The anecdote about the garden of earthly delights is going to be relatable even for art students. I've met art teachers that ended up "trapped" in Madrid by the Prado Museum: A green, American future Ph.D student that was heading to Greece to specialize in old greek art. But instead of flying straight there, they stopped at Madrid to see the Prado, and were never able to leave. Changed their direction immediately, and ended up teaching in Madrid, and retiring there, because one of the countless masterpieces in there stole their life plans away.
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.
Possibly the best thing about Washington D.C. is that the National Gallery of Art (along with, I think, all the Smithsonian) is free. This means you just take a casual stroll through without any of the pressure of having spent a sizable sum like you might to visit a place like the Art Institute in Chicago. In Chicago a visit is an event, you need to see the Seurat, the Grant Wood, etc. You've spent money and you need make it count.
In D.C. you can literally walk in, go look at the big Joan Mitchell for 10 minutes and continue on your day. Or you can wander through a room you've never been interested in and find something and then go to lunch. Without the commitment to get everything done, you are suddenly free.
Good libraries (edit: even mediocre libraries) also have this quality.
For those of us on the other side of the ditch: all museums in London are free. and I would echo the sentiment that it makes exploration of them less of a completionist activity to "get your monies worth" and more of an enjoyable forey into a rich space.
Its literally a paradigm shift.
Also almost all commercial art galleries are like this, obvs for other reasons. The gallery district (google art galleries then wander those streets, chelsea is the most established) in NYC is an amazing place to spend a day wandering around seeing amazing art. my uncle who teaches art introduced me to it and i try to spread the word.
Many museums have a membership. For one price you can visit the museum any time you want. I strongly recommend everyone do this for all their local museums. It changes the experience when you don't feel bad about wasting the admission because you only have an hour. Particularly small local museums where spending all day isn't worth it, but if you have to pay admission you feel compelled to spend all day to get your money's worth.
Some of them also include reduced price admission to others of the same time. My local zoo isn't very big, but the membership means half price admission to a very good zoo just a couple hours away. My local science museum got me free admission to many other science museums and children's museums. My local historic farm got me into a lot of interesting historical sites. Be sure to understand what you get and take advantage of it on vacations.
I strongly recommend you get the version that lets you bring two guests. When my parents or some other friend from out of town comes to visit we have something interesting to show them (and if they are not having fun we can leave early).
I lived in DC for a couple of years and I felt exactly the same. I try and carry that same mentality to all museums now, paid or unpaid. No research, no expectations, wander around and let yourself be surprised, leave when you’re bored. It’s a lot of fun.
Although it is hard to do when you’ve paid 50 bucks for a ticket and you know there is “just one more” ultra-famous piece on the other side of the museum and when will I really be back in (Amsterdam, Paris, etc)?
^^ this. I was never an art person and then one day I felt like I was just punched in the face when it hit me. It's not like "I like this, it's interesting", it's like "Oh. That."
the punched in the face expression is strange here. I get it but I also presume that you have never been punched in the face much like you never connected (that's the word you are looking for, also a boxing term) with art.
I wish I could do this. In general, in museums I always feel compelled to go through all the exhibits my time allows, when clearly some of them capture my attention and others are just filler. But I would feel guilty "wasting" my time with the piece that caught my attention.
This is where a membership to the local museum comes in handy. Then there's no pressure to see all the exhibits because you could always come back next week.
I have the same feeling always, so for my upcoming trip to Amsterdam and a visit to the Rijksmuseum I vibed https://rijksmuseum.matze.lol to concentrate on something I _want_ to see.
But let’s not pretend that the plastic and painterly arts are so much more self-evidently “thick” than literature is. Despite their immediacy, these arts have their own conventions, motifs, and demands that must be understood to “find the treasure in the dark cave.”
I have tried to convince someone I know that an art museum merits more than a one-minute-per-painting, four minutes-max-per-room, pretty/not-pretty approach. She still does not understand why I linger over books or works of art, and I have not the wherewithal to lead her through the techniques, the conventions, or the history that makes this worthwhile for me.
I had the exact same experience as the author with The Garden of Earthly Delights. I went to Madrid on a whim and went to the Prado without really expecting much, tbh (I’m a philistine). But I stopped in front of this painting, which I don’t recall having heard of, and I couldn’t leave. I stood there for a long time.
Saturn Devouring His Son was similar. Haunting. I still think about that painting often, many years later.
> The very best paintings in the world, in person, can stop people cold.
I will always remember literally stopping mid stride to just stare at a Francis Bacon I'd seen in the corner of my eye in the Tate modern. Slightly later same day I am just staring at Monet lillies bewildered.
I gotta be honest, any time I go back I am disappointed because the same surprise and wonder have simple not been present. Idk
I had this incident with the Miraikan in Tokyo. I visited it in the summer of 2017 and just seeing the fascinating future I knew I had to be a part of it. The week after I got home I decided to apply late to University to finally take that step. A PhD and lots of research later and I'm finally getting papers accepted that are planning the future I want to see.
> Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?
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.)
> Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade?
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.
That's part of why I like the fuzziness. And why it's a really great system looking back retrospectively. I don't keep a reading journal, but if I glance over physical books in my house or reading history on my ereader, rankings of past things read get really clear really fast.
I agree with your sentiment about ranking -- the gamification of art is pointless -- but I'd go even further: often you won't agree with yourself from the past about a book or movie! Sometimes you just need to be in the mood for a work you previously considered average to really hit you. Other times you revisit music that felt really powerful in your youth, but hearing it again only evokes a mild nostalgia and a feeling of "why did I ever like this?".
THANK YOU! This is why I hate security questions that ask for my “favorite” whatever. That’s going to change! My favorite movie, or supervillain or whatever is going to change - hopefully - within a couple years if good artists are out there making good art. So why the hell would I answer that question the same 5 years from now as I would today?!
Robin Hobb (a very successful fantasy author) rates books on Goodreads. To her, anything over one star is a good rating. Even two stars means she liked it.
I am always hit hard by the paradox of choice, it is very hard for me to just rank something, But it is easy to compare two items. Considering the metaphysics of this a little too hard I put together this silly little web toy to explorer my ideas on ranking things. https://compare.outband.net/compare/app/compare.html
It still sort of sucks and you can tell I am not a web dev, but it was interesting to think about.
I like my five stars, but I always preface any rating with a description of how I define my ratings:
5: This book changed the way I think.
4: I enjoyed reading this book. It was interesting and engaging.
3: This book is OK. I wouldn't read it again.
2: This book had parts where I wanted to drop it.
1: I couldn't finish the book. It's actively bad.
As always with scales like this, any definition is subjective and scales shouldn't be used without understanding their impact. I'd never apply this scale to an Uber driver. Also, scales shouldn't be used for stack ranking. At least not without defining the heuristics first.
To me, scales are a way to focus my qualitative impressions into something that's not an essay. It's a good starting point for a discussion about the merits of the work. It definitely has its footguns, though.
> 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?
I love it because it put something into words that I was thinking about the last season of the show Succession. All I could say before being armed with this, was something along the lines of it feeling like it was suddenly "all over the place."
This guy's blog is great by the way, I went and subscribed.
I have had similar thoughts about "x of the week/month/year". But every now and then there's a dirge or deluge of good things and years aren't even comparable because the fourth best thing one year might have been the number one in any other year of the decade.
I think a good example for me personally is 2019 in music. And I assume most people reading this list will shake their head at my (in their view) poor taste.
1. Rammstein released their untitled album which to me remains the best they've ever made.
2. Slipknot released "We are not your kind" which I played on repeat for so long. Nero Forte remained my first or second most listened to song for three years in a row.
3. Lars Winnerbäck also released Eldtuppen, causing the one and only time someone else than AC/DC became my most listened to artist for a year
4. While I didn't like the 2019 Korn album "The Nothing", it made me realize I'd missed their 2016 release "The Serenity of Suffering", which remains one of my favorite albums of the last decade.
The nice thing about "ranking" stuff for yourself and not for anyone else is that some years can have three "best of the year" and some can have none. Embrace the fuzziness inherent in the system.
Because, man, some years really were just that good.
Because an AI company made their LLM "roll a dice" that was loaded in a specific way to choose that word, so they could claim ownership of your document later.
I'm not sure if you're just choosing not to engage fully with what I wrote or if you're trying to make some other point, but for what it's worth I do not and did not write any of my comments here with AI.
Really loved this essay, loved the irreverent style. I had a similar literary journey as this guy.
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.
Yes. I really liked and enjoyed reading this post, but was a bit frustrated by the focus on "thickness". Great art is not great just because it has many layers that take some time and effort to discover, like great cooking doesn't need a large number of different ingredients.
Great art, as you say, has something true, profound, and original to tell us about the human experience, and it touches us deeply in a way that not-so-great art doesn't. It "stops you in your tracks" as other comments here mention. It hits you on the head and makes you a different person, at least a little.
And, there's a magic component to it too. Great art is greater, I think, if you can't guess how it could possibly have been made by a mere mortal. That's where trade comes in. Great art is made by great artisans with a touch of genius, but genius alone isn't enough.
I am actually often a bit annoyed at discussions of depth in discussions of art - especially from art snobs talking about whether or not something is "true art".
I think what depth does do is help something stand not the test of time but deep continuous analysis. It really heightens the experience when you're a fan and can dive deeply into something for years and still discover subtleties you somehow missed that elevate it even further.
But if something catches your attention immediately granting you a sense of wonder and appreciation which lingers... Well, that is valuable art. Perhaps that's another kind of mastery, managing to convey your ideas so effectively that it doesn't need deeper analysis to digest?
Yes. After thinking about it a little more, I think my critique of thickness would be that the tail is wagging the dog a little bit here. Great art is sometimes 'thick' - it has nuance, layers, depth - because the human soul is sometimes 'thick'.
There's an interesting part of this that's mentioned in the comments that the original author states:
> 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
Feedback is a gnarly problem because a lot of people assume this means "I, the reviewer, will criticize what I think will improve this work" and "I, the receiver, will receive suggestions to improve my work" but the reviewer and the creative will never have the same idea of what the WIP's ideal state looks like. So the feedback can be actively harmful to the creator. For example, if I'm a Mexican author writing about my abuela, and a feedback is "you should replace all these words with English", that's probably actively harmful to the vision of the work. But also sometimes the creator must be actively open to feedback that "hey, your abuela isn't a person in this story, she's just a female cardboard character" because it's probably a disservice to the vision to have a cardboard character clouded by the creator's nostalgia.
> But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
That part made me feel seen. I took a handful of literature classes, all to satisfy some requirement. I don't think I ever once generated a genuine appreciation of any of it. Sometimes a resentment (particularly for Shakespeare) but most often just an indifference. Like maybe there's something there, but if so, it must be for other people who are just better at understanding this stuff. It's not for me. I just need to come up with some plausible ideas to get through this class with a passing grade.
The best thing about gaining an appreciation of this aspect of life is it opens up so many extra pleasures. I can spend an entire day at the (free entry!) V&A in London and never be bored. Likewise with a great book (when my 11-year-old isn't around!)
As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time.
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.”
Or the narrator does
“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.”
And from the books YOU LEARN WHAT THE SOCIETY WAS LIKE!
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_.
> I get your point, and the book does say that. It's just... For a teenager, it rarely lands.
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.
I don't see the conflict between the two. I think you can do both. But, yes, the quality of the teachers matters a whole lot. And, sometimes, how well they relate to the kids. Because I can imagine that some people just won't click well together. Thinking back on the poor professors, I kinds of am sorry for all the crap they had to put up with.
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.
You have 20 kids in a classroom. Fifteen of them want to know what's going to be on the state-mandated test. Five, if you're lucky, may have some interest in the subject you're teaching.
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.
You can indeed do both. That's what separates a good teacher from a great teacher.
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.
> in the right frame of mind and, importantly, _interested in it_
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.
Telling you about the great depression in Steinbeck's work is a lot different from living a few years out in the world and struggling to pay rent. Even if that's still a far cry from what actually happened 80-90 years ago. I think those are the key sensations that are missing that made me resonate with a lot more classic literature post-college rather than bumbling through English class in high school.
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.
The book can only tell you from its own reference frame. Time has passed since the book was published, a lot of relevant opinions have come out in the meantime.
A publication also somewhat assumes what the reader knows, because it would take forever to explain things otherwise. With time passing, those assumptions are no longer valid.
Dickens is full of extremely theatrical scenes. The characters are often a caricature, but the caricature is so finely drawn that it is tremendous fun.
(Nobody should be ashamed for having read or not read some work though, or for having enjoyed or not enjoyed one.)
You're making a good point. I was also of the opinion that these books don't land well, because I'm missing the context. And I'm actually still thinking that about quite a lot of these classics. But what I believe I'm also concluding from your comment, is that these books aren't good hooks to get people, especially teenagers, interested in the context and in the society of the time. And that is where YouTube/TikTok/TV might shine. Or a well written and narrated podcast.
> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture
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.
A lot of people revisit these works later in life and have even further appreciation of them. I think it all validates the goal is to teach learning as a life skill. Learning is never complete. Even things you know, you may not understand until later. It’s all part of the process of learning to learn and emphasizing curiosity and critical thinking. These are the high level objectives of education and inform a lot of the processes that exist.
I’m in my fifties and taking a break from work and have now found myself reading Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, along with Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. My movie watching is now much more auteur and reaching for the unconscious and immaterial experience.
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.
My understanding is the Confederacy did not give its states the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, and did not give its states the freedom to decide whether or not to associate with each other.
It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning.
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.
I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it.
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.
I've had a similar experience, with the same play, but in an absolutely minimalist setting. No sets, the only props were a few chairs, and costumes were the same white slacks and smock worn by all the players.
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>.
I think that is one thing about trying to study Shakespeare in class that can be improved. The class shouldn't just be taking turns saying the lines out loud. But you don't need a full theatrical production either or memorize lines. Read the lines with some light acting out of scenes with just the tables, chairs, and a small bit of imagination could be the class room study impactful.
In retrospect, I think I have to apologize to my English teacher. I thought it was too ambitious having the class put on a Shakespeare play. But it was fun and we apparently learned a lot.
