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From The New Yorker:
They aren’t reading Finnegans Wake, but instead a novel that was long considered a mainstream standard.
On the other hand, here’s the first paragraph of Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter:
It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine—with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion—I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years’ experience in a Custom-House. The[2] example of the famous “P. P., Clerk of this Parish,” was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.
Well, I can kinda see the poor Harvard students’ point …
I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in Brother John Doran’s tenth grade American Literature class and didn’t like it. My eyes glazed over.
In general, I didn’t like the prose style of most of the pre-Civil War American writers we were assigned: Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance was painful and Thoreau’s Walden wasn’t as bad but still not a delight. The one unexpected class favorite was Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener: for months guys went around saying: “I would prefer not to.”
In general, American prose styles back then seemed awkward and long-winded.
I asked Brother John if Emerson’s Self-Reliance was well-written. He said, “Of course not. I’d give you a bad grade if you turned in an essay like that. But it’s important to read to understand where we’re coming from.” It was our patriotic duty to read the 1850s generation of American writers, even if they weren’t that good. Not surprisingly, in 2023, that doesn’t strike many Harvard students as a good reason to try hard to read them.
(My impression at the time was that British writers were better than American writers of the same era, at least until fairly recently. And I haven’t seen much reason to change my mind since then. For instance, I recently read Thackeray’s quite long 1848 novel Vanity Fair for fun. I can’t imagine rereading The Scarlet Letter from two years later.)
These days, the prose style of 1850 is 50 years further into the past than it was in 1973. Things change and it’s harder to connect the further back you go. For example, the full title of Melville’s short story is:
Both the comma and the hyphen would no longer be used, so they tend to disrupt modern readers’ concentration.
Still, Harvard students ought to be able to follow Hawthorne’s prose. I wonder if the changes over the years since the mid-1990s that neutered the once-exacting SAT Verbal test have made it harder for Harvard to find top verbalists.
Outside of Harvard, of course, college students are getting less verbally adept.
I've seen enough, time to vent:
None of the end-of-humanities/criticism discourse–NONE–has even remotely engaged with the fact that minoritized (e.g., AfAm, Latinx, Indigenous Studies) and interdisciplinary fields (e.g., Environmental Studies) are BOOMING right now.
— Brian Hochman (@brian_hochman) February 28, 2023
As I wrote in 2017:
The General Social Survey, which has been running for 45 years, includes a ten-question vocabulary test. …
The Audacious Epigone converts the results to an IQ-style scale with a standard deviation of 15 and a mean of 98.
Among respondents who graduated from college in the 1960s, the average score on the vocabulary test, expressed on an IQ scale, was 112.3, almost a standard deviation above average. For each decade since then, the average vocabulary IQ has dropped steadily down to 100.0 (two points above the mean) for those who graduated in the 2010s.
… You might be somewhat surprised by the falling vocabulary test scores because raw IQ scores in the 20th century tended to go up. But the Flynn Effect was seen less on culture-loaded subtests such as vocabulary and more on subtests that resemble programming your smartphone. …
Audacious took another look at vocabulary skill and got a similar result. He calculated the percentage of age 25-40 college grads who answered nine or ten words right out of ten questions on the GSS. In 1974, almost one out of two grads aced the test. By recent years, the high-scorers were down to one out of six.
Much of the explanation for Audacious Epigone’s finding is likely that a larger fraction of the population sticks it out for a bachelor degree today, especially since the 2008 economic collapse dried up construction jobs.
Another factor is that the population of young people is becoming more diverse, and diversity doesn’t correlate well with a mastery of English vocabulary.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
“Their capacities are different…” Yeah, that’s a nice way to put “they aren’t as smart as the kids we used to get.”
I’ll give the modern kids credit for being able to write 144-character tweets with only 2 or 3 typos average each time in 7.3 seconds on average, using only 2 fingers, and being able to figure out who’s responding to whom.
Otherwise, yes, the Nineteenth Century WAS long ago. Good think it hasn’t been 500 years.
