusion.
"Thickness" is giving authors credit for things they didn't write, but they did leave breadcrumbs for. That's different from "they didn't write it at all", and it's also different from "I didn't look for breadcrumbs, so I didn't see them".
Here's an example: The song "Welcome to the Future", by Brad Paisley, the third verse says:
I had a friend in school
Running back on the football team.
They burned a cross in his front yard
For asking out the homecoming queen.
I thought about him today
And everybody who'd seen what he'd seen
From a woman on a bus
To a man with a dream.
There's more famous museums, and it doesn't have the most popular paintings for non specialist, but it's just haymaker after haymaker, in every single room. And that's leaving the modern art to the Reina Sofia, a short walk away. (Although I guess keeping late Goya there is kind of cheating, as I'd argue he becomes a pioneer of modern art after the war starts)
Books might require quite a bit of work before you can tell they are eternal masterpieces. Seeing the depths of some forms of music might involve not-so-impressive efforts earlier, just to get to the good parts. The very best paintings in the world, in person, can stop people cold. Large format efforts that demand attention even when you don't consider every single small decision.
The Garden of Earthly Delights used to be stuck in a corner, at the edge of one of the wings of the Prado. As if "oh well, I guess it fits here, near all the medieval art". It counted as an ambush.
Most astonishing time that happened to me was a wall-sized Rothko that just floored me, in a way I never would have expected a slab of color to.
Dali’s La Gare de Perpignan stopped me in my tracks too.
Rarely been as stunned by more famous works as when I got blindsided by something that leapt out and said ‘look’.
Goya's museum in Zaragoza was the one I could take in during one visit.