I couldn't find the exact point that I was thinking of (when Hamlet is telling Ophelia that men are basically all just assholes), but I think this modern-day version of Hamlet helps to illustrate your point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdZVR4Ry3jQ
I gave up trying to read plays shortly after school. There's no point to me, they are supposed to be performed. I still think it's worth studying some of the more famous ones in school, but any study should absolutely involve actually going to see the play at some point.
You'd probably be in a better place to understand the scripts now, having seen more performances, for whatever that might be worth. That said, I personally don't read scripts, and have not done so since I was last required to in high school.
I commented elsewhere but my schooling had a pattern of: read > analyze/discuss > watch movie > analyze/discuss. Most of the material has film adaptations and this was fairly sufficient in closing the loop during the course.
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)
A couple years after I graduated college, I came across the 1972 movie of Macbeth. The experience was so drastically different from reading it in high school that it seemed like a completely different play. Suddenly, it all made sense now that I had a visual context.
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.
Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing.
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.
Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're actually said and stressed, they're going to be a lot less memorable.
Thank you for recognizing the situation I was in! (Nit: "to be or not to be" is probably a bad example of something that depends on iambic for memorability.)
Also, when I tried rewriting that soliloquy for modern ears, it didn't even occur to me to keep the meter; that never registered as a noteworthy aspect of it.
One other thing: keep in mind what it's like to be in high school. For the vast majority of your life, you're told to do things "because I said so". So the idea that there might be an actual good reason for stressing Shakespeare the right way ... didn't stand out as an obvious hypothesis.
I'm curious: does any poetic metre stick out to you as 'nice' or making texts easier to remember? Or is this just some part of the human condition that's completely alien to you? I've heard similar things from some people about music in general ('it's just noise; I don't see why you think it sounds nice'), so it wouldn't really surprise me if that were the case.
Meter does matter to me, and I do enjoy music. Just the every-other-syllable stress with natural stresses in iambic pentameter doesn't resonate.
In the lightning talk, I contrast IP with ska music, which I like, and which is characterized by stressed off-beats (which resonate with me) and mis-stressing the syllables to fit the meter (which also resonates with me).
Edit: Another thing about the high school experience: Shakepeare kind of fit a pattern of "stuff everyone professes to like but whose enjoyment seems to be fake/performative" (along with pop music, sports, and the taste of alcoholic drinks). I joke that if I were gay, I'd include everyone else's apparent heterosexuality in that pattern.
Oh wow I remember having read/heard that it was helpful for memorization, never occurred to me to think that there was an impact for some listeners too.
Again, it was taught[1]. The fact that (speaking it with) one meter sounds particularly pleasant (to some people), and that this is a big part of its appeal (to those who like it) was not taught.
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.
I have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not
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
It's a tragedy that most English classes don't have field trips. Going to an actual Shakespeare play would probably change many people's minds than having to direct it in book form.
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.
I was preparing to heavily disagree with you before that "because". I'm French speaking, one of my highschool English teachers made us read Romeo and Juliet, and it's different enough from modern English that my brain just couldn't understand anything at all. Thank god Sparknotes already existed in the early/mid 00s cause I would have fluked that class so hard.
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.
Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.
I mean, even the most famous line in all of Shakespeare, "wherefore art thou Romeo" is frequently misunderstood because many people reasonably assume "wherefore" means something like "where". Yes, you can figure it out from context, but the context is in the same archaic language. Very possible to untangle all that while you're reading it and perhaps it's a good mental exercise. But it can be really tough to keep up when you're watching in the form it was meant to be enjoyed in, a play
That speech is expressing an awesome idea: Juliet is saying that she loves Romeo-the-person, but she is terrified of her bad luck in that he happens to have a certain surname ("Montague") which will automatically cause her family to hate him. Which, indeed, they do. It's basically something like "why did I fall in love with such an inconvenient person?", together with "why does my family care so much about this thing that I'm not sure needs to matter?".
Sure, but the archaic language can obscure the awesome idea.
"Why are you Romeo?" may sound less poetic to modern ears, but isn't that how people back then would have parsed it - just as easily as everyday language, because it was their everyday language?
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
True, but a big part of Shakespeare is the rhythm, and if you replace the words with newer words that disappears.
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.
Yeah, that helps. But attending a performance by a company that thoroughly understands it themselves is a massive shortcut. Sure, you'll still not be able to define every word, but they'll give you all the context you need to "get" enough to enjoy the show.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about the poetry. In fact, being aware of that level is essential to really understanding the plays. I'm sure you're aware of this, but for the peanut gallery: when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first words to each other are a mf-ing sonnet. They're so in tune with each other that they complete each other's thoughts and (within the world of the play) extemporize a whole poem. And it's good - totally witty and flirtatious, and just... Yeah. You want to talk about two people made for each other? That's them. Which, of course, sets up the whole tragedy of the rest of the show. Good actors will make you feel that, but it hits harder if you recognize the sonnet as it goes by.
I disagree. Shakespeare was not "plain" even in the 16/17th century. It wasn't archaic, but it was far, far from plain. The same is true for a lot of great literary works, even recent ones. Many great works have a lofty diction, which is easy to lampoon when inferior works veer into purple prose, but when it works, really elevates language.
True. But I think you can agree that the (now) archaic language and cultural context that would have been common knowledge back then gives an extra layer of difficulty over the already poetic/literary nature of the work
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
Yes, no disagreement there. Some things would have been more commonly said or just common knowledge, but I only wanted to push back on the idea that Shakespeare's writing was just how people talked back then.
We often didn’t just get sent home with a copy of Romeo and Juliet and then get asked to write an essay.
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.
This is a really good point. My wife and I produce a history podcast where, right now, a lot of it draws on primary sources such as letters, diaries, etc. from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The ones in German she translates into English, but it feels "wrong" to change someone's words that are already in English.
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.
It's hard to pick a favorite - everyone brings their own perspective to their time. One of my early favorites was 'A Jew Who Stood Guard for Hitler'[1], the account of a kid who joined the Nazis for a while - till they found out he was Jewish and kicked him out. Ah, the naivety of youth.
Well yeah. Look no further than the "brevity is the soul of wit" quote. It's taken at literal value when, in context, you know it's a joke, a potshot at the expense of the character saying it, who's anything but brief in speech.
It's totally in earnest, and it's funny because Polonius isn't being self-deprecating: he wholeheartedly believes in brevity, when he isn't being it. At all.
But, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, he's not being entirely poked fun at. He's saying goodbye to his son, who's headed off into adulthood, and his over-long list of life-advice is like his last chance to to be a loving father. It's a "yeah, dad" moment, but Polonius is ever so slightly desperate to impart all the lessons that maybe he never quite got around to teaching quite as well as he wishes he had, and he's just ever so slightly desperate, and totally not ready to say goodbye, and it's... Really, really relatable.
Though maybe not to high school students, I guess. I think it's still worthwhile for them to try.
Yes, I agree completely with the Shakespeare point.
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.
> in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
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.
There is no correct way to read Shakespeare. There are many wrong ways, but don't let your friend's interpretation cloud you from the others. It is really magic when you see some other interpretation and understand both are right despite not being compatible.
But then, Shakespeare was popular entertainment. It's only difficult today because the language is now archaic. The material in itself is neither difficult nor long.
Dickens was both paid by the word and serialized in newspapers, which is why his books run so long. Long, but not difficult.
It's okay, but it would be a whole lot better without the constant laughter over things that aren't even funny. Makes it really hard to follow what's actually going on. I mean, I understand a laughter when someone says/does something funny and there are funny parts in there, but there's just constant laughing at places where there's nothing funny happening. That is just rude to people trying to follow the story.
I hate to be that curmudgeon but sometimes i have to be
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
The aspiring song analyst might think it's about the singer being asked by a cop (wearing sunglasses) asking about him abusing his girlfriend, or whatever, but Nate Ruess is on record saying it's just about being hung over, and no more deep than that.
Projecting meaning where there is none, or where the meaning is clear, is simply not valid even for Shakespeare.
I felt the same way. I think we were on Hamlet, and reading it alone just felt so confusing and lifeless. I couldn't tell when characters were upset, sarcastic, ecstatic, etc. It drained it of all character.
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!
Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit.
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.
The teacher makes a huge difference. My kids teacher somehow made The Odyssey a page turner for them and when the movie came out they were able to critique and delta the way the movie and book portrayed Odysseus. I was pretty impressed, because like the parent, The Odyssey and Shakespeare was a form of torture when I was in school.
I guess I can't lump every English teacher into the same bucket, but in my experience, they aren't particularly skilled at explaining the context behind a lot of the stuff being taught.
I would agree wrt my High School teachers. They were basically competent, but not particularly good.
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.
Frankly, Shakespeare is one of the few things I enjoyed reading in school. It was classic American novels I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t tell you why, but getting through something even as simple as Tom Sawyer was such a chore for me.
Twain can be tedious because he’s a humorist and we’ve heard those jokes a million times by now. Also he writes speech in dialect which now means nothing to us and makes him harder to read. I find him easier to read as an adult but he can still be a slog.
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.
Another really good and interesting film adaptation of Shakespeare is "Scotland, PA" - Macbeth, set against the backdrop of a 1970s fast food restaurant featuring a soundtrack that consists entirely of Bad Company songs (apparently the library was shockingly inexpensive?) and Christopher Walken as an inspired Detective Macduff.
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.
> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such?
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?
It still feels academic though. Suppose your response to that is, "Well, suck it up, its formalized".
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.
There are books that I read every decade or so, and there is always new insight. Sometimes I will identify with an older character and see the entire story through their eyes.
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.
Several of our English and History classes were paired on purpose for just this reason. We'd be reading Dickens while study that era, or Catch-22 when studying WWII and the immediate post-War era, etc.
That said, I'm also frequently amazed at the stuff some people didn't learn that I clearly remember being covered in school...
This was my thought as well. They were teaching us not to just read the words for their face value, to imagine the time and place the events occurred within.
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.
I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise.
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.
Gatsby is one of those books I hated in high school. A few years ago I read it again and confirmed it’s a terrible book filled with shallow characters living boring lives doing nothing of interest to me.
My opinion of 1984 also dropped when I reread it. Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Chrysalids, and Lost Horizon are all books I liked more when I reread them as an adult.
English teachers aren't really there to provide you books you'll "like" or else they'd just be assigning the latest teen melodrama. They're instructing you on the different ways the English language has been used throughout its history and give you practice in analyzing it.
The Great Gatsby has themes about the American Dream, wealth, social class, love, ambition, and the gap between appearance and reality. Symbolism is easily teachable in the book, as well. And it's short, with relatively simple language and simple characters, which makes it a practical book for students.
Vapid characters aren’t a problem if they are doing something interesting or if there is non-trivial conflict or mystery or confusion or tension or drama of any sort or anything that leads to some kind of meaningful change in a character. Gatsby's death might have counted if Fitzgerald hadn't telegraphed it from so far away that it became a non-event.
You know how kids’ books for beginning readers are mostly about stringing together words that are easy to read and make a sensible sentence? See Jane run. Run, Jane, run! why is Jane running? Because she wants to. That’s how Gatsby read to me with more complex words and sentences.
I don’t even mind books where nothing much happens (Iyashikei) if the setting is novel. But Gatsby was predictable and dull for me with cardboard characters living passive lives.
The other book that lots of people seem to love that I've never been able to finish is Moby Dick. I don't dislike it but he pace is a bit slow for me.
The real value isn't in getting it at the time, it's having those seeds planted, among a population who will likely read very little after graduation, to find fertile ground later.
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.
It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.
I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
At their young age, it typically takes children the ritual of performing arithmetic algorithms at least several dozens of times if not a hundred times to get them to understand and internalize the algorithm itself. You can't actually teach the algorithm itself because they haven't studied basic algebra yet, so the only approximation is using the algorithm on multiple numbers. Then afterwards just give them a calculator.
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.
Absolutely not. Properly designed problems involve numbers that simulate the real world (Benford’s law). Specifically choosing numbers that are easier to compute mentally or by hand would lead students to doubt themselves whenever they encounter something difficult to compute, so you can consider that either cheating or giving them undue psychological stress.
> but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
Except it does not. Or, maybe some kids do build up lifetime hatred of math due to arithmetic. But it is not what happened with my kids, their friends, me myself back then or my friends.
The thing that pushes people to dislike math is when abstract concepts are taught too soon, before the brain develops the abstract thinking. Or too fast, or in a bad way.
But where I have seen dislike of math. it was not arithmetic part of it. It was seemingly magic incomprehensible concepts later on.
I'm saying young children shouldn't be led to believe that that's what math is. People should probably learn how to do basic operations, but it should have much, much less emphasis than it does now, and it would be much more useful to teach intuitions regarding how to stop when you've made an error, how to estimate, which operations useful when, etc. As an example of what I mean, my mom is an accountant and I've caught her on at least one occasion multiplying a monthly interest rate by 12. That's an OK method to estimate, but it's pointless when you're doing it on a calculator anyway.
> 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.
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.
I really liked my teachers, and have always thought of them as good teachers, however it's also very clear to me as an adult that they didn't teach literature or art. We where taught to read and write, but not have an appreciation of the language, nor to see text as anything but text. I did have teachers that briefly touched on the subject of interpreting a text, I still view that subject as mostly bullshit as you can basically read anything you want into a text, e.g. a lot of works can be read as a struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, without it being remotely the intention.
Also not all books are great works of art, created to teach you about the world, humanity or life in general, most are just entertainment. The problem, in my mind, is that teachers feel like they need to pick out classics, and "great works of art" most of which aren't written for children or even teenagers. A great number of people have had their potential joy of reading and art stomped out of them, by not introducing them to works relevant for their age and life situation. Doing so might however mean picking 20 or more different books for a single class.
In my case Danish and history was two different subjects and rarely did they cross paths. Just as an example of how terrible history lessons can be, the general summary of my schools teaching of WW2: A time of rationing, blackout curtains and bunkers. Oh and the Germans where there, they appeared to enjoy their stay.
But you did read and maybe watch the movie of Det Forsømte Forår.
Interestingly we had a couple of much more recent books about young people in my school.
But again, how would you know even about your own country without quite a lot of context? I just never thought I could place things until I was quite old.