For example, Steve says:But I don't think there necessarily is such a thing as a separate "vocabulary IQ." Rather, one's ranking in vocabulary has been traditionally highly correlated with, and is thetefore a tool to measure, general intellectual ability (or "g"). But if the culture changes in some way that deemphasizes the utility of vocabulary, then absolute vocabulary knowledge could decline, while relative vocabulary knowledge could still correlate just as highly with g.
The Flynn effect still mystifies Academics. But it seems to me it just reflects changes in the culture in which the test items that used to correlate most closely with g are simply becoming more commonly distributed. But that doesn't necessarily change the actual mean intelligence of the people taking the tests. It just means that g is still being being measured based on relative rankings, which exist within a new cultural norm that either emphasizes or deemphasizes the ability to aquire particular skills and knowledge.
One has to remember that "The map is not the terrain." IQ test questions don't, by themselves, define "intelligence." It is only their reliable and objective correlation with whatever outcomes we separately define as "intelligence" that matters as a measurement tool.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @bomag
Oh, bullshit. They’re just fucking stupid as bricks and ADD’ed out and high as kites and come from houses without books. And they’ve never been to church, and so even the King James bible is a mystery to them. They can only say whatever they want to say one way (if that). Any other way of saying something baffles them. It’s this shit society’s fault, of course, not the teachers, who nobody has their back, so it’s amazing they ever show up. But one of the things society encourages in the little bastards is self-obsessed utter laziness. Anybody who is not brain-damaged and has been taught to read in English can read the Scarlet Letter if they try a little. Ah, but there’s the rub.
I enjoyed reading that excerpt, just as I enjoyed reading the book in high school long ago. There’s no arguing about taste, but if today’s Harvard students are struggling to understand it that means either smartphones have devastated kids’ literacy or Harvard admissions has become a joke, or both.
These two kids taught themselves to read and write using the immediate feedback of autocorrect.
If a kid is dumb, give him a smart phone, if he is smart, give him a book.Replies: @Dieter Kief, @Anon
In general, I didn’t like the prose style of most of the pre-Civil War American writers we were assigned:
In general, American prose styles back then seemed awkward and long-winded.....I can’t imagine rereading The Scarlet Letter.In other words, Steve hasn't developed as a intellectual since the 10th Grade. Notice, not one word about what Hawthorne, Emerson, or Thoreau were actually saying.
Steve simply stopped on the surface and let it go at that. Of course, his eyes glazed over because he wan't up to the challenge presented by the writer's style. So instead of practicing a bit so as to overcome his obvious defeciency as a reader, he dismissed the writer's work with a shallow value judgment. A good reader is supposed to read a work from the perspective of the writer, not just the reader. That way they can develop their skills as a reader. It's also how one develops the intellectual quality of Perspective. In this case one's historical perspective, which in turn helps develop one's contemporary perspective. That way they're better able to operate out of a wider frame of reference.If the reader is so disoriented by the style that they can't get to the substance of what they writer is saying, let alone make a connection between the two (because of course they're connected) then the reader doesn't judge the book, the book judges them and finds them severely wanting. And by the way, forget Brother John Doran's valuation of the book. What was his analysis of it? Let me guess. Teacher Right/Writer Wrong.As a teacher he's supposed to make analytical statements, not value judgments. And for a simple reason devoid of any complexity - his taste determines nothing. He likes it. He doesn't like it. Whoop Dee Do! From this perspective value judgments are just a way to dismiss something you don't understand. That's teaching?If teachers like that developed their analytical skills they could spare us their value judgments. Of course, it wouldn't solve all of our problems. But there's no question that the quality of life would improve immediately the world over.Replies: @Inquiring Mind
And let’s not even talk about how they are taught no history whatsoever, and they don’t even see historical movies anymore that don’t have zombies and vampires in them.
Really?
REALLY?Replies: @p38ace
....hat tip!
Feature not bug. What passes for history in the US is mostly nonsense anyway.
British colonies SECEDED from Great Britain and we call it a REVOLUTION though there was no attempt to overthrow King George as head of the British state.
