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What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

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Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#41

Post by mr_toad »

VancouverMan wrote: post #32
IncreasePosts wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"

I don't think that Shakespeare's works have been popular (in the sense of many people wanting to voluntarily consume them) for many generations. Yes, most people even today are familiar with those works to some extent, but that's just an artifact of those people being forced to consume those works repeatedly in high school and possibly again in college or university. When I was in high school in Canada decades ago, a…

> Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.

This is amusing because evidence suggests that at the time his works were not considered highbrow, and they seem to have been popular with a wide audience.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#42

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #31
darby_nine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should be able to connect with people over things besides "tentpole" pop culture artifacts. You can, of course. You're missing or ignoring the implication that one can have any kind of expectation about connecting with an arbitrary individual. Personally, I think this is for the positive: acknowledging that you can't expect to connect with everyone seems healthy.

To me it seems like walking back on all the moral progress we've achieved. Today you don't expect it's possible to connect with everyone, tomorrow you deny humanity to anyone you can't imagine yourself connecting to.

[deleted]

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#43

Post by parpfish »

Zambyte wrote: post #13
jl6 wrote: post #10

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultura…

I am not the content I see. I don't watch movies or shows, I don't watch Douyin (TikTok), don't keep up with social media, I haven't read Harry Potter or watched Star Wars. I only watch a few small channels on Youtube, and I play Rocket League, and work on personal hobby projects (coding, photography, ceramics). There are lots of people who I would consider myself to not be strangers with. You should be able to conne…

I think it also depends on what kind of connections you want.

As somebody that really values comedy and a sense of humor, it becomes very obvious that humor is particularly dependent on having shared cultural references. For me, if a new relationship doesn’t having the touchstones that allow joking around it feels empty and sterile

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#44

Post by lyu07282 »

jl6 wrote: post #10

Something that used to be popular was the concept of the Western Canon: a core reading list of timeless works for the ages, around which our collective culture revolved. But I don’t think such a thing exists or can exist any more, in our hyper-diverse, hyper-content-stuffed world. As the amount and availability of TV, music, books, films, etc. increases, the odds of meeting somebody who’s had a similar set of cultura…

I suppose this might be related to nerd culture decades ago. Scifi, fantasy and comic books for example were much more niche, you would be ostracized or ridiculed for showing interested in them openly. That was before those genres were appropriated by the mainstream. Before that, nerds would (with great effort) seek out other nerds in order to share the same appreciation for the hyper specific interests they had.

Now the average person discovered the joy of such hyper specific content, instead of the same lowest most common denominator mainstream shit. But it's also generational, older generations are very much constrained in their cultural consumption. What you described hasn't happened yet I don't think, but it might once everyone who still watches TV is dead.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#45

Post by lyu07282 »

rpdillon wrote: post #35
tomjen3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Harry Potter will stand the test of time that well. In the world of Harry Potter, there are no cell phones, no internet, no Google and no AI. For my generation that was no issue at all when we got into the books, because the Internet were fairly obscure in 1997 (as in, not something you would use on a daily basis), Google was just a postdoc project and of course kids didn't have cellphones. 7 books late…

As an aside from your core point about tech, I don't think Harry Potter's universe is particularly well-designed or thoughtful. I mean, I haven't actually read Harry Potter, but having watched the movies and talked to my son who has read the books a few times, the magic system seems entirely inconsistent and capricious, and is one of my bigger gripes with the story coming from more mature authors like Brandon Sanders…

You might enjoy HPMOR then, what you described is kind of the whole point of it. https://hpmor.com/

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#47

Post by bsder »

VancouverMan wrote: post #32
IncreasePosts wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Shakespeare remain popular in the age of the atom bomb? Wasn't every new reader in the 1960s just thinking "Hey, why doesn't Macbeth just nuke Macduff?"

I don't think that Shakespeare's works have been popular (in the sense of many people wanting to voluntarily consume them) for many generations. Yes, most people even today are familiar with those works to some extent, but that's just an artifact of those people being forced to consume those works repeatedly in high school and possibly again in college or university. When I was in high school in Canada decades ago, a…

> Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works.

The main problem with Shakespeare is that we are reading something that is supposed to be performed.

A play strongly depends upon the actors to give it life.

I had this driven home when I was reading a script for some play I found particularly particularly boring. We got together to read it aloud for rehearsal, and I uttered some line that caused a couple of chuckles.

Wait, hold the phone! This character is supposed to be funny, and I, the actor, completely missed that from simply reading the script. Suddenly, I was rereading everything with a completely different tone in mind and paid a lot more attention to timing. The character suddenly had life where before it was simply flat.

I think this is what causes the disconnect about Shakespeare. The people who praise Shakespeare are projecting their experience(s) of a play over top of what they are reading while those who do not have that experience cannot understand what is so interesting.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#48

Post by solumunus »

morley wrote: post #29
ggm wrote: post #2

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy. "The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward. My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense…

Some comedy works have endured, like Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (though it is helped by its huge influence on To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis).

Endured how? No one knows what these are.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#49

Post by solumunus »

bsder wrote: post #47
VancouverMan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that Shakespeare's works have been popular (in the sense of many people wanting to voluntarily consume them) for many generations. Yes, most people even today are familiar with those works to some extent, but that's just an artifact of those people being forced to consume those works repeatedly in high school and possibly again in college or university. When I was in high school in Canada decades ago, a…

> Even among those who claim to "like Shakespeare", they seem to be driven more by wanting to feel "highbrow" rather than any genuine appreciation for the works. The main problem with Shakespeare is that we are reading something that is supposed to be performed . A play strongly depends upon the actors to give it life. I had this driven home when I was reading a script for some play I found particularly particularly…

People unfamiliar with Shakespeare who go and watch it performed by and large “don’t get it” and will never go again.

Re: What Lasts and (Mostly) Doesn't Last

#50

Post by solumunus »

lelanthran wrote: post #28
flyinghamster wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the information the kids need is in a book somewhere, but often in the restricted section or perhaps not in the library at all A problem that is getting worse with politically-motivated "protect the children" witch hunts bringing book bans to the Land of the Free. Nobody shooed me away from the grown-up side of the library when I was a kid.

> Nobody shooed me away from the grown-up side of the library when I was a kid. Me neither, but the grown-up side of the library back then did not have instructional books for teenagers on how to have homosexual intercourse. In fact, instructions on having intercourse of any sort weren't in the grown-up side of any library I went to in the 80s. I'd be very surprised if you went to a library that did direct teens and…

Why is it a problem for teenagers to learn about sex? A thing that almost every human on earth engages in, with the desire to do so emerging in their teenage years… It seems completely obvious and normal.
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