I think the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now applies, life is a conversation with experience.. you are not the same person you were in your teens, in your twenties.. and once you go through life some more life you perspectives shift even more drastically. Doesn't mean younger perspectives are useless.. you were more engaged with the world when you younger and more innocent.. you really can't get back to that
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.
This. I am late bloomer in humanity subjects. I was a typical stem students that didn't really understand any of those classes.
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
Context is everything for art and literature! It's not to say they can't be enjoyed out of context, but a lot can be lost without it, especially for a teenager.
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!
I second this. As a teenager, you don't have the life experience to appreciate most classic literature. I don't even think you have it in college, although this is less true.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
But fiction is the best way to learn about those past times.
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?
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.
The best class I had in high school was American Dream: a mixture of literature and history/social studies. You'd learn about a time and then read a book for that time, like Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle or All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a double period, had two dynamic teachers (one old hippie and one young fun guy), and most of the grades were from papers about how the book and history related. More schools should have something like that.
School is about wide exposure to concepts that wouldn’t be encountered elsewhere. The goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think. The actual subject matter is irrelevant.
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”.
100% agree. The best literature class I ever had was in college. In class our professor spent very little time discussing the book and spent most of the time discussing the author's life and historical context. I understood those books way more than I had ever understood classical literature before.
Depends on your teachers and your school. I've been lucky to have really good teachers despite attending public schools from K-12 (except Spanish - my Spanish teachers sucked. Turns out being fluent Spanish first speakers doesn't make someone a good teacher).
This is a message that should be conveyed to kids. It's one that I didn't get. I wore blinders and prejudged that basically all the humanities was a waste of time. The guidance counselor would sign me up for history classes and I literally didn't even show up beyond the first day when I told the teacher that I have better things to do. I regret doing that.
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.
> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
I remember when I was a senior in (public) high school they created a two period class for one of the earlier grades that was a combined history and literature class, with one history teacher and one english teacher co-teaching it. The idea was that you'd learn the historical context and then in the same class also be reading the literature that came out of the period. Seemed like a great idea and I wonder what ever came of it.
Wow. So I'm a college instructor (in IT) and you're nailing what I'm trying to defeat to the best of my ability. I do an intro class, and I think most everyone around me believes that my job is to "go over the technologies that are important to students."
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.
I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced.
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.
One might consider this an argument for an integrated curriculum. Teach Les Misérables during a unit on the French revolution. Teach Huckleberry Finn or Roots when discussing the history of slavery in the US. Teach The Great Gatsby as part of a unit on the roaring 20s and Prohibition or alternately on the second world war.
It’s not only the historical context is missing but you yourself haven’t experienced life to be interested in the topic. If you haven’t had a child or a marriage, or even a friend who had one. Why would you understand that relationship. How can you possibly think about government structures when you’ve never led anything.
There is no vampire in all of literature able to suck blood from victims as well as high school English classes are able to suck all the joy from reading.
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.
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.
It's this, and also a lot of required readings were just girl books even in hindsight. I wasn't part of the intended audience. It's like if some day Twilight becomes an American classic.
I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.
> 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.
Play "Fuck Tha Police" for someone.
Usually, they are shocked that someone would listen to a song with so many swear words and clearly so disrespectful to an institution most have been brought up to respect. The sheer anger in it...
And then you put it in context. The societal mores of the time, the specific events, how this album landed and why it resonated.
Just look at the lyrics and count swear words? It means nothing.
> 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.
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.
Something I learned recently and which this article sort of hints at - look at the three drafts of Under The Wave Off Kanagawa. The composition is different, but also the colours are much more muted. In the first draft, the only colours highlighted are the people in the corner; in the second, the cliffs. The third draft finally colours the wave, but it's a sedate grey-blue. It's not until the fourth draft that everybody recognizes that we get this brilliant dark blue wave rising up over the the boat, dwarfing the mountain in the background.
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.
If you enjoyed this you will probably enjoy Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag[0]. Great piece that discusses why and how art moves us and pushes back a bit against the idea that is presented in this post that real art is art you can ask questions about and get answers from. I think most people including the author can recognize impactful art is more than just being able to get your 'why' questions answered (some might claim modern art is about challenging these assumptions), but it is even more difficult to talk about that concept without sounding extremely snobby, and Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
> Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
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.
I like hamburgers and beer and that is what I end up telling people but of course I tried to engage people and no one appreciated any higher level of depth besides burgers and beers.
I am going to scream inside my soul when I see a flat deadpan useless story telling like if someone hangs a gun over the fireplace, writes two paragraphs about it and then ... it never fires.
Of course never firing might be the point of the story, but it never is.
There are also ways to enjoy hamburgers and beers, not everything has to be elaborate and a lot of things being plain simple is celebration of life as it is. Can you enjoy your burger and beer? Then leaving room for being surprised by the cook who really took time to make something of the burger or just this twist in a beer that well is not an eye opening moment, but goes into your head and makes you think a little.
I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers.
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.
I think this is one of the more important points in this thread.
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.
This is tough, because as this newsletter gets at - sometimes things will simply smack you in the face. The only way to get that underlying experience is through experiencing more.
My two favorite books I read in high school were "The Crucible", and "The Sun Also Rises". Neither had an ounce of relatability to my life, I had no prior experience that should let me connect with a disillusioned generation of WWI vets or puritans scared of the woods. But I did have a phenomenal AP Lit teacher that conveyed the context enough for me to have a starting point and then get lost in the characters and environments and let the quality of the work carry it from there.
I found Gatsby less appealing, but at least two of my friends fell in love with it that year.
No book is going to do it for everyone, especially in a class like that where the point is working your way through cultural history.
I think you nail it with the range of teachers being the crux. There's just so much riding on whether or not you really connect with a teacher's way of conveying excitement or not.
I’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity. It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same?
Good writing isn't complex for complexity's sake though. Mistaking complexity for quality is the most common mistake when it comes to writing — and I allege one central reason why many people like and trust LLM output.
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
I suppose with an experience I'm taking value as a synonym for enjoyment level, I'm not sure what else it means in that context.
I guess you can enjoy something to the detriment of your focus on other things and then to your overall wellbeing. But idunno if someone being really into analyzing fancy coffee or something counts.
The simpler pleasures and pains of life are easier to speak to and we have a lot more (proportionally) media that reflects those experiences. Particular media does it better and worse and so there's a hierarchy, but if you are looking to have your enjoyment of good food and drink reflected in a story that's pretty easy to find.
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."
To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!
I'm always suspicious we read far too much into most works, as if they were all live examples of The DaVinci Code. It feels inevitable that one day, centuries from now, someone will "realize" that JK Rowling embedded a map of hyperspace into her phonemes or that Banksy was actually issuing incisive commentary on the contrast between ancient Sumerian government and veganism all along.
I get your idea but I wonder about the construction of this argument:
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.
Do you not think those teachers all failed Lockhart's Lament?
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.
It's a sales problem. "Why should I care about this in the first place?" It doesn't necessarily have to be for something, but if you can't communicate any value, then... yeah... the results speak for themselves.
One of my favorite thing about getting older is finally learning answers to questions I was asking high school teachers. (e.g. applications in math class... though to be fair, I had the same problem in undergrad too!)
Most such things I ever grew to appreciate, happened from some sort of example case that doinged me on the head, and then I recognized how the principle applied elsewhere. Then the understanding of the principle itself was just part of my understanding of life and the world after that.
It would seem that the job of a teacher is to understand this themselves, having once been a child themselves or at least having had experience with kids in their own training even if they themselves were a different kind of kid, and to actively construct scenarios that teach concepts to kids who are not already aware of them or believe when things are simply stated at them.
Simply telling a kid something is approximately useless. If you want them to understand it, you have to understand them, and arrange for them to walk through some process where they end up arriving at the understanding "on their own".
I'm sure it's not easy but my own job is not easy either, but that just means it's a job that has to be done and doesn't just do itself, not that it's not doable.
How conditioned am I? I thought the title was a play on "em dashes" and when I got into the second paragraph and saw em dashes I immediately flipped to assuming I was reading a story from some never-lived life manifest by a diffusion model. I don't think it is. But that is irrelevant. The point is if our content cannot avoid or ultimately pass the sniff test it won't have the impact we hope.
I think you're over conditioned, I think this should have easily passed the sniff test. I'm not sure how to elaborate on this exactly, I'm just very surprised that you got a false alarm.
Well, it's actually an essay against the thinness of AI slop.
> 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.
> The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
No, the very first meeting with the Emergents, where ... I forget the character's name (Trixia?), but she's a linguist and she figures out that there's something odd about the painting-carvings in the Emergent habitat. She can't put her finger on it until she spends more time studying their language, and figures out that they... well, we're getting into spoiler territory, so rot13: Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq.
Well that's a new experience, I naively googled for "Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq" and gemini responded to the text without rot13ing it, so I had no idea why it was telling me what it told me, I had to decode it to make sense of it's answer
He’s a great writer. I subscribe to his podcast which is just him reading his essay/blog post (in one take!) every time he publishes. I don’t think any of them have been uninteresting to me.
I really enjoyed reading this and I've been thinking along similar lines when I imagine viable careers of the future. No one will care if code is "thick" but why would anyone buy a novel written by AI? What does the reader get out of it? It seems like the humanities might be the most stable career path available.
Haha and suddenly we'll have the pivot where all the software engineers try their hand at being writers. I can already see glimpses of it here wirh articles like this.
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.
i’m working on a little ios widget display currently. even a tiny little one view box has hundreds of nuanced design and structure decisions behind it.
That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.
I only disagree with looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Rhyming is another way to demonstrate effort, a thing that the author claims is thick. Not to say I dislike all non-rhyming poems, but it is just less impressive to capture an idea or feeling without rhyming, than it is with.
One of the signs of a declining band is the discarding of rhyming. This is usually accompanied by uninspired lyrics. The result is often something only for the die-hards to enjoy.
To be fair I didn't understand the author's statements as looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Regardless, I think, and hopefully we could both agree, that we shouldn't look down on people for any reason. Humans have inherit value and worth that does not depend on laws, leaders or their views on any topic.
I will say, I am always impressed, if some time has gone by and I pick up some Chaucer, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare again. Interestingly, now that I am reflecting on it, one of the most impressive and dense, at least to me, is Milton, who writes in blank verse in Paradise Lost, which itself provides a counterpoint to the notion that non-rhyming poems are less impressive.
I think I still agree with you though that ceteris paribus, Paradise Lost with rhyme would be even more impressive, though I do wonder if it would have the same impact.
But when I see something incomprehensible, is it thick, or is it just stupid?
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?
When I read something and don't understand it, is it because the author is financially incentivized to make it sound more impressive than it is, or because they're unable or unwilling to communicate clearly, or both? Sometimes!
Often things are genuinely hard, and take a lot of time to get into. (You can read the same paper repeatedly for weeks!) Sometimes, it takes about 5-10 minutes, and it finally clicks, and I go "why the hell didn't they just say it like that?"
> 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. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
Doesn't particularly sound like their English teachers are owed an apology.
The thing about treasure is that you often have to find it for yourself, it can be hard to find, butt when you do find it you get some legendary booty.
The thickness of some caves in terms of genuine girth is truly something to marvel at.
I also feel like I was let down by my English teachers. Even in high school I would complain that they would suck all the enjoyment out of a reading a book. Every book felt like a chore and I was an avid reader, a get-in-trouble-because-I-stayed-up-too-late-reading kid. I was the "reading at an N+1/N+2/N+3 grade" student, but I hated English/reading classes with a passion.
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.
I really like this, in the world burning, slaughter of the young all around and the economy unbalanced and tettering on the brink...
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.
Yes! I'll have to write a response to this article... an ode to crap art!
A while back I started consciously making low effort art. It was part of a exercise where I was intentionally desensitizing myself to shame, embarrassment and fear of judgment, because I noticed them severely holding me back in life.
So I thought, I am going to make something crap, that people will judge me for, and I am going to share it with them.
I wrote about gay werewolves.
A lot of people responded quite poorly (overall even worse than expected!), but a few were inspired to write their own short stories, and share them with me, and this was the most satisfying feeling in the world!
When you make something crap, and put it out there, you make others feel comfortable sharing their own crap with you.
This was very good to read. I would like to add "form/structure" to attributes of "thick"ness. It is possible for good art to adhere strictly to a form and yet be universal and transcend the confines imposed by form. E.g. meters in poems. When I write a poem, the imposed constraints make me weigh and choose from multiple words in a way that free-verse doesn't. Now whether that makes for better reading or not is something a reader should say :)
"I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!
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.
This is the best expression of why i love Stone Roses but hate Coldplay.
Coldplay is sublime, perfect pop music. The Roses were kids with a four-track trying to create sublime, perfect pop music and falling short, but you can complete the journey on foot.
One reason we see so much thinning in the current media(books, films, music etc.) is that old western/European media is considered tainted by history, so you need to reinvent or change it sufficiently to be different.
By rejecting postmodernism and even the Enlightenment (due to the overwhelming reactionary messaging) most people have unilaterally disarmed themselves, or so I hypothesize. It's hard to talk about these things in any specific, evidence-based way, but here is the idea:
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.
I wonder whether people who use open source software in the way I do are merely providing the egg (in the context of tfa). Most people, that I know, rarely modify the code in any way and merely build and use. Do not even read it most times. But, it somehow conveys a sense of _doing_ something that the mere install of a binary does not.
I remember hearing once that a core element of collegiate humanities education involves teaching that a great work can only be understood and appreciated when the reader first understands the work's context. Only then should the reader attempt to summit the great work.
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 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.
> 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.
No the author wouldn't have.
He wasn't ready yet as a teenager to understand what he understands now.
About the benches: seems like an oxymoron. New Yorkers love busy places! Of course; they live in New York. Plenty of people on the benches in my midwest city park. Because we by and large are uncomfortable with crowds and noise. Why we don't live in New York.
Engaging article to read. I very much like the "the shape of a thing" bit:
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.
But read the whole article, it's worth it.
Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities?
A Chinese example of this for me is Jin Yong, probably the most influential wuxia (Chinese martial-arts fiction) novelist in the Chinese-speaking world. His books are popular fiction in the most literal sense: enormously entertaining, widely read, and for many people first encountered simply as page turners.
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.