Six states SECEDED from the United States before Lincoln was president and the governing regime at the time, Buchanan, let them go. Later an army assembled by the Lincoln regime engaged the Army of SECEDED states in Northern VA and we now call that engagement a CIVIL WAR even though nobody used that terminology at the time, seceded states were no longer part of The UNION and the confederacy was not seeking to replace the United States as governing power over non-seceding states.
This just scratches the surface.
Tastes differ, but I have always enjoyed and learned from Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Longfellow, Whitman, Dickinson and a few lesser lights such as Stowe and Jackson. My mother read us kids Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales as bedtime stories and my father read us Moby Dick, in which I discovered my ideal man — Starbuck.
Incidentally, I’m a millennial, but I sprang from a family in which parents and grandparents read, there were full bookshelves at home and we visited the library often. Children imitate their parents, and if the parents don’t read, neither will their children. I make it a point to read to my children from our heritage American literature to, among other things, help instill in them a national and cultural identity.
“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserable deaths every day for lack of what is found there.”
(William Carlos Williams)
-- Frank O'Hara
When I was in jr high and high school there a few lists of books to read before college. I think part of the reason was to help you indirectly with your SATs. I also had the wonderful good luck around age 12 to come across an early episode of The First Churchills, which was the first series on the first season of Masterpiece Theatre. I was hooked immediately.
English literature, especially Victorian literature, became a big part of my mental landscape and still is. I am very happy about that and if kids today do not have the chance to experience what I did, it is a great shame. My parents were factory workers so this interest was all me.
I wish the professor had specified if her struggling students were English majors, liberal arts majors or a mix of all students. If we have Harvard students studying English who have trouble reading Hawthorn, God help us.
That “literally who on Twitter” has a point though because of all the violence.
I never had a problem with this, because I tend to write in an awkward and long-winded manner. 😉
You do realize most Harvard graduates (and graduates of other Ivies) can’t even read or understand their own diplomas, because these are in Latin, right?
The days of the Ivy students being gentlemen-athletes-scholars are long, long gone along with America’s golden years.
This is but one of the reasons why I love my children reading and debating about the Great Books, both at school and at home. They should be familiar with, and have intelligent opinions about, the literary foundations of the European civilization (and those of East Asia to a lesser extent).
I stopped doing this, but I used to get quite distressed interviewing high school students in my area – supposedly some of the most accomplished in the country – for my almae matres. They were extremely shallow in their knowledge and understanding of the classics. When I asked about virtue, I’d get that deer-caught-in-a-headlight look from the vast majority of them.
Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson
English literature, especially Victorian literature, became a big part of my mental landscape and still is. I am very happy about that and if kids today do not have the chance to experience what I did, it is a great shame. My parents were factory workers so this interest was all me.
I wish the professor had specified if her struggling students were English majors, liberal arts majors or a mix of all students. If we have Harvard students studying English who have trouble reading Hawthorn, God help us.Replies: @Steve Sailer
I’m guessing that Claybaugh’s students aren’t English majors obsessed with French Theory. She sounds pretty old fashioned for a Literature professor. She teaches famous traditional novels, doesn’t sound exceptionally Woke, is a big shot administrator, and has won teaching prizes. Perhaps economics majors who need to take an English course figure she won’t force feed them a lot of weird leftist stuff.
I thought the reading of Dead White Males had been outlawed by Stanford women in 1989. Didn’t Harvard get the memo?
Early American writers obviously benefit from a kind of patriotic affirmative action. There weren’t that many Americans in 1800-1850. And those were around were busy inventing stuff, making money, settling the continent, killing Indians, etc., rather than being intellectuals or indulging in high literature.
English, French, and Russian literature was obviously far superior. But “American writers” needed to be held up for “representation” reasons in a way that’s not entirely different from how thoroughly mediocre black writers must be read today. At some level, you can’t take politics out of art.
As an aside, I wonder how the typesetters felt about the long meandering, discursive sentences and paragraphs that seemed to be in vogue in the early 19th century. When you consider that the manuscripts had to be written out in longhand and then laboriously manually typeset, you’d think it would have created some incentive to cut to the point and eliminate all the ornamental verbiage. But apparently not.
