211–220 of 334 posts
Some of the most enthusiastic readers I know are also opiate addicts.
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I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizz…
When I write, it comes out like this. Pulling your attention to and fro across a scene to construct "brain pictures", letting your imagination fill in the gaps as the fragments become a whole. The mention of Megalosaurus was jarring. My imagination placed this within a gloomy late-Victorian period and the mention of giant lizard caused mental association to very unrelated content for the rest of paragraph. I think a…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_Dinosaurs
The collection includes an (inaccurate) model of a Megalosaurus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2005-03-30_-_London_-_Cry...
Horse blinkers are things that restrict a horse's field of vision to directly in front of it so it's less likely to get startled or distracted. Readers would also have been familiar with them, because they were commonly used with horses pulling carriages.
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Click-bait longform is where things went wrong. I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading. Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're…
And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here. Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles paid off.
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And it's the New Yorker that is frequently a culprit here. Too many articles talking about the journey the reporter went on to write their article. The low signal to noise ratio is a decent chunk of the reason I unsubscribed. Too few articles paid off.
Any good sources for longform articles?
"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:
https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.
Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril. On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting su…
Objections: - it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise. - It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming de…
IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two problems:
1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case. The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but the brain in the student is making its own connections and tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way, leading to learning a different lesson from the one being taught.
2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present in their students.
So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right word for it.
One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses. WTF. Asking university English students to read a book is not asking swimmers to go through molasses.
I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new. I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all. I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. Bu…
> I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.
They can, they just won't, because they don't give a fucking shit. The moment you hit adulthood in modern times you're bombarded with bazillion of bullshit. Do you seriously believe your meticulously hand-crafted email is high enough on someones radar that they'll actually pay attention?
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The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means. In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college . Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect…
I guess I would not have done much better. >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. >Facilitator: >O.K. >Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere. What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems li…
Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around.
Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean.
Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain,…
> Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day. If they could be called paragraphs, that is. A more accurate description might be a random sample of phrases that spontaneously popped into their heads, only loosely relevant to each other in the broadest possible sense, minus anything like grammar, punctuation, or even non-mediocre word choice.