As they say, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I think thick works though are not necessarily works with a lot of detail, but works where when you revisit them, you get something more from them. This does not have to be a detail, but more subtle, as if coming to contact with it the first time changed you as a person, and allowed you to see it with different eyes the second time.
> The Betty Crocker Corporation could put just egg powder into their cake mix, but they don’t, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they’re baking.
Those who use ChatGPT for research should be advised that it will add `?utm_source=chatgpt.com` to the URLs it provides you. Make sure to edit that away if you don't want people to know. And also, you know, make sure you verify the source.
Free admission changes how you experience a museum. No pressure to justify the ticket means you actually let things surprise you instead of checking off famous works.
There's a lot of great things about this piece, but I'm kind of stuck on the "Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music". Listened to it a bunch of times now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U
The test of whether a work keeps unfolding under sustained attention is much better than asking whether it produces a strong reaction in the first five seconds
There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.
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.
> I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young.
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.
> 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?
I contend people will be willing, even eager, to pay a premium for content provably produced by humans.
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).
It was such a joy to read something clearly written by a human, for humans, by someone who takes pride and spends effort in their writing.
Reading this article felt like a breath of fresh air, like a vice had been released from my head. Not just the broader point about our increasingly slop-filled world resonated with me, but the writing itself felt like it just flows effortlessly.
I guess I’ve been suffering for too long, pouring over claude code jargon-filled responses and going in circles trying to understand its convoluted sentence construction and terminology.
I think I’m burnt out on working with agents all day long…
Agreed. The AI news cycle is constant and promises the eventual end to human usefulness. I feel like one day we'll be but pets to the machines (like those in Iain M. Banks' culture novels), but real life won't be a communist utopia like his novels.
This piece is great. And it’s totally true that we’re surrounded by walls of slop. I stop reading things all the time when I notice the tinge of AI.
That said, I don’t think that just because this is the way things are, this is this is the way things have to be. Even with our interactions with AI. And I have hope.
Ted Chiang had a great piece in the New Yorker years ago called “Why AI isn’t going to make Art”[1] where he describes something similar. There are 10,000 choices to make in every good pieces of art. AI makes the average choice for every decision and the average choice is derivative and uninteresting. There in I think lies both the problem and the solution. Rather than autocompleting our work, we’d all be so lucky to have a captivated and motivated reader who asks all of the questions this author suggests, so we can get better and better at asking them ourselves and making great art.
If it were just a problem of making too average choices, it could be fixed by sampling at a higher temperature. But I think there's a bigger problem in that the correct choices depend on the context in a complicated way, and LLMs can't handle arbitrary deep dependency chains, so by default you get the average choice based on superficial cues instead of the average choice based on careful planning. Which is why for coding, chain-of-thought and tool calls are necessary to make the implicit explicit.
Making artistic choices explicit and subjecting them to a planning process with iterative refinement would probably already improve quality a lot (consider image generation models using a prompt rewriting to create more varied and detailed outputs) but to get the most out of it, you'd likely need a model specifically trained for that process. And considering that coding is much more lucrative, it might take a while before we get there.
> 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.
> Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.
> 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.
> I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains.
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.
Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness? Is it because it looks like the meme word 'thicc'?
> 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.
I think I like the term "thickness" over "depth" here because thickness implies a sort of solidity, an ability to stand up to being held and examined, turned over and and handled. Depth can feel unapproachable (the ocean is pretty deep and it is famously challenging to explore) while something which has thickness intuitively feels like you can walk right up to it and try to learn something.
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.
I imagine the word thickness represents the great number of (metaphorical) layers of a painting, since paintings are the reoccurring symbol to talk about art in this essay.
I don't think the author is claiming you HAVE to be a dick about it. But that the pursuit of "thickness" does in reality give ammunition to a lot of people who are inevitably dicks about it seems observably true to me.
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.
I think it's made obvious that "thick" can mean many different things. Personally, I've never heard "thick" to mean "dimwitted" or it ever used as such.
Although it can be annoying to step into someone else's situational language/definitions/grammar, it can be a good rhetorical trick to shed the preexisting cultural context of a preexisting term such as depth.
"Thick" already has a meaning of "dimwitted" so it's a particularly strange choice of word in this context. Is this something this new use of "thick" as a synonym for "deep" something this author is trying to coin, or is this already an established meaning among younger generations?
So many things we spend our time on in school never have the basics explained. Why am I reading Shakespeare? Why am I writing an essay? Why am I learning algebra?
By the time I realized writing is the process by which you organize your thoughts (not just record them) I was a few years out of school. I started appreciating Shakespeare after watching Throne of Blood at 21. I generally enjoyed learning math, but it was not impressed upon me that the mental machinery you build to solve algebra can be used for soooo many things.
I was lucky to go to an excellent public school. My teachers were generally pretty good and cared. And yet they didn't manage to embed these basic facts in my head. I worry they were too busy making sure I could pass a test and didn't spend time making sure I'd got the most important lessons out of the subject.
Fantastic writing. I didn't want it to end. It's the warmest and loveliest defence of its core idea that I've ever come across, and likely ever will. The humour in particular -- it's disarming, pitch-perfect in making a case that (ETA: in lesser hands would be) beset on all sides by self-seriousness.
And yet... I'm not persuaded. I think its stance is completely understandable, and plausible, and wrong. Not about everything -- I agree 100% that thickening an idea (great metaphor!) makes it more valuable to others, and that the work involved in the thickening process itself is valuable to the artist. But I think this piece is wrong about what I take to be its core idea: That art has inherent objective value about which we all ought to agree. In the words of the author: That a particular cave has treasure or not, independently of the explorer.
I say instead that it is enough to treat art the same way as we treat modern human relationships: If two people have a bad relationship, it doesn't have to be that one (or both) of them is a bad person. It can simply be that those two people are not a good match for each other. The explanation can be a predicate on two people rather than on one. Similarly, there doesn't have to be a total order on the set of pieces of art -- or even a partial order. I believe that the only reasons to think that there should be are ultimately rooted in either ego ("I feel smart/cultured/a sense of mastery by liking the 'right' things") or tribal belonging ("I feel a comforting sense of inclusion by liking the 'right' things").
This "purely subjective value" idea has always been a deeply unpopular view for "cultured" people to hold, and nowadays that's also true of the general public in regard to AI-generated works. It is called philistinism, and a person who holds it is properly called a philistine. As jarring as the label is, I would encourage anyone exploring this idea not to stop thinking there -- but to keep going, and consider the implications of both it and its opposite. Perhaps, like with the similarly jarring term "Luddite", people will take another look and decide that it is not something to be written off immediately.
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:
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.
This comment is just truly bleak and I hope you find something artistic that you can enjoy the depth of.
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.
If you think my comment is bleak you should read Jane Eyre. Then come back to my comment if you’d like to get cheered up. It is truly a miserable book.
I thought so too at first. Then I realized it was a comment on machine slop being thin, while artist produced dough with more substance. Or perhaps just more air, as if whipping in real eggs rather than just adding water to the readymade cake mix.
Complexity should be relative to the material covered.
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.
It's always funny to me how often comments like yours show up, despite a long history on here of diverse thoughts and intellectual curiosities, technological or otherwise.
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.
You say you felt like the article wasn't well-written (which I disagree with, btw, it was clear and with many nice turns of phrase), but your comment complained about it not being very hackery or newsy. Maybe your comment was thick cause we were supposed to figure out what you actually mean.
Hacker news comments aren't private, and they shouldn't be private. I find it interesting that you think your own public soapbox declarations should not be discoverable.
As you delve further into the article, and (ironically, based on the topic) consider the ideas presented, it becomes more clear. Or skip to near the end to see.
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 that's not the author's point; he's mostly talking that time solidifies ideas as shown by the evolution of points of view. At the same time, his picture of the wave shows that over time the painting feels more distilled and simplified. So is his point actually that simple ideas persist and are appealing? It isn't clear? That an art improves?
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.
In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great".
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!
Your point of view seems to imply that the author's skill and intent don't matter, which I can't agree with. The reason that a reader's effort gets more out of a great work is because the author put it there, not because it exists as a function of the work in itself.
I'm sure this aesthetic relativism holds up under argument, but this is an 'anti realization' that:
-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.?)
One of them has existed for more than 100 years. One of them has been granted credibility by a small number of academics before becoming a safe conservative choice for subsequent ones.
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
On the first point, explanation is inherently subjective. It reduces explanatory power purely because you're forced to acknowledge it was never universally appropriate, which tracks. The variety of explanation you're referring to in this context is one that I always found to be unsatisfactory. It's inherently stripping context (IE every component of what makes something the right place, the right time) out of the equation, which makes comparative analysis absurd.
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?
I don’t think that’s true. True masters will create works that enable additional interpretations, perhaps beyond or even contradictory to those intended by the original authors. I doubt 50 Shades of Grey enables such a multitude of additional interpretations.
I strongly disagree. Sure, I can say story X is about Y, for any arbitrary Y.
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.
That verse is thick. There are breadcrumbs all over the place, trails leading to things that the author did not say. And yet he did say them, through the breadcrumbs.
The anecdote about the garden of earthly delights is going to be relatable even for art students. I've met art teachers that ended up "trapped" in Madrid by the Prado Museum: A green, American future Ph.D student that was heading to Greece to specialize in old greek art. But instead of flying straight there, they stopped at Madrid to see the Prado, and were never able to leave. Changed their direction immediately, and ended up teaching in Madrid, and retiring there, because one of the countless masterpieces in there stole their life plans away.
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.
Totally. The right way to approach an art gallery is definitely just to walk round until something hits you.
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’.
Possibly the best thing about Washington D.C. is that the National Gallery of Art (along with, I think, all the Smithsonian) is free. This means you just take a casual stroll through without any of the pressure of having spent a sizable sum like you might to visit a place like the Art Institute in Chicago. In Chicago a visit is an event, you need to see the Seurat, the Grant Wood, etc. You've spent money and you need make it count.
In D.C. you can literally walk in, go look at the big Joan Mitchell for 10 minutes and continue on your day. Or you can wander through a room you've never been interested in and find something and then go to lunch. Without the commitment to get everything done, you are suddenly free.
Good libraries (edit: even mediocre libraries) also have this quality.
For those of us on the other side of the ditch: all museums in London are free. and I would echo the sentiment that it makes exploration of them less of a completionist activity to "get your monies worth" and more of an enjoyable forey into a rich space.
Its literally a paradigm shift.
Also almost all commercial art galleries are like this, obvs for other reasons. The gallery district (google art galleries then wander those streets, chelsea is the most established) in NYC is an amazing place to spend a day wandering around seeing amazing art. my uncle who teaches art introduced me to it and i try to spread the word.
Free art for any reason is amazing.
Many museums have a membership. For one price you can visit the museum any time you want. I strongly recommend everyone do this for all their local museums. It changes the experience when you don't feel bad about wasting the admission because you only have an hour. Particularly small local museums where spending all day isn't worth it, but if you have to pay admission you feel compelled to spend all day to get your money's worth.
Some of them also include reduced price admission to others of the same time. My local zoo isn't very big, but the membership means half price admission to a very good zoo just a couple hours away. My local science museum got me free admission to many other science museums and children's museums. My local historic farm got me into a lot of interesting historical sites. Be sure to understand what you get and take advantage of it on vacations.
I strongly recommend you get the version that lets you bring two guests. When my parents or some other friend from out of town comes to visit we have something interesting to show them (and if they are not having fun we can leave early).
I lived in DC for a couple of years and I felt exactly the same. I try and carry that same mentality to all museums now, paid or unpaid. No research, no expectations, wander around and let yourself be surprised, leave when you’re bored. It’s a lot of fun.
Although it is hard to do when you’ve paid 50 bucks for a ticket and you know there is “just one more” ultra-famous piece on the other side of the museum and when will I really be back in (Amsterdam, Paris, etc)?
^^ this. I was never an art person and then one day I felt like I was just punched in the face when it hit me. It's not like "I like this, it's interesting", it's like "Oh. That."
the punched in the face expression is strange here. I get it but I also presume that you have never been punched in the face much like you never connected (that's the word you are looking for, also a boxing term) with art.
I presume you think having been punched in the face makes you special. I have too. It doesn't.
You should also go apologize to your English teacher.
Perhaps more teachers should punch students in the face.
I wish I could do this. In general, in museums I always feel compelled to go through all the exhibits my time allows, when clearly some of them capture my attention and others are just filler. But I would feel guilty "wasting" my time with the piece that caught my attention.
This is where a membership to the local museum comes in handy. Then there's no pressure to see all the exhibits because you could always come back next week.
I have the same feeling always, so for my upcoming trip to Amsterdam and a visit to the Rijksmuseum I vibed https://rijksmuseum.matze.lol to concentrate on something I _want_ to see.
The Rijksmuseum has a very nice shop too. It's a great place to wander and discover and you can browse it without paying museum admission.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/visit/practical-info/shop
But let’s not pretend that the plastic and painterly arts are so much more self-evidently “thick” than literature is. Despite their immediacy, these arts have their own conventions, motifs, and demands that must be understood to “find the treasure in the dark cave.”
I have tried to convince someone I know that an art museum merits more than a one-minute-per-painting, four minutes-max-per-room, pretty/not-pretty approach. She still does not understand why I linger over books or works of art, and I have not the wherewithal to lead her through the techniques, the conventions, or the history that makes this worthwhile for me.
I was in Prado and it felt overwhelming to me. Like trying to eat an entire cake. I think it must be taken in in measured doses.
Goya's museum in Zaragoza was the one I could take in during one visit.
I had the exact same experience as the author with The Garden of Earthly Delights. I went to Madrid on a whim and went to the Prado without really expecting much, tbh (I’m a philistine). But I stopped in front of this painting, which I don’t recall having heard of, and I couldn’t leave. I stood there for a long time.
Saturn Devouring His Son was similar. Haunting. I still think about that painting often, many years later.
> The very best paintings in the world, in person, can stop people cold.
I will always remember literally stopping mid stride to just stare at a Francis Bacon I'd seen in the corner of my eye in the Tate modern. Slightly later same day I am just staring at Monet lillies bewildered.
I gotta be honest, any time I go back I am disappointed because the same surprise and wonder have simple not been present. Idk
I know almost nothing about music; can’t play a bit.
I can still distinctly remember the first time I heard Rachmaninoff performed in person — and the shock at the “brutal genius” of the art.