By contrast, if you read prose from a hundred years ago in the 1920s, it’s striking how thoroughly modern it seems.
For British prose authors: Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Bronte sisters, Trollope, Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Ruskin, George Eliot, R.L. Stevenson, John Henry Newman, Oscar Wilde, .. Highly regarded & still read are Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. Others have different fortunes.In Italian, I think that Giovanni Verga is the only one who is appreciated & read.Among Russian authors - Gogol, Leskov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Herzen,.. All are read, although Leskov is virtually unknownThe French: Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, Zola,... Hippolyte Taine was influential, but has vanished.German language authors are paradoxical - prose fiction writers are not much appreciated (Keller, C.F. Meyer,..). The most important German authors are readable philosophers: Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Nietzsche, even Marx in some works, ..
Of course, these authors are impossible to compare. Trollope & Goncharov inhabit different universes & for the modern mind, Goncharov is more "alive", while Trollope has the charm of a social historian. And- Max Stirner, writing in the 1840s, belongs to the 20th C, while most other authors are clearly dated.
I was an English lit major as an undergrad, and I’ve read a load of 19th-century novels.
I’ll make one point here: it’s not really fair to assess the difficulty of many works from this era based on their first few paragraphs, or even pages. Authors at the time often engaged in some showing off, using verbal pyrotechnics and twee appeals to the reader — as Hawthorne does here — presumably with the purpose of establishing their authorly bona fides. It’s not unlike mainstream writers today larding the openings to their works with preambles that signal ‘Oh yes, like-minded reader: I’m woke, so I’m respectable, and you can read this book in public’.
I went over to Project Gutenberg, found The Scarlet Letter, and scrolled to the halfway point in the novel. Here’s a paragraph I found there:
You know what? That’s not really all that hard to read, even in the current year.
I’ve found this to be the case for many older books and essays; it’s hard to push your way through the openings. But once you get going, many of these works are really not that difficult to follow.
It always takes a few pages to a chapter to ‘Orient’ yourself to a writer’s style…
Shakespeare was nonsense to me when I was 8th/9th grade…but after sloughing through Romeo & Juliet (the easiest) Hamlet/King Lear/ etc became entertaining
I despised the Scarlett Letter, but after reading it I happened to flip through a few pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Short Stories and became Obssessed…especially after reading The Birthmark
I think I’ve read all if not most of his books….The House of Seven Gables was especially good…
The days of the Ivy students being gentlemen-athletes-scholars are long, long gone along with America's golden years.This is but one of the reasons why I love my children reading and debating about the Great Books, both at school and at home. They should be familiar with, and have intelligent opinions about, the literary foundations of the European civilization (and those of East Asia to a lesser extent).
I stopped doing this, but I used to get quite distressed interviewing high school students in my area - supposedly some of the most accomplished in the country - for my almae matres. They were extremely shallow in their knowledge and understanding of the classics. When I asked about virtue, I'd get that deer-caught-in-a-headlight look from the vast majority of them.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Redneck farmer, @cityview
Thoreau and Walden changed me for the better. It also made me curious to read “Resistance to Civil Government,” the most inspiring 30 or so pages in Am Lit.
You don’t want to know how many times I’ve heard ‘Game of Thrones is how things used to be’
Really?
REALLY?
Generally, the best 19th century stuff comes from military guys, they didn’t have time for flourishes.
"I won the battle of Gettysburg" became quite the cottage industry in the officer corps present those fateful days, with Chamberlain emerging the clear winner after half a century of self-promotion. Even that fool Dan Sickles thought he should get the laurels; though for me the most memorable postwar thing about him is a 20th century newsreel of him hopping around on that one remaining leg.
Maybe it’s because I’m a girl, but I loved The Scarlet Letter when I first read it in high school (for a class? extra credit? I can’t remember). I don’t remember that opening paragraph, which I probably skimmed, but a few pages later I was swooning over brave, beautiful Hester Prynne with her scarlet “A” embroidered on her dress and her pale, doomed, sensitive, and unutterably handsome minister-secret lover, Arthur Dimmesdale. Also Hester’s creepy husband, Roger Chillingworth, and her little girl, Pearl, the “pearl of great price.”
