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I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

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Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#201

Post by trgn »

ransom_rs wrote: post #77

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…

> 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.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#202

Post by phainopepla2 »

colinrand wrote: post #45

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.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#203

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#204

Post by worik »

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

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#205

Post by SilasX »

gowld wrote: post #200
SilasX wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#206

Post by deaton »

kstenerud wrote: post #160
NoboruWataya wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 _____

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#207

Post by scarecrowbob »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

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. S…

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.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#208

Post by Perseids »

serbuvlad wrote: post #138
lordnacho wrote: post #33

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. S…

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 t…

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.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#209

Post by zerotolerance »

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.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#210

Post by janalsncm »

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.

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