Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

experimental-history.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 360 posts

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

#211

Post by Brian_K_White »

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/

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

#212

Post by Brian_K_White »

Bratmon wrote: post #49

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 sha…

This just means that you don't percieve any difference, not that there is no difference.

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

#213

Post by ptidhomme »

zerotolerance wrote: post #209

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.

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.

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

#214

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

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.

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

#215

Post by tcmart14 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #105
NobodyNada wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 someth…

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.

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

#216

Post by Agingcoder »

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…

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.

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

#217

Post by eapressoandcats »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #203

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.

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

#218

Post by Telaneo »

SilasX wrote: post #109
pavel_lishin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

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…

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.

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

#219

Post by cwnyth »

PsylentKnight wrote: post #100
schoen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 consid…

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.

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

#220

Post by emaro »

Folcon wrote: post #143
pavel_lishin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nobh…

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.

Post reply on HN