But I had a head start on Hawthorne. When I was 8 or so, our neighbor across the street, a retired engineer who had a wonderful library, gave me a copy of Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales. They were Greek myths retold for children: Pandora and her box, King Midas turning everything he touched into gold. Hawthorne gave King Midas’s daughter a name–“Merrygold”–and it was so sad and horrible when he hugged her and she turned into a golden statue. The book was a vintage book, perhaps even a first edition, and I think I still have it somewhere in a box of unpacked books.
But those were days when middle-class parents routinely exposed their children to high culture. I was reading Shakespeare at age 10 because my parents had a fat volume of his complete plays on their bookshelf. I opened it one day at random, and the play was Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first and worst. On that random page a maiden named Lavinia had been “ravished” and had her tongue and hands cut off. I didn’t know what “ravished” meant, but the gore fascinated me, so I read on and on, braving my way through yellowed pages, fine print, and nearly unreadable double columns. Shakespeare became my friend. That was the way it was for children back then.
I'm a girl who first read The Scarlet Letter in high school and was really disappointed by it. Not enough sex. Henry James suited me much better since so many of his works concern passion, whether unrequited, thwarted or illicit.
If Hawthorne included in The Scarlet Letterbanything like this from James's The Portrait of a Lady, I missed it:
"He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession."
Or I like literature where the distaff presence is either peripheral to the story or absent altogether. Heart of Darkness or Moby Dick. Or Kim.Replies: @Charlotte Allen
The days of the Ivy students being gentlemen-athletes-scholars are long, long gone along with America's golden years.This is but one of the reasons why I love my children reading and debating about the Great Books, both at school and at home. They should be familiar with, and have intelligent opinions about, the literary foundations of the European civilization (and those of East Asia to a lesser extent).
I stopped doing this, but I used to get quite distressed interviewing high school students in my area - supposedly some of the most accomplished in the country - for my almae matres. They were extremely shallow in their knowledge and understanding of the classics. When I asked about virtue, I'd get that deer-caught-in-a-headlight look from the vast majority of them.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Redneck farmer, @cityview
A true classical liberal arts education might appeal to boys, and as our host as pointed out, the goal of current education theory is to make school unattractive for boys.
So, how does one fight this?
The stories are fantastic: “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Maypole of Merrymount.” They are Hawthorne’s true gems.
How much of this is because students now speak English as a second language ? I would hate to face a test like this in a language that I could manage it but was not my native language.
I hear echoes of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye when I read this opening page of the Scarlett Letter. Strange. Not too strange though.
I know the first page of The Catcher by heart because an utterly tasteful, charming and sexy English teching assistant, only a few years older than I was, told me to learn it. Those were the quite happy days 1970 ff. near Heidelberg/Mannheim. Salinger and Hawthorne both go for the romantic twilight zone of the half-conscious dreams & longings, lust & visions.
Good teachers get the young MDMA crowds, as soon as they manage to make the magical connection that is enshrined in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose style as well as in this and other chemical substances. What’s still up – and will continue to be be up – – is to find the other way round to transcnedence, as Heinrich von Kleist put that, and he continued: Now,that the direct way to paradise is blocked***.
***note that that was in accordance with what modern – theology was saying too – – so teh genius Kleist’s was a n enlightned, but not a anti-regilion/transcendence approach
A lot of 19th century novels were originally written for serial publication in magazines, for which the writers were paid by the word.
In “Real Education” Charles Murray, in support of his view that only 20 percent (10 percent if he really had his way) of high school graduates should go to college, quotes two random sequential paragraphs from the middle of several big general survey college textbooks in humanities and STEM to show the level of reading comprehension required. Yeah, you’ve got to concentrate, and these textbooks are hundreds of pages long.
Only admitting the 85th percentile or above to college would mean that an IQ of about 115 would be the minimum. So much for diversity.
I'll give the modern kids credit for being able to write 144-character tweets with only 2 or 3 typos average each time in 7.3 seconds on average, using only 2 fingers, and being able to figure out who's responding to whom.
