alt Hacker NewsI like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
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> Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?
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.)
> I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
Doesn't particularly sound like their English teachers are owed an apology.
Really loved this essay, loved the irreverent style. I had a similar literary journey as this guy.
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.
There's an interesting part of this that's mentioned in the comments that the original author states:
> 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
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.
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.
The best thing about gaining an appreciation of this aspect of life is it opens up so many extra pleasures. I can spend an entire day at the (free entry!) V&A in London and never be bored. Likewise with a great book (when my 11-year-old isn't around!)
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 might claim modern art is about challenging these assumptions), but it is even more difficult to talk about that concept without sounding extremely snobby, and Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.
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.
> But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)
I have to say, this guy should teach English to high-schoolers.
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.
Edit: fixing quotes.
I've thought something similar but never put it into words. It's nice when someone else puts your thoughts into words so clearly that you go, "That's exactly how I see this topic!"
> I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them.
> But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.
I’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity. It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same?
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
Great piece. Seeing that depth and context is one of the best parts of gaining intellectual maturity.
This was very good to read. I would like to add "form/structure" to attributes of "thick"ness. It is possible for good art to adhere strictly to a form and yet be universal and transcend the confines imposed by form. E.g. meters in poems. When I write a poem, the imposed constraints make me weigh and choose from multiple words in a way that free-verse doesn't. Now whether that makes for better reading or not is something a reader should say :)
> The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
But when I see something incomprehensible, is it thick, or is it just stupid?
Surely the literary field has its cranks that believe they have made something deep, but have just made something nonsensical? What's the literary equivalent of TimeCube or chemtrails?
This is one of the better written things I have read online in a long time. The quality of the prose almost makes the subject irrelevant.
I wonder whether people who use open source software in the way I do are merely providing the egg (in the context of tfa). Most people, that I know, rarely modify the code in any way and merely build and use. Do not even read it most times. But, it somehow conveys a sense of _doing_ something that the mere install of a binary does not.
I also feel like I was let down by my English teachers. Even in high school I would complain that they would suck all the enjoyment out of a reading a book. Every book felt like a chore and I was an avid reader, a get-in-trouble-because-I-stayed-up-too-late-reading kid. I was the "reading at an N+1/N+2/N+3 grade" student, but I hated English/reading classes with a passion.
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.
I remember hearing once that a core element of collegiate humanities education involves teaching that a great work can only be understood and appreciated when the reader first understands the work's context. Only then should the reader attempt to summit the great work.
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.
This writing is so delicious. Just became a paid sub
A Chinese example of this for me is Jin Yong, probably the most influential wuxia (Chinese martial-arts fiction) novelist in the Chinese-speaking world. His books are popular fiction in the most literal sense: enormously entertaining, widely read, and for many people first encountered simply as page turners.
As a kid, that was how I read them too.
Only after I started working did I realize how perceptive some of the character writing was. Murong Fu, for example, is genuinely capable, but his ambition is even greater. Everyone around him, friends, followers, even people who love him, is ultimately someone he is willing to sacrifice for his goal. I have met people who seem to reproduce almost the whole arc: the ambition, the triumphs, the disappointments, the pain, the struggle, and sometimes even the madness. Suddenly Murong Fu no longer feels like an exaggerated fictional character.
The book never changes. I had finally acquired the experience to see what was already there. That feels like thickness to me.
"I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!
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.
‽ interrobang i like this one. I’ve got it to auto correct whenever i put a question and exclamation mark together.
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.
This is also true in science; some things reward depth of study in a way that just isn't apparent from the outside.
> I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains.
unfortunately a lot of people in tech tend to think in terms of technology - looking at this from one solution - not looking at the problem holistically. turning their brains into slop brains.
I think teachers did tell us exactly this. But we were 15 and we didn't believe them or didn't listen.
There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.
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.
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
There's a lot of great things about this piece, but I'm kind of stuck on the "Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music". Listened to it a bunch of times now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U
Maybe that's the point?
Something I learned recently and which this article sort of hints at - look at the three drafts of Under The Wave Off Kanagawa. The composition is different, but also the colours are much more muted. In the first draft, the only colours highlighted are the people in the corner; in the second, the cliffs. The third draft finally colours the wave, but it's a sedate grey-blue. It's not until the fourth draft that everybody recognizes that we get this brilliant dark blue wave rising up over the the boat, dwarfing the mountain in the background.
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.
Really enjoyed how thick this essay was.
> 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.
> 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?
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)
I really enjoyed reading this and I've been thinking along similar lines when I imagine viable careers of the future. No one will care if code is "thick" but why would anyone buy a novel written by AI? What does the reader get out of it? It seems like the humanities might be the most stable career path available.
Omg. this is the best word ever: poptimism
Verbose docs and over-engineered specs always crash and burn. Clear, concise writing is just clean code with fewer bugs.
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.
By rejecting postmodernism and even the Enlightenment (due to the overwhelming reactionary messaging) most people have unilaterally disarmed themselves, or so I hypothesize. It's hard to talk about these things in any specific, evidence-based way, but here is the idea:
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.
Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness? Is it because it looks like the meme word 'thicc'?
> 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.
> I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young.
It's mixed. It's both true and false.
There are a great many books out there, but there's also countless pointless turds.
Then something has to be said about your teacher forcing you to read a great book in a language that is not the author's native language. Some do translate well (Dostoevsky for example) but for many others it simply doesn't make any sense. A great book is not just a story: the writing itself is an art form and that cannot be translated.
Then many books are just bland, naive, with a ridiculously laughable "message" they try to pass.
The problem is a teacher shall force you to read either indistinctly. At least mine was.
I could be forced to read great literature just as I was forced to read the latest fart from whatever author was fancy in the city atm for his parents owned a bookstore.
Another way to see it is this: how many books (novel books) are there out there? Like, literally, how many? The number is gigantic. How many great novels are there?
If you were to pick one at random, which probability that you'd end up on a great one?
What's the probability your teacher will pick great ones?
In my case, the odds were basically as you'd expect: I remember very few of them because most didn't warrant being remembered.
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>For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts. [...] This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights
closed tab.
> ... and I was like ...
And you'll need to add an apology for using that phrase too.
The anecdote about the garden of earthly delights is going to be relatable even for art students. I've met art teachers that ended up "trapped" in Madrid by the Prado Museum: A green, American future Ph.D student that was heading to Greece to specialize in old greek art. But instead of flying straight there, they stopped at Madrid to see the Prado, and were never able to leave. Changed their direction immediately, and ended up teaching in Madrid, and retiring there, because one of the countless masterpieces in there stole their life plans away.
There's more famous museums, and it doesn't have the most popular paintings for non specialist, but it's just haymaker after haymaker, in every single room. And that's leaving the modern art to the Reina Sofia, a short walk away. (Although I guess keeping late Goya there is kind of cheating, as I'd argue he becomes a pioneer of modern art after the war starts)
Books might require quite a bit of work before you can tell they are eternal masterpieces. Seeing the depths of some forms of music might involve not-so-impressive efforts earlier, just to get to the good parts. The very best paintings in the world, in person, can stop people cold. Large format efforts that demand attention even when you don't consider every single small decision.
The Garden of Earthly Delights used to be stuck in a corner, at the edge of one of the wings of the Prado. As if "oh well, I guess it fits here, near all the medieval art". It counted as an ambush.