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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Interpretation
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.)
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.
This is a wonderful thought, I thank you for it
> 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
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.
This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)
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.
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!
-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
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
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.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.
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
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."
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 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.
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.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
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.
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.
https://xkcd.com/877/
Maybe that's the point?
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.
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.
And you'll need to add an apology for using that phrase too.
But especially funny and bewildering in this case is that you have this in your About section of your HN user account:
TLDR: AI and generic pop culture artifacts have something in common - a lack of a certain type of depth that makes art great.