Otherwise, yes, the Nineteenth Century WAS long ago. Good think it hasn't been 500 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIRDCR8xSO0Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Hypnotoad666, @JimDandy
See, only 1 typo!
General/President U. S. Grant, as has been often noted, was an excellent writer.
Hearsay opinion has long claimed that Mark Twain ghostwrote Grant's Autobiography.
In the late 1970s in England, it became an educational fad to promote the use of single clause, simple sentences. Like “the cat sat on the mat”. Grammar and punctuation were deemed less important than whatever the student was trying to say. This attitude still prevailed in the late 90s, at university. I had a lecturer mark down an essay because it contained long but grammatically correct sentences. I appealed and won. But the upshot is, lots of people now cannot decipher sentences with more than one clause or subclause.
I'll give the modern kids credit for being able to write 144-character tweets with only 2 or 3 typos average each time in 7.3 seconds on average, using only 2 fingers, and being able to figure out who's responding to whom.
Otherwise, yes, the Nineteenth Century WAS long ago. Good think it hasn't been 500 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIRDCR8xSO0Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Hypnotoad666, @JimDandy
Maybe. But I wonder if it’s more nuanced than that because IQ (or “g,” more accurately) expresses itself differently based on the culture in which it operates. (Which is totally different than saying that “g” or “IQ” is merely a cultural construct.)
For example, Steve says:
But I don’t think there necessarily is such a thing as a separate “vocabulary IQ.” Rather, one’s ranking in vocabulary has been traditionally highly correlated with, and is thetefore a tool to measure, general intellectual ability (or “g”). But if the culture changes in some way that deemphasizes the utility of vocabulary, then absolute vocabulary knowledge could decline, while relative vocabulary knowledge could still correlate just as highly with g.
The Flynn effect still mystifies Academics. But it seems to me it just reflects changes in the culture in which the test items that used to correlate most closely with g are simply becoming more commonly distributed. But that doesn’t necessarily change the actual mean intelligence of the people taking the tests. It just means that g is still being being measured based on relative rankings, which exist within a new cultural norm that either emphasizes or deemphasizes the ability to aquire particular skills and knowledge.
One has to remember that “The map is not the terrain.” IQ test questions don’t, by themselves, define “intelligence.” It is only their reliable and objective correlation with whatever outcomes we separately define as “intelligence” that matters as a measurement tool.
De gustibus…
Steve likes clear, not highly metaphorical tortuous sentences, so I guess -I’m not sure- he prefers Hemingway over Faulkner. Also, as regards narrative fiction, I suppose he is more into “sociological” type of imaginative literature, not so much into psychological-metaphysical.
Steve likes clear, not highly metaphorical tortuous sentences, so I guess -I'm not sure- he prefers Hemingway over Faulkner. Also, as regards narrative fiction, I suppose he is more into "sociological" type of imaginative literature, not so much into psychological-metaphysical.Replies: @Steve Sailer
My favorite prose stylists are the post-Hemingway Brits like Waugh, Orwell, and “A Roving Commission” Churchill.
But, there are not just temperamental, but also national differences.
British author & critic Walter Allen wrote two books about novels in English: The English novel (it ends with Joyce and Lawrence) & Tradition and Dream.
In the latter book he discusses American literature & I think Harold Bloom was influenced by Allen. In short, Allen posits that American novels are the best when they are romances, not realist novels in the ordinary sense. His example was "Wuthering Heights", which he- along many others- considers an "oddity" in English fiction.
But it wouldn't have been an oddity in the American tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James' "supernatural" novellas, Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", Nathanael West, Cormac McCarthy at his most extravagant etc.
So, considering the approach to reality, in Allen's and Bloom's view, canonical (an adjective Bloom overused) American prose tradition is centered in visionary romances. Also, they seem to prefer, stylistically, neo-Baroque rhetorical excess.
But why not have it both? Gongorism & limpid prose; visionary romances & realist fiction? That's the richness of a literary culture.
For once, the Wiki Bio isn't bad.Just one more life senselessly wasted.