I think sometimes art just speaks to you.
I had this incident with the Miraikan in Tokyo. I visited it in the summer of 2017 and just seeing the fascinating future I knew I had to be a part of it. The week after I got home I decided to apply late to University to finally take that step. A PhD and lots of research later and I'm finally getting papers accepted that are planning the future I want to see.
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> Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?
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.)
> Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade?
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.
That's part of why I like the fuzziness. And why it's a really great system looking back retrospectively. I don't keep a reading journal, but if I glance over physical books in my house or reading history on my ereader, rankings of past things read get really clear really fast.
As you said it can be kind of surprising!
I agree with your sentiment about ranking -- the gamification of art is pointless -- but I'd go even further: often you won't agree with yourself from the past about a book or movie! Sometimes you just need to be in the mood for a work you previously considered average to really hit you. Other times you revisit music that felt really powerful in your youth, but hearing it again only evokes a mild nostalgia and a feeling of "why did I ever like this?".
THANK YOU! This is why I hate security questions that ask for my “favorite” whatever. That’s going to change! My favorite movie, or supervillain or whatever is going to change - hopefully - within a couple years if good artists are out there making good art. So why the hell would I answer that question the same 5 years from now as I would today?!
The best answer to security question is unrelated to question. My favorite book would be name of my dog for example
Robin Hobb (a very successful fantasy author) rates books on Goodreads. To her, anything over one star is a good rating. Even two stars means she liked it.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/25307.Robin_Hobb
Oh, that's great! I'm going to have to remember that!
I am always hit hard by the paradox of choice, it is very hard for me to just rank something, But it is easy to compare two items. Considering the metaphysics of this a little too hard I put together this silly little web toy to explorer my ideas on ranking things. https://compare.outband.net/compare/app/compare.html
It still sort of sucks and you can tell I am not a web dev, but it was interesting to think about.
I like my five stars, but I always preface any rating with a description of how I define my ratings: 5: This book changed the way I think. 4: I enjoyed reading this book. It was interesting and engaging. 3: This book is OK. I wouldn't read it again. 2: This book had parts where I wanted to drop it. 1: I couldn't finish the book. It's actively bad.
As always with scales like this, any definition is subjective and scales shouldn't be used without understanding their impact. I'd never apply this scale to an Uber driver. Also, scales shouldn't be used for stack ranking. At least not without defining the heuristics first.
To me, scales are a way to focus my qualitative impressions into something that's not an essay. It's a good starting point for a discussion about the merits of the work. It definitely has its footguns, though.
Just fyi, you can take your time-based rating and fit it the 5-stars system of the club.
> 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?
This is a wonderful thought, I thank you for it
I love it because it put something into words that I was thinking about the last season of the show Succession. All I could say before being armed with this, was something along the lines of it feeling like it was suddenly "all over the place."
This guy's blog is great by the way, I went and subscribed.
I have had similar thoughts about "x of the week/month/year". But every now and then there's a dirge or deluge of good things and years aren't even comparable because the fourth best thing one year might have been the number one in any other year of the decade.
I think a good example for me personally is 2019 in music. And I assume most people reading this list will shake their head at my (in their view) poor taste.
1. Rammstein released their untitled album which to me remains the best they've ever made.
2. Slipknot released "We are not your kind" which I played on repeat for so long. Nero Forte remained my first or second most listened to song for three years in a row.
3. Lars Winnerbäck also released Eldtuppen, causing the one and only time someone else than AC/DC became my most listened to artist for a year
4. While I didn't like the 2019 Korn album "The Nothing", it made me realize I'd missed their 2016 release "The Serenity of Suffering", which remains one of my favorite albums of the last decade.
The nice thing about "ranking" stuff for yourself and not for anyone else is that some years can have three "best of the year" and some can have none. Embrace the fuzziness inherent in the system.
Because, man, some years really were just that good.
> Why this word
Because an AI company made their LLM "roll a dice" that was loaded in a specific way to choose that word, so they could claim ownership of your document later.
:sigh:
I'm not sure if you're just choosing not to engage fully with what I wrote or if you're trying to make some other point, but for what it's worth I do not and did not write any of my comments here with AI.
So that wasn't really a consideration for me.
Really loved this essay, loved the irreverent style. I had a similar literary journey as this guy.
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.
Yes. I really liked and enjoyed reading this post, but was a bit frustrated by the focus on "thickness". Great art is not great just because it has many layers that take some time and effort to discover, like great cooking doesn't need a large number of different ingredients.
Great art, as you say, has something true, profound, and original to tell us about the human experience, and it touches us deeply in a way that not-so-great art doesn't. It "stops you in your tracks" as other comments here mention. It hits you on the head and makes you a different person, at least a little.
And, there's a magic component to it too. Great art is greater, I think, if you can't guess how it could possibly have been made by a mere mortal. That's where trade comes in. Great art is made by great artisans with a touch of genius, but genius alone isn't enough.
I am actually often a bit annoyed at discussions of depth in discussions of art - especially from art snobs talking about whether or not something is "true art".
I think what depth does do is help something stand not the test of time but deep continuous analysis. It really heightens the experience when you're a fan and can dive deeply into something for years and still discover subtleties you somehow missed that elevate it even further.
But if something catches your attention immediately granting you a sense of wonder and appreciation which lingers... Well, that is valuable art. Perhaps that's another kind of mastery, managing to convey your ideas so effectively that it doesn't need deeper analysis to digest?
Yes. After thinking about it a little more, I think my critique of thickness would be that the tail is wagging the dog a little bit here. Great art is sometimes 'thick' - it has nuance, layers, depth - because the human soul is sometimes 'thick'.
There's an interesting part of this that's mentioned in the comments that the original author states:
> 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
Feedback is a gnarly problem because a lot of people assume this means "I, the reviewer, will criticize what I think will improve this work" and "I, the receiver, will receive suggestions to improve my work" but the reviewer and the creative will never have the same idea of what the WIP's ideal state looks like. So the feedback can be actively harmful to the creator. For example, if I'm a Mexican author writing about my abuela, and a feedback is "you should replace all these words with English", that's probably actively harmful to the vision of the work. But also sometimes the creator must be actively open to feedback that "hey, your abuela isn't a person in this story, she's just a female cardboard character" because it's probably a disservice to the vision to have a cardboard character clouded by the creator's nostalgia.
> But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)
That part made me feel seen. I took a handful of literature classes, all to satisfy some requirement. I don't think I ever once generated a genuine appreciation of any of it. Sometimes a resentment (particularly for Shakespeare) but most often just an indifference. Like maybe there's something there, but if so, it must be for other people who are just better at understanding this stuff. It's not for me. I just need to come up with some plausible ideas to get through this class with a passing grade.
The best thing about gaining an appreciation of this aspect of life is it opens up so many extra pleasures. I can spend an entire day at the (free entry!) V&A in London and never be bored. Likewise with a great book (when my 11-year-old isn't around!)
As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time.
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.
Because the book tells you?
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!
Or the narrator does And from the books YOU LEARN WHAT THE SOCIETY WAS LIKE!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.
Oh, such a day, a talk about Ion on HN.
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_.
> I get your point, and the book does say that. It's just... For a teenager, it rarely lands.
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.
I don't see the conflict between the two. I think you can do both. But, yes, the quality of the teachers matters a whole lot. And, sometimes, how well they relate to the kids. Because I can imagine that some people just won't click well together. Thinking back on the poor professors, I kinds of am sorry for all the crap they had to put up with.
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.
You have 20 kids in a classroom. Fifteen of them want to know what's going to be on the state-mandated test. Five, if you're lucky, may have some interest in the subject you're teaching.
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.
You can indeed do both. That's what separates a good teacher from a great teacher.
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.
> in the right frame of mind and, importantly, _interested in it_
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.
Telling you about the great depression in Steinbeck's work is a lot different from living a few years out in the world and struggling to pay rent. Even if that's still a far cry from what actually happened 80-90 years ago. I think those are the key sensations that are missing that made me resonate with a lot more classic literature post-college rather than bumbling through English class in high school.
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.
The book can only tell you from its own reference frame. Time has passed since the book was published, a lot of relevant opinions have come out in the meantime.
A publication also somewhat assumes what the reader knows, because it would take forever to explain things otherwise. With time passing, those assumptions are no longer valid.
> "To my shame I've never read Dickens"
I suggest dropping the shame; you're not missing much. IMHO Dickens is hugely overrated. Paid by the word and it shows.
I have to reply and say that this ain't so, for anyone reading this and thinking of picking Dickens up: it's worth it.
To each his own. I love Dickens, though I haven't read that much.
Dumas was also paid by the word. Still fun to read.
Dickens is full of extremely theatrical scenes. The characters are often a caricature, but the caricature is so finely drawn that it is tremendous fun.
(Nobody should be ashamed for having read or not read some work though, or for having enjoyed or not enjoyed one.)
Go for "Great Expectations", "David Copperfield" and "Bleak House". If they are not great novels, I don't know what are.
"A Christmas Carol" will never be a great novel, but there is a reason it is beloved the world over for what it is.
You're making a good point. I was also of the opinion that these books don't land well, because I'm missing the context. And I'm actually still thinking that about quite a lot of these classics. But what I believe I'm also concluding from your comment, is that these books aren't good hooks to get people, especially teenagers, interested in the context and in the society of the time. And that is where YouTube/TikTok/TV might shine. Or a well written and narrated podcast.
> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture
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.
A lot of people revisit these works later in life and have even further appreciation of them. I think it all validates the goal is to teach learning as a life skill. Learning is never complete. Even things you know, you may not understand until later. It’s all part of the process of learning to learn and emphasizing curiosity and critical thinking. These are the high level objectives of education and inform a lot of the processes that exist.
I’m in my fifties and taking a break from work and have now found myself reading Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, along with Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. My movie watching is now much more auteur and reaching for the unconscious and immaterial experience.
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.
> Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things
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.
The civil war was, in fact, about slavery.
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 _____
My understanding is the Confederacy did not give its states the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery, and did not give its states the freedom to decide whether or not to associate with each other.
It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning.
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.
I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it.
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.
I've had a similar experience, with the same play, but in an absolutely minimalist setting. No sets, the only props were a few chairs, and costumes were the same white slacks and smock worn by all the players.
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>.
I think that is one thing about trying to study Shakespeare in class that can be improved. The class shouldn't just be taking turns saying the lines out loud. But you don't need a full theatrical production either or memorize lines. Read the lines with some light acting out of scenes with just the tables, chairs, and a small bit of imagination could be the class room study impactful.
In retrospect, I think I have to apologize to my English teacher. I thought it was too ambitious having the class put on a Shakespeare play. But it was fun and we apparently learned a lot.
I couldn't find the exact point that I was thinking of (when Hamlet is telling Ophelia that men are basically all just assholes), but I think this modern-day version of Hamlet helps to illustrate your point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdZVR4Ry3jQ
I agree with everything you say, but to offer an alternative (modern) take, from an actor who takes more care with the verse:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1u8OlUS7BhU
I gave up trying to read plays shortly after school. There's no point to me, they are supposed to be performed. I still think it's worth studying some of the more famous ones in school, but any study should absolutely involve actually going to see the play at some point.
You'd probably be in a better place to understand the scripts now, having seen more performances, for whatever that might be worth. That said, I personally don't read scripts, and have not done so since I was last required to in high school.
I commented elsewhere but my schooling had a pattern of: read > analyze/discuss > watch movie > analyze/discuss. Most of the material has film adaptations and this was fairly sufficient in closing the loop during the course.
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)
A couple years after I graduated college, I came across the 1972 movie of Macbeth. The experience was so drastically different from reading it in high school that it seemed like a completely different play. Suddenly, it all made sense now that I had a visual context.
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.
They really need to be produced to be appreciated.
I came to love Shakespeare in High School because I happened to perform it in a Theatre Class. Acting it is totally different from reading it.
> where the performance carries a lot of the meaning
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.
That's why The Taming of The Shrew is recommended for children. The bawdiness s straightforward.
Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever registered as sounding particularly pleasant to me. The word choice, sure, but not the meter or stressing.
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...
Yeah, Shakespeare is not going to land if iambic pentameter doesn't sound like anything special to you. It's a big part of why many Shakespearean quotes stick so hard in people's brains, like 'To be or not to be', 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' and 'If music be the food of love, play on'. If all of these have to carry their weight with only their literal words on the page, and not how they're actually said and stressed, they're going to be a lot less memorable.
Thank you for recognizing the situation I was in! (Nit: "to be or not to be" is probably a bad example of something that depends on iambic for memorability.)
Also, when I tried rewriting that soliloquy for modern ears, it didn't even occur to me to keep the meter; that never registered as a noteworthy aspect of it.
One other thing: keep in mind what it's like to be in high school. For the vast majority of your life, you're told to do things "because I said so". So the idea that there might be an actual good reason for stressing Shakespeare the right way ... didn't stand out as an obvious hypothesis.
I'm curious: does any poetic metre stick out to you as 'nice' or making texts easier to remember? Or is this just some part of the human condition that's completely alien to you? I've heard similar things from some people about music in general ('it's just noise; I don't see why you think it sounds nice'), so it wouldn't really surprise me if that were the case.
Meter does matter to me, and I do enjoy music. Just the every-other-syllable stress with natural stresses in iambic pentameter doesn't resonate.
In the lightning talk, I contrast IP with ska music, which I like, and which is characterized by stressed off-beats (which resonate with me) and mis-stressing the syllables to fit the meter (which also resonates with me).
Edit: Another thing about the high school experience: Shakepeare kind of fit a pattern of "stuff everyone professes to like but whose enjoyment seems to be fake/performative" (along with pop music, sports, and the taste of alcoholic drinks). I joke that if I were gay, I'd include everyone else's apparent heterosexuality in that pattern.
Oh wow I remember having read/heard that it was helpful for memorization, never occurred to me to think that there was an impact for some listeners too.
Meter is a very basic part of English poetry that is usually taught. Almost all popular music and poetry has meter.
Again, it was taught[1]. The fact that (speaking it with) one meter sounds particularly pleasant (to some people), and that this is a big part of its appeal (to those who like it) was not taught.
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 have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not
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
It's a tragedy that most English classes don't have field trips. Going to an actual Shakespeare play would probably change many people's minds than having to direct it in book form.
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.
I was preparing to heavily disagree with you before that "because". I'm French speaking, one of my highschool English teachers made us read Romeo and Juliet, and it's different enough from modern English that my brain just couldn't understand anything at all. Thank god Sparknotes already existed in the early/mid 00s cause I would have fluked that class so hard.
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.
Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.
I mean, even the most famous line in all of Shakespeare, "wherefore art thou Romeo" is frequently misunderstood because many people reasonably assume "wherefore" means something like "where". Yes, you can figure it out from context, but the context is in the same archaic language. Very possible to untangle all that while you're reading it and perhaps it's a good mental exercise. But it can be really tough to keep up when you're watching in the form it was meant to be enjoyed in, a play
That speech is expressing an awesome idea: Juliet is saying that she loves Romeo-the-person, but she is terrified of her bad luck in that he happens to have a certain surname ("Montague") which will automatically cause her family to hate him. Which, indeed, they do. It's basically something like "why did I fall in love with such an inconvenient person?", together with "why does my family care so much about this thing that I'm not sure needs to matter?".
Sure, but the archaic language can obscure the awesome idea. "Why are you Romeo?" may sound less poetic to modern ears, but isn't that how people back then would have parsed it - just as easily as everyday language, because it was their everyday language?
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
True, but a big part of Shakespeare is the rhythm, and if you replace the words with newer words that disappears.
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.
> unless someone explains it to them
Yeah, that helps. But attending a performance by a company that thoroughly understands it themselves is a massive shortcut. Sure, you'll still not be able to define every word, but they'll give you all the context you need to "get" enough to enjoy the show.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about the poetry. In fact, being aware of that level is essential to really understanding the plays. I'm sure you're aware of this, but for the peanut gallery: when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first words to each other are a mf-ing sonnet. They're so in tune with each other that they complete each other's thoughts and (within the world of the play) extemporize a whole poem. And it's good - totally witty and flirtatious, and just... Yeah. You want to talk about two people made for each other? That's them. Which, of course, sets up the whole tragedy of the rest of the show. Good actors will make you feel that, but it hits harder if you recognize the sonnet as it goes by.
I disagree. Shakespeare was not "plain" even in the 16/17th century. It wasn't archaic, but it was far, far from plain. The same is true for a lot of great literary works, even recent ones. Many great works have a lofty diction, which is easy to lampoon when inferior works veer into purple prose, but when it works, really elevates language.
True. But I think you can agree that the (now) archaic language and cultural context that would have been common knowledge back then gives an extra layer of difficulty over the already poetic/literary nature of the work
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
Yes, no disagreement there. Some things would have been more commonly said or just common knowledge, but I only wanted to push back on the idea that Shakespeare's writing was just how people talked back then.
Well, "[Romeo], why are you Romeo?" would not work, as it's not iambic pentameter. It is literally not poetic, no matter whose ears are hearing it.
Much of Shakespeare is written in poetry, not prose, and that format engenders rare and archaic word use even today.
We often didn’t just get sent home with a copy of Romeo and Juliet and then get asked to write an essay.
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.
This is a really good point. My wife and I produce a history podcast where, right now, a lot of it draws on primary sources such as letters, diaries, etc. from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The ones in German she translates into English, but it feels "wrong" to change someone's words that are already in English.
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.
What’s been your favorite episode to put together?
It's hard to pick a favorite - everyone brings their own perspective to their time. One of my early favorites was 'A Jew Who Stood Guard for Hitler'[1], the account of a kid who joined the Nazis for a while - till they found out he was Jewish and kicked him out. Ah, the naivety of youth.
[1] https://www.messyhistory.net/a-jew-who-stood-guard-for-hitle...
Well yeah. Look no further than the "brevity is the soul of wit" quote. It's taken at literal value when, in context, you know it's a joke, a potshot at the expense of the character saying it, who's anything but brief in speech.
It sounds like it's still meant in earnest, then. That it's a self-deprecating joke doesn't detract from the sentiment.
It's totally in earnest, and it's funny because Polonius isn't being self-deprecating: he wholeheartedly believes in brevity, when he isn't being it. At all.
But, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, he's not being entirely poked fun at. He's saying goodbye to his son, who's headed off into adulthood, and his over-long list of life-advice is like his last chance to to be a loving father. It's a "yeah, dad" moment, but Polonius is ever so slightly desperate to impart all the lessons that maybe he never quite got around to teaching quite as well as he wishes he had, and he's just ever so slightly desperate, and totally not ready to say goodbye, and it's... Really, really relatable.
Though maybe not to high school students, I guess. I think it's still worthwhile for them to try.
I know a fair number long winded people who like that quote and have no clue it should apply to them despite repeating it often.
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Yes, I agree completely with the Shakespeare point.
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.
> in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
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.
There is no correct way to read Shakespeare. There are many wrong ways, but don't let your friend's interpretation cloud you from the others. It is really magic when you see some other interpretation and understand both are right despite not being compatible.
"Brush Up Your Shakespeare" [1]
But then, Shakespeare was popular entertainment. It's only difficult today because the language is now archaic. The material in itself is neither difficult nor long.
Dickens was both paid by the word and serialized in newspapers, which is why his books run so long. Long, but not difficult.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Zzl_HH4XQ
Obligatory "To Be or Not to Be"
https://youtu.be/iQULEW2JwHE
It's okay, but it would be a whole lot better without the constant laughter over things that aren't even funny. Makes it really hard to follow what's actually going on. I mean, I understand a laughter when someone says/does something funny and there are funny parts in there, but there's just constant laughing at places where there's nothing funny happening. That is just rude to people trying to follow the story.
I hate to be that curmudgeon but sometimes i have to be
Oh, I hate this sentiment so very much.
Example: The song "We Are Young" by fun features the following lyrics.
The aspiring song analyst might think it's about the singer being asked by a cop (wearing sunglasses) asking about him abusing his girlfriend, or whatever, but Nate Ruess is on record saying it's just about being hung over, and no more deep than that.Projecting meaning where there is none, or where the meaning is clear, is simply not valid even for Shakespeare.
> Projecting deeper meaning where there is none is simply not valid.
Nah, that is the most fun part.
I felt the same way. I think we were on Hamlet, and reading it alone just felt so confusing and lifeless. I couldn't tell when characters were upset, sarcastic, ecstatic, etc. It drained it of all character.
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!
Reading these comments about Shakespeare makes me think that most of you had terrible teachers of Eng. Lit.
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.
The teacher makes a huge difference. My kids teacher somehow made The Odyssey a page turner for them and when the movie came out they were able to critique and delta the way the movie and book portrayed Odysseus. I was pretty impressed, because like the parent, The Odyssey and Shakespeare was a form of torture when I was in school.
The Odyssey is a page turner, when you distill it to few action chapters and stories it has. Majority of the Odyssey is not really actiony tho.
I guess I can't lump every English teacher into the same bucket, but in my experience, they aren't particularly skilled at explaining the context behind a lot of the stuff being taught.
I would agree wrt my High School teachers. They were basically competent, but not particularly good.
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.
Frankly, Shakespeare is one of the few things I enjoyed reading in school. It was classic American novels I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t tell you why, but getting through something even as simple as Tom Sawyer was such a chore for me.
Twain can be tedious because he’s a humorist and we’ve heard those jokes a million times by now. Also he writes speech in dialect which now means nothing to us and makes him harder to read. I find him easier to read as an adult but he can still be a slog.
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.
If not for Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, I'd probably had just completely bounced off Shakespeare's works in high school.
Another really good and interesting film adaptation of Shakespeare is "Scotland, PA" - Macbeth, set against the backdrop of a 1970s fast food restaurant featuring a soundtrack that consists entirely of Bad Company songs (apparently the library was shockingly inexpensive?) and Christopher Walken as an inspired Detective Macduff.
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.
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> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such?
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?
It still feels academic though. Suppose your response to that is, "Well, suck it up, its formalized".
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.
There are books that I read every decade or so, and there is always new insight. Sometimes I will identify with an older character and see the entire story through their eyes.
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.
Several of our English and History classes were paired on purpose for just this reason. We'd be reading Dickens while study that era, or Catch-22 when studying WWII and the immediate post-War era, etc.
That said, I'm also frequently amazed at the stuff some people didn't learn that I clearly remember being covered in school...
In my case I didn't understand the context of the context. Also, having no life experience at the time didn't help.
Most of my time was spent on grinding stem subjects
This was my thought as well. They were teaching us not to just read the words for their face value, to imagine the time and place the events occurred within.
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.
No way, there was simply no time for that.
How would he have taught me economics anyway?
I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise.
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.
Gatsby is one of those books I hated in high school. A few years ago I read it again and confirmed it’s a terrible book filled with shallow characters living boring lives doing nothing of interest to me.
My opinion of 1984 also dropped when I reread it. Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, Canticle for Leibowitz, The Chrysalids, and Lost Horizon are all books I liked more when I reread them as an adult.
English teachers aren't really there to provide you books you'll "like" or else they'd just be assigning the latest teen melodrama. They're instructing you on the different ways the English language has been used throughout its history and give you practice in analyzing it.
The Great Gatsby has themes about the American Dream, wealth, social class, love, ambition, and the gap between appearance and reality. Symbolism is easily teachable in the book, as well. And it's short, with relatively simple language and simple characters, which makes it a practical book for students.
I’m certain the vapidity of the characters in Gatsby is entirely the point.
Vapid characters aren’t a problem if they are doing something interesting or if there is non-trivial conflict or mystery or confusion or tension or drama of any sort or anything that leads to some kind of meaningful change in a character. Gatsby's death might have counted if Fitzgerald hadn't telegraphed it from so far away that it became a non-event.
You know how kids’ books for beginning readers are mostly about stringing together words that are easy to read and make a sensible sentence? See Jane run. Run, Jane, run! why is Jane running? Because she wants to. That’s how Gatsby read to me with more complex words and sentences.
I don’t even mind books where nothing much happens (Iyashikei) if the setting is novel. But Gatsby was predictable and dull for me with cardboard characters living passive lives.
The other book that lots of people seem to love that I've never been able to finish is Moby Dick. I don't dislike it but he pace is a bit slow for me.
The real value isn't in getting it at the time, it's having those seeds planted, among a population who will likely read very little after graduation, to find fertile ground later.
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.
It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.
I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
At their young age, it typically takes children the ritual of performing arithmetic algorithms at least several dozens of times if not a hundred times to get them to understand and internalize the algorithm itself. You can't actually teach the algorithm itself because they haven't studied basic algebra yet, so the only approximation is using the algorithm on multiple numbers. Then afterwards just give them a calculator.
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.
>Then afterwards just give them a calculator.
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.
Absolutely not. Properly designed problems involve numbers that simulate the real world (Benford’s law). Specifically choosing numbers that are easier to compute mentally or by hand would lead students to doubt themselves whenever they encounter something difficult to compute, so you can consider that either cheating or giving them undue psychological stress.
In math they shouldn't be computing at all, they should just be performing symbolic manipulations.
> but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".
Except it does not. Or, maybe some kids do build up lifetime hatred of math due to arithmetic. But it is not what happened with my kids, their friends, me myself back then or my friends.
The thing that pushes people to dislike math is when abstract concepts are taught too soon, before the brain develops the abstract thinking. Or too fast, or in a bad way.
But where I have seen dislike of math. it was not arithmetic part of it. It was seemingly magic incomprehensible concepts later on.
You’re saying people shouldn’t be taught how to add and subtract?
I'm saying young children shouldn't be led to believe that that's what math is. People should probably learn how to do basic operations, but it should have much, much less emphasis than it does now, and it would be much more useful to teach intuitions regarding how to stop when you've made an error, how to estimate, which operations useful when, etc. As an example of what I mean, my mom is an accountant and I've caught her on at least one occasion multiplying a monthly interest rate by 12. That's an OK method to estimate, but it's pointless when you're doing it on a calculator anyway.
> 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.
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.
I really liked my teachers, and have always thought of them as good teachers, however it's also very clear to me as an adult that they didn't teach literature or art. We where taught to read and write, but not have an appreciation of the language, nor to see text as anything but text. I did have teachers that briefly touched on the subject of interpreting a text, I still view that subject as mostly bullshit as you can basically read anything you want into a text, e.g. a lot of works can be read as a struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie, without it being remotely the intention.
Also not all books are great works of art, created to teach you about the world, humanity or life in general, most are just entertainment. The problem, in my mind, is that teachers feel like they need to pick out classics, and "great works of art" most of which aren't written for children or even teenagers. A great number of people have had their potential joy of reading and art stomped out of them, by not introducing them to works relevant for their age and life situation. Doing so might however mean picking 20 or more different books for a single class.
In my case Danish and history was two different subjects and rarely did they cross paths. Just as an example of how terrible history lessons can be, the general summary of my schools teaching of WW2: A time of rationing, blackout curtains and bunkers. Oh and the Germans where there, they appeared to enjoy their stay.
But you did read and maybe watch the movie of Det Forsømte Forår.
Interestingly we had a couple of much more recent books about young people in my school.
But again, how would you know even about your own country without quite a lot of context? I just never thought I could place things until I was quite old.
> But you did read and maybe watch the movie of Det Forsømte Forår.
No, we did not. To be fair the movie came out two years before I left school, so maybe there wasn't time. For some reason we didn't read the book.
The average high school English teacher isn’t great, and half of all teachers are worse than that!
I think the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now applies, life is a conversation with experience.. you are not the same person you were in your teens, in your twenties.. and once you go through life some more life you perspectives shift even more drastically. Doesn't mean younger perspectives are useless.. you were more engaged with the world when you younger and more innocent.. you really can't get back to that
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.
I think my favorite part of this song is that there are excellent versions of this song from her in her 20s, 70s and 90s
??? She’s 82.
This. I am late bloomer in humanity subjects. I was a typical stem students that didn't really understand any of those classes.
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
Context is everything for art and literature! It's not to say they can't be enjoyed out of context, but a lot can be lost without it, especially for a teenager.
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!
I second this. As a teenager, you don't have the life experience to appreciate most classic literature. I don't even think you have it in college, although this is less true.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
But fiction is the best way to learn about those past times.
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?
Yeah, I feel you on that.
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.
The best class I had in high school was American Dream: a mixture of literature and history/social studies. You'd learn about a time and then read a book for that time, like Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle or All Quiet on the Western Front. It was a double period, had two dynamic teachers (one old hippie and one young fun guy), and most of the grades were from papers about how the book and history related. More schools should have something like that.
School is about wide exposure to concepts that wouldn’t be encountered elsewhere. The goal is to teach students how to think, not what to think. The actual subject matter is irrelevant.
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”.
100% agree. The best literature class I ever had was in college. In class our professor spent very little time discussing the book and spent most of the time discussing the author's life and historical context. I understood those books way more than I had ever understood classical literature before.
School in general is terrible at teaching the "everything is connected to everything else" of history.
Depends on your teachers and your school. I've been lucky to have really good teachers despite attending public schools from K-12 (except Spanish - my Spanish teachers sucked. Turns out being fluent Spanish first speakers doesn't make someone a good teacher).
I've always thought about that with history - it should be taught to people with enough life experience to realize the subtleties.
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.
The point of school is to expose you briefly to many things in hopes that one catches your fancy.
This is a message that should be conveyed to kids. It's one that I didn't get. I wore blinders and prejudged that basically all the humanities was a waste of time. The guidance counselor would sign me up for history classes and I literally didn't even show up beyond the first day when I told the teacher that I have better things to do. I regret doing that.
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.
> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
I remember when I was a senior in (public) high school they created a two period class for one of the earlier grades that was a combined history and literature class, with one history teacher and one english teacher co-teaching it. The idea was that you'd learn the historical context and then in the same class also be reading the literature that came out of the period. Seemed like a great idea and I wonder what ever came of it.
Wow. So I'm a college instructor (in IT) and you're nailing what I'm trying to defeat to the best of my ability. I do an intro class, and I think most everyone around me believes that my job is to "go over the technologies that are important to students."
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.
I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced.
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.
Yes, imagine classical physics were taught by studying the original works from Newton.
It would never work!
A couple of my buddies and I tried that in HS - it didn't go well. Halliday Resnick and Mir publishers was the way to go for USAPhO.
One might consider this an argument for an integrated curriculum. Teach Les Misérables during a unit on the French revolution. Teach Huckleberry Finn or Roots when discussing the history of slavery in the US. Teach The Great Gatsby as part of a unit on the roaring 20s and Prohibition or alternately on the second world war.
It’s not only the historical context is missing but you yourself haven’t experienced life to be interested in the topic. If you haven’t had a child or a marriage, or even a friend who had one. Why would you understand that relationship. How can you possibly think about government structures when you’ve never led anything.
There is no vampire in all of literature able to suck blood from victims as well as high school English classes are able to suck all the joy from reading.
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.
>there isn't time for that
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.
I learned not to like literatures, and arts learning them in school. There were some kids who did great, and did not like it. Some liked it.
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.
It's this, and also a lot of required readings were just girl books even in hindsight. I wasn't part of the intended audience. It's like if some day Twilight becomes an American classic.
I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.
So that’s what I thought - but if I hadn’t been exposed to it early I don’t think I’d have gone back to it as an adult.
So I think it’s useful.
> 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.
Play "Fuck Tha Police" for someone.
Usually, they are shocked that someone would listen to a song with so many swear words and clearly so disrespectful to an institution most have been brought up to respect. The sheer anger in it...
And then you put it in context. The societal mores of the time, the specific events, how this album landed and why it resonated.
Just look at the lyrics and count swear words? It means nothing.
In the context of it's time? Scintillating.
> 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.
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.
Something I learned recently and which this article sort of hints at - look at the three drafts of Under The Wave Off Kanagawa. The composition is different, but also the colours are much more muted. In the first draft, the only colours highlighted are the people in the corner; in the second, the cliffs. The third draft finally colours the wave, but it's a sedate grey-blue. It's not until the fourth draft that everybody recognizes that we get this brilliant dark blue wave rising up over the the boat, dwarfing the mountain in the background.
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.
If you enjoyed this you will probably enjoy Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag[0]. Great piece that discusses why and how art moves us and pushes back a bit against the idea that is presented in this post that real art is art you can ask questions about and get answers from. I think most people including the author can recognize impactful art is more than just being able to get your 'why' questions answered (some might claim modern art is about challenging these assumptions), but it is even more difficult to talk about that concept without sounding extremely snobby, and Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Interpretation
> Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
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.
I think I am one of those people that caved in.
I like hamburgers and beer and that is what I end up telling people but of course I tried to engage people and no one appreciated any higher level of depth besides burgers and beers.
I am going to scream inside my soul when I see a flat deadpan useless story telling like if someone hangs a gun over the fireplace, writes two paragraphs about it and then ... it never fires.
Of course never firing might be the point of the story, but it never is.
There are also ways to enjoy hamburgers and beers, not everything has to be elaborate and a lot of things being plain simple is celebration of life as it is. Can you enjoy your burger and beer? Then leaving room for being surprised by the cook who really took time to make something of the burger or just this twist in a beer that well is not an eye opening moment, but goes into your head and makes you think a little.
I have to say, this guy should teach English to high-schoolers.
I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers.
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.
I think this is one of the more important points in this thread.
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.
This is tough, because as this newsletter gets at - sometimes things will simply smack you in the face. The only way to get that underlying experience is through experiencing more.
My two favorite books I read in high school were "The Crucible", and "The Sun Also Rises". Neither had an ounce of relatability to my life, I had no prior experience that should let me connect with a disillusioned generation of WWI vets or puritans scared of the woods. But I did have a phenomenal AP Lit teacher that conveyed the context enough for me to have a starting point and then get lost in the characters and environments and let the quality of the work carry it from there. I found Gatsby less appealing, but at least two of my friends fell in love with it that year. No book is going to do it for everyone, especially in a class like that where the point is working your way through cultural history.
I think you nail it with the range of teachers being the crux. There's just so much riding on whether or not you really connect with a teacher's way of conveying excitement or not.
Relevant: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/behind-bluey/ep5-show...
I’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity. It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same?
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
Good writing isn't complex for complexity's sake though. Mistaking complexity for quality is the most common mistake when it comes to writing — and I allege one central reason why many people like and trust LLM output.
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
Is it even possible to over-value an experience?
I suppose with an experience I'm taking value as a synonym for enjoyment level, I'm not sure what else it means in that context.
I guess you can enjoy something to the detriment of your focus on other things and then to your overall wellbeing. But idunno if someone being really into analyzing fancy coffee or something counts.
The simpler pleasures and pains of life are easier to speak to and we have a lot more (proportionally) media that reflects those experiences. Particular media does it better and worse and so there's a hierarchy, but if you are looking to have your enjoyment of good food and drink reflected in a story that's pretty easy to find.
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."
To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!
I'm always suspicious we read far too much into most works, as if they were all live examples of The DaVinci Code. It feels inevitable that one day, centuries from now, someone will "realize" that JK Rowling embedded a map of hyperspace into her phonemes or that Banksy was actually issuing incisive commentary on the contrast between ancient Sumerian government and veganism all along.
I get your idea but I wonder about the construction of this argument:
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.
Hemingway might have a few words to say about that. Just a few, mind you. Not many.
Lol. I had the same thought: "but, but... Hemingway!"
Of course, his magic lies in how much thickness he creates with such terse prose.
Don't forget software engineering
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Do you not think those teachers all failed Lockhart's Lament?
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.
https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansLament/
It's a sales problem. "Why should I care about this in the first place?" It doesn't necessarily have to be for something, but if you can't communicate any value, then... yeah... the results speak for themselves.
One of my favorite thing about getting older is finally learning answers to questions I was asking high school teachers. (e.g. applications in math class... though to be fair, I had the same problem in undergrad too!)
Most such things I ever grew to appreciate, happened from some sort of example case that doinged me on the head, and then I recognized how the principle applied elsewhere. Then the understanding of the principle itself was just part of my understanding of life and the world after that.
It would seem that the job of a teacher is to understand this themselves, having once been a child themselves or at least having had experience with kids in their own training even if they themselves were a different kind of kid, and to actively construct scenarios that teach concepts to kids who are not already aware of them or believe when things are simply stated at them.
Simply telling a kid something is approximately useless. If you want them to understand it, you have to understand them, and arrange for them to walk through some process where they end up arriving at the understanding "on their own".
I'm sure it's not easy but my own job is not easy either, but that just means it's a job that has to be done and doesn't just do itself, not that it's not doable.
Great piece. Seeing that depth and context is one of the best parts of gaining intellectual maturity.
How conditioned am I? I thought the title was a play on "em dashes" and when I got into the second paragraph and saw em dashes I immediately flipped to assuming I was reading a story from some never-lived life manifest by a diffusion model. I don't think it is. But that is irrelevant. The point is if our content cannot avoid or ultimately pass the sniff test it won't have the impact we hope.
I think you're over conditioned, I think this should have easily passed the sniff test. I'm not sure how to elaborate on this exactly, I'm just very surprised that you got a false alarm.
Well, it's actually an essay against the thinness of AI slop.
> 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.
> The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
The lake?
No, the very first meeting with the Emergents, where ... I forget the character's name (Trixia?), but she's a linguist and she figures out that there's something odd about the painting-carvings in the Emergent habitat. She can't put her finger on it until she spends more time studying their language, and figures out that they... well, we're getting into spoiler territory, so rot13: Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq.
Well that's a new experience, I naively googled for "Fur svtherf bhg gung gurl gnyx nobhg crbcyr nf bowrpgf gb or bjarq" and gemini responded to the text without rot13ing it, so I had no idea why it was telling me what it told me, I had to decode it to make sense of it's answer
TIL Gemini can respond to rot13
I pasted it into Kagi and the smart response just showed the clear text. Usually the smart responses are much more verbose.
Just read "a deepness in the sky" last month, surprised to see a reference here.
I had forgotten that section. Time to reread, I guess!
This is one of the better written things I have read online in a long time. The quality of the prose almost makes the subject irrelevant.
He’s a great writer. I subscribe to his podcast which is just him reading his essay/blog post (in one take!) every time he publishes. I don’t think any of them have been uninteresting to me.
I really enjoyed reading this and I've been thinking along similar lines when I imagine viable careers of the future. No one will care if code is "thick" but why would anyone buy a novel written by AI? What does the reader get out of it? It seems like the humanities might be the most stable career path available.
Haha and suddenly we'll have the pivot where all the software engineers try their hand at being writers. I can already see glimpses of it here wirh articles like this.
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.
i’m working on a little ios widget display currently. even a tiny little one view box has hundreds of nuanced design and structure decisions behind it.
That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.
I only disagree with looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Rhyming is another way to demonstrate effort, a thing that the author claims is thick. Not to say I dislike all non-rhyming poems, but it is just less impressive to capture an idea or feeling without rhyming, than it is with.
One of the signs of a declining band is the discarding of rhyming. This is usually accompanied by uninspired lyrics. The result is often something only for the die-hards to enjoy.
To be fair I didn't understand the author's statements as looking down on people who dislike poems that don't rhyme. Regardless, I think, and hopefully we could both agree, that we shouldn't look down on people for any reason. Humans have inherit value and worth that does not depend on laws, leaders or their views on any topic.
I will say, I am always impressed, if some time has gone by and I pick up some Chaucer, Keats, Byron, Shakespeare again. Interestingly, now that I am reflecting on it, one of the most impressive and dense, at least to me, is Milton, who writes in blank verse in Paradise Lost, which itself provides a counterpoint to the notion that non-rhyming poems are less impressive.
I think I still agree with you though that ceteris paribus, Paradise Lost with rhyme would be even more impressive, though I do wonder if it would have the same impact.
But when I see something incomprehensible, is it thick, or is it just stupid?
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?
When I read something and don't understand it, is it because the author is financially incentivized to make it sound more impressive than it is, or because they're unable or unwilling to communicate clearly, or both? Sometimes!
Often things are genuinely hard, and take a lot of time to get into. (You can read the same paper repeatedly for weeks!) Sometimes, it takes about 5-10 minutes, and it finally clicks, and I go "why the hell didn't they just say it like that?"
Probably Finnegan's Wake
I have a visceral hatred for Joyce so, even if I were a literary expert (which I'm not), I doubt I could judge it in an unbiased manner.
> 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. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
Doesn't particularly sound like their English teachers are owed an apology.
Well, a teacher's job is to help illuminate a cave. I can grope around blindly just fine on my own!
The thing about treasure is that you often have to find it for yourself, it can be hard to find, butt when you do find it you get some legendary booty.
The thickness of some caves in terms of genuine girth is truly something to marvel at.
You could say it is asstounding.
Asspounding even.
I also feel like I was let down by my English teachers. Even in high school I would complain that they would suck all the enjoyment out of a reading a book. Every book felt like a chore and I was an avid reader, a get-in-trouble-because-I-stayed-up-too-late-reading kid. I was the "reading at an N+1/N+2/N+3 grade" student, but I hated English/reading classes with a passion.
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.
I really like this, in the world burning, slaughter of the young all around and the economy unbalanced and tettering on the brink...
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
>Part of the pleasure of art, is making art.
Yes! I'll have to write a response to this article... an ode to crap art!
A while back I started consciously making low effort art. It was part of a exercise where I was intentionally desensitizing myself to shame, embarrassment and fear of judgment, because I noticed them severely holding me back in life.
So I thought, I am going to make something crap, that people will judge me for, and I am going to share it with them.
I wrote about gay werewolves.
A lot of people responded quite poorly (overall even worse than expected!), but a few were inspired to write their own short stories, and share them with me, and this was the most satisfying feeling in the world!
When you make something crap, and put it out there, you make others feel comfortable sharing their own crap with you.
> ... gay werewolves
Care to share??? :)
This was very good to read. I would like to add "form/structure" to attributes of "thick"ness. It is possible for good art to adhere strictly to a form and yet be universal and transcend the confines imposed by form. E.g. meters in poems. When I write a poem, the imposed constraints make me weigh and choose from multiple words in a way that free-verse doesn't. Now whether that makes for better reading or not is something a reader should say :)
"I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!
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.
> Leaving the egg out of the cake mix
This is the best expression of why i love Stone Roses but hate Coldplay.
Coldplay is sublime, perfect pop music. The Roses were kids with a four-track trying to create sublime, perfect pop music and falling short, but you can complete the journey on foot.
Case in point, for your delectation or derision, the middle 8 of She Bangs The Drum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWBZpGMWOik&t=115s
Having said that, the Roses weren't "thick" - i haven't discovered new things from repeated listening.
One reason we see so much thinning in the current media(books, films, music etc.) is that old western/European media is considered tainted by history, so you need to reinvent or change it sufficiently to be different.
By rejecting postmodernism and even the Enlightenment (due to the overwhelming reactionary messaging) most people have unilaterally disarmed themselves, or so I hypothesize. It's hard to talk about these things in any specific, evidence-based way, but here is the idea:
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.
I wonder whether people who use open source software in the way I do are merely providing the egg (in the context of tfa). Most people, that I know, rarely modify the code in any way and merely build and use. Do not even read it most times. But, it somehow conveys a sense of _doing_ something that the mere install of a binary does not.
For those who enjoy the Bosch painting, there’s this fun robot, which posts random crops of it daily: https://bsky.app/profile/boschbot.bsky.social
It’s been going years now, still hasn’t run out (though it seems to have added a few of his other pieces recently).
There’s a Twitter version too, but I think it broke when Musk screwed up the api; don’t have an account to check.
I remember hearing once that a core element of collegiate humanities education involves teaching that a great work can only be understood and appreciated when the reader first understands the work's context. Only then should the reader attempt to summit the great work.
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.
Edit: fixing quotes.
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.
> 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.
No the author wouldn't have.
He wasn't ready yet as a teenager to understand what he understands now.
About the benches: seems like an oxymoron. New Yorkers love busy places! Of course; they live in New York. Plenty of people on the benches in my midwest city park. Because we by and large are uncomfortable with crowds and noise. Why we don't live in New York.
The point isn’t so much that the writing is definitely correct as that the writing is interesting and compelling.
This writing is so delicious. Just became a paid sub
Engaging article to read. I very much like the "the shape of a thing" bit:
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.
But read the whole article, it's worth it.
Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities?
Absolute gold.
A Chinese example of this for me is Jin Yong, probably the most influential wuxia (Chinese martial-arts fiction) novelist in the Chinese-speaking world. His books are popular fiction in the most literal sense: enormously entertaining, widely read, and for many people first encountered simply as page turners.
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.
As they say, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. I think thick works though are not necessarily works with a lot of detail, but works where when you revisit them, you get something more from them. This does not have to be a detail, but more subtle, as if coming to contact with it the first time changed you as a person, and allowed you to see it with different eyes the second time.
This is also true in science; some things reward depth of study in a way that just isn't apparent from the outside.
https://xkcd.com/877/
> The Betty Crocker Corporation could put just egg powder into their cake mix, but they don’t, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they’re baking.
Those who use ChatGPT for research should be advised that it will add `?utm_source=chatgpt.com` to the URLs it provides you. Make sure to edit that away if you don't want people to know. And also, you know, make sure you verify the source.
Fucking toppus kekkus maximus
Experimental History is such a consistently pleasant read. I often refer to the "skull full of poison" one.
Less Penguiny has a short blog with similar writing style. Not as good but very good nonetheless
What a good article, I really love the punchline at the end. If you skim the article, you can't even tell it's there.
That certainly increased the thickness of the article, for me.
Skimming Adam's articles should come with a fine and some time in.
Free admission changes how you experience a museum. No pressure to justify the ticket means you actually let things surprise you instead of checking off famous works.
There's a lot of great things about this piece, but I'm kind of stuck on the "Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music". Listened to it a bunch of times now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U
Maybe that's the point?
The test of whether a work keeps unfolding under sustained attention is much better than asking whether it produces a strong reaction in the first five seconds
There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.
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.
What kind of abusive high school gives a 900-page summer assignment?
One that wants to teach Greek mythology but can't because no child left behind forced teachers to teach the standardized tests over all else.
> I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young.
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.
Father, I cannot zoom the paintings!
Edit: found a zoomable version!
https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html
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)
> this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened.
I think this is a good candidate to hang on the wall, or perhaps for a tattoo.
I have always loved long books, or better yet long series, but it's because I just don't want a story I love to end.
This is a really good essay. I'll bookmark it as motivation for my own art.
It was such a joy to read something clearly written by a human, for humans, by someone who takes pride and spends effort in their writing.
Reading this article felt like a breath of fresh air, like a vice had been released from my head. Not just the broader point about our increasingly slop-filled world resonated with me, but the writing itself felt like it just flows effortlessly.
I guess I’ve been suffering for too long, pouring over claude code jargon-filled responses and going in circles trying to understand its convoluted sentence construction and terminology. I think I’m burnt out on working with agents all day long…
Agreed. The AI news cycle is constant and promises the eventual end to human usefulness. I feel like one day we'll be but pets to the machines (like those in Iain M. Banks' culture novels), but real life won't be a communist utopia like his novels.
‽ interrobang i like this one. I’ve got it to auto correct whenever i put a question and exclamation mark together.
I think teachers did tell us exactly this. But we were 15 and we didn't believe them or didn't listen.
And that's okay for 15 year olds. But for 30+ year olds? Embarrassing.
This piece is great. And it’s totally true that we’re surrounded by walls of slop. I stop reading things all the time when I notice the tinge of AI.
That said, I don’t think that just because this is the way things are, this is this is the way things have to be. Even with our interactions with AI. And I have hope.
Ted Chiang had a great piece in the New Yorker years ago called “Why AI isn’t going to make Art”[1] where he describes something similar. There are 10,000 choices to make in every good pieces of art. AI makes the average choice for every decision and the average choice is derivative and uninteresting. There in I think lies both the problem and the solution. Rather than autocompleting our work, we’d all be so lucky to have a captivated and motivated reader who asks all of the questions this author suggests, so we can get better and better at asking them ourselves and making great art.
[1] https://dmd-program.github.io/dmd-300-master/assets/Chiang-A...
If it were just a problem of making too average choices, it could be fixed by sampling at a higher temperature. But I think there's a bigger problem in that the correct choices depend on the context in a complicated way, and LLMs can't handle arbitrary deep dependency chains, so by default you get the average choice based on superficial cues instead of the average choice based on careful planning. Which is why for coding, chain-of-thought and tool calls are necessary to make the implicit explicit.
Making artistic choices explicit and subjecting them to a planning process with iterative refinement would probably already improve quality a lot (consider image generation models using a prompt rewriting to create more varied and detailed outputs) but to get the most out of it, you'd likely need a model specifically trained for that process. And considering that coding is much more lucrative, it might take a while before we get there.
Really enjoyed how thick this essay was.
> 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.
> Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.
> 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.
> I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains.
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.
Omg. this is the best word ever: poptimism
It comes from a big struggle in the world of music criticism and appreciation, specifically as a reaction to "rockism".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
There were issues with rockism, but I still think the wrong side won that fight.
Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness? Is it because it looks like the meme word 'thicc'?
> 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.
I think I like the term "thickness" over "depth" here because thickness implies a sort of solidity, an ability to stand up to being held and examined, turned over and and handled. Depth can feel unapproachable (the ocean is pretty deep and it is famously challenging to explore) while something which has thickness intuitively feels like you can walk right up to it and try to learn something.
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.
Also, depth does not necessarily mean substance. Holes in the ground have depth. I think thickness works well here.
I imagine the word thickness represents the great number of (metaphorical) layers of a painting, since paintings are the reoccurring symbol to talk about art in this essay.
I don't think the author is claiming you HAVE to be a dick about it. But that the pursuit of "thickness" does in reality give ammunition to a lot of people who are inevitably dicks about it seems observably true to me.
> what's the deal with calling depth thickness
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.
I think the fact that "thick" can mean "dim-witted" is proof that the author did not in fact choose their words carefully.
I think it's made obvious that "thick" can mean many different things. Personally, I've never heard "thick" to mean "dimwitted" or it ever used as such.
The full term is "thickheaded" but it can be abbreviated, as in "He's a bit thick, isn't he?"
Although it can be annoying to step into someone else's situational language/definitions/grammar, it can be a good rhetorical trick to shed the preexisting cultural context of a preexisting term such as depth.
"Thick" already has a meaning of "dimwitted" so it's a particularly strange choice of word in this context. Is this something this new use of "thick" as a synonym for "deep" something this author is trying to coin, or is this already an established meaning among younger generations?
As thick as the paint on the Lexus LS400. ;)
> Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness?
Possibly riffing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description?
Given the butt-emphasis, there's also a certain allusion to Sir Mix-a-Lot.
So many things we spend our time on in school never have the basics explained. Why am I reading Shakespeare? Why am I writing an essay? Why am I learning algebra?
By the time I realized writing is the process by which you organize your thoughts (not just record them) I was a few years out of school. I started appreciating Shakespeare after watching Throne of Blood at 21. I generally enjoyed learning math, but it was not impressed upon me that the mental machinery you build to solve algebra can be used for soooo many things.
I was lucky to go to an excellent public school. My teachers were generally pretty good and cared. And yet they didn't manage to embed these basic facts in my head. I worry they were too busy making sure I could pass a test and didn't spend time making sure I'd got the most important lessons out of the subject.
Fantastic writing. I didn't want it to end. It's the warmest and loveliest defence of its core idea that I've ever come across, and likely ever will. The humour in particular -- it's disarming, pitch-perfect in making a case that (ETA: in lesser hands would be) beset on all sides by self-seriousness.
And yet... I'm not persuaded. I think its stance is completely understandable, and plausible, and wrong. Not about everything -- I agree 100% that thickening an idea (great metaphor!) makes it more valuable to others, and that the work involved in the thickening process itself is valuable to the artist. But I think this piece is wrong about what I take to be its core idea: That art has inherent objective value about which we all ought to agree. In the words of the author: That a particular cave has treasure or not, independently of the explorer.
I say instead that it is enough to treat art the same way as we treat modern human relationships: If two people have a bad relationship, it doesn't have to be that one (or both) of them is a bad person. It can simply be that those two people are not a good match for each other. The explanation can be a predicate on two people rather than on one. Similarly, there doesn't have to be a total order on the set of pieces of art -- or even a partial order. I believe that the only reasons to think that there should be are ultimately rooted in either ego ("I feel smart/cultured/a sense of mastery by liking the 'right' things") or tribal belonging ("I feel a comforting sense of inclusion by liking the 'right' things").
This "purely subjective value" idea has always been a deeply unpopular view for "cultured" people to hold, and nowadays that's also true of the general public in regard to AI-generated works. It is called philistinism, and a person who holds it is properly called a philistine. As jarring as the label is, I would encourage anyone exploring this idea not to stop thinking there -- but to keep going, and consider the implications of both it and its opposite. Perhaps, like with the similarly jarring term "Luddite", people will take another look and decide that it is not something to be written off immediately.
I disagree with many of the points.
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.
This comment is just truly bleak and I hope you find something artistic that you can enjoy the depth of.
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.
If you think my comment is bleak you should read Jane Eyre. Then come back to my comment if you’d like to get cheered up. It is truly a miserable book.
I thought so too at first. Then I realized it was a comment on machine slop being thin, while artist produced dough with more substance. Or perhaps just more air, as if whipping in real eggs rather than just adding water to the readymade cake mix.
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Complexity should be relative to the material covered.
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.
Spot on. Verbosity for the sake of it sucks, but vague docs on complex systems are even worse. Balance is everything—depth where it actually matters.
>For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts. [...] This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights
closed tab.
> ... and I was like ...
And you'll need to add an apology for using that phrase too.
I'm confused; why is this hitting #2 on HN? I don't see the H or the N in this.
It's always funny to me how often comments like yours show up, despite a long history on here of diverse thoughts and intellectual curiosities, technological or otherwise.
But especially funny and bewildering in this case is that you have this in your About section of your HN user account:
I find it slightly creepy that people are reading my past thoughts. Time to look into privacy settings.
I just felt like the article wasn't particularly well written.
Just because AI can produce slop, doesn't mean humans don't either.
> Time to look into privacy settings.
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.
You say you felt like the article wasn't well-written (which I disagree with, btw, it was clear and with many nice turns of phrase), but your comment complained about it not being very hackery or newsy. Maybe your comment was thick cause we were supposed to figure out what you actually mean.
Hacker news comments aren't private, and they shouldn't be private. I find it interesting that you think your own public soapbox declarations should not be discoverable.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15360228>
Diving deep into something is a core aspect of hacking.
Because it's about AI
Because it's thick.
As you delve further into the article, and (ironically, based on the topic) consider the ideas presented, it becomes more clear. Or skip to near the end to see.
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 that's not the author's point; he's mostly talking that time solidifies ideas as shown by the evolution of points of view. At the same time, his picture of the wave shows that over time the painting feels more distilled and simplified. So is his point actually that simple ideas persist and are appealing? It isn't clear? That an art improves?
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.
So it seems in summary you do see the "H" and "N" of it, you just disagree with some parts of the article.
In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great".
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!
Your point of view seems to imply that the author's skill and intent don't matter, which I can't agree with. The reason that a reader's effort gets more out of a great work is because the author put it there, not because it exists as a function of the work in itself.
I'm sure this aesthetic relativism holds up under argument, but this is an 'anti realization' that:
-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
One of them has existed for more than 100 years. One of them has been granted credibility by a small number of academics before becoming a safe conservative choice for subsequent ones.
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
On the first point, explanation is inherently subjective. It reduces explanatory power purely because you're forced to acknowledge it was never universally appropriate, which tracks. The variety of explanation you're referring to in this context is one that I always found to be unsatisfactory. It's inherently stripping context (IE every component of what makes something the right place, the right time) out of the equation, which makes comparative analysis absurd.
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?
I don’t think that’s true. True masters will create works that enable additional interpretations, perhaps beyond or even contradictory to those intended by the original authors. I doubt 50 Shades of Grey enables such a multitude of additional interpretations.
I strongly disagree. Sure, I can say story X is about Y, for any arbitrary Y.
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:
That verse is thick. There are breadcrumbs all over the place, trails leading to things that the author did not say. And yet he did say them, through the breadcrumbs.This just means that you don't percieve any difference, not that there is no difference.
I don't think it's about giving credit at all.