I read The Scarlet Letter one Christmas over two days and enjoyed it immensely.
Being forced to read a book for school can kill any enjoyment to be had from it.
People always debate whether our society is turning into Huxley vs. Orwell. Neither. Bradbury. Only instead of burning books, they will be edited for reasons of "safety". Get them in print, and start patronizing the new uncensored crypto book stores. Now.
That’s funny, exactly the same thing happened to me in high school.
As I observed my kids’ education, it seems to me that for kids in really good high schools STEM is vastly more sophisticated and the humanities have been tremendously dumbed down versus 40 years ago.
Not surprising.
But, there are not just temperamental, but also national differences.
British author & critic Walter Allen wrote two books about novels in English: The English novel (it ends with Joyce and Lawrence) & Tradition and Dream.
In the latter book he discusses American literature & I think Harold Bloom was influenced by Allen. In short, Allen posits that American novels are the best when they are romances, not realist novels in the ordinary sense. His example was “Wuthering Heights”, which he- along many others- considers an “oddity” in English fiction.
But it wouldn’t have been an oddity in the American tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James’ “supernatural” novellas, Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”, Nathanael West, Cormac McCarthy at his most extravagant etc.
So, considering the approach to reality, in Allen’s and Bloom’s view, canonical (an adjective Bloom overused) American prose tradition is centered in visionary romances. Also, they seem to prefer, stylistically, neo-Baroque rhetorical excess.
But why not have it both? Gongorism & limpid prose; visionary romances & realist fiction? That’s the richness of a literary culture.
For example, Steve says:But I don't think there necessarily is such a thing as a separate "vocabulary IQ." Rather, one's ranking in vocabulary has been traditionally highly correlated with, and is thetefore a tool to measure, general intellectual ability (or "g"). But if the culture changes in some way that deemphasizes the utility of vocabulary, then absolute vocabulary knowledge could decline, while relative vocabulary knowledge could still correlate just as highly with g.
The Flynn effect still mystifies Academics. But it seems to me it just reflects changes in the culture in which the test items that used to correlate most closely with g are simply becoming more commonly distributed. But that doesn't necessarily change the actual mean intelligence of the people taking the tests. It just means that g is still being being measured based on relative rankings, which exist within a new cultural norm that either emphasizes or deemphasizes the ability to aquire particular skills and knowledge.
One has to remember that "The map is not the terrain." IQ test questions don't, by themselves, define "intelligence." It is only their reliable and objective correlation with whatever outcomes we separately define as "intelligence" that matters as a measurement tool.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @bomag
I never brought up IQ, Hypno. I just noted the excerpt from the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, which I could read just fine, and enjoyed, in 9th or 10th grade, lots of clauses or not. (<—see, like that, haha!) I don't know about "vocabulary IQ" which wouldn't be a factor here, but then what is it, "grammar IQ"?
I get your point about the students being as smart as need be for the current culture (which sucks, BTW). However, what ARE they good at? Are they better at working with their hands than Boomers and generations prior? No. Are they better at critical thinking? No. (The latter is not all their own faults – they've been brought up to not think critically by that 13 years of mandatory indoctrination.) How about smarter at the level of conversation? No. You can't even ask a simple question with no anger or malice intended before their eyes freeze up and they get that look "why are you doing this, asking me something that you could have texted me about or used an app?!
It's not every one of them, of course, but these new generations are mostly just dumb as rocks. Mike Judge was off by 425 to 450 years, the way this is going.
But, also: fuck The Scarlett Letter.
The Hawthorne text needs to be read carefully and not skipped or skimmed to be understood, but it’s not that hard. The only part which needs some context, or a classical education, is the phrase “to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature” which is probably a reference to the image used by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, in which people are originally made of two parts, which are then split, and ever after search for each other.
I know the first page of The Catcher by heart because an utterly tasteful, charming and sexy English teching assistant, only a few years older than I was, told me to learn it. Those were the quite happy days 1970 ff. near Heidelberg/Mannheim. Salinger and Hawthorne both go for the romantic twilight zone of the half-conscious dreams & longings, lust & visions.
Good teachers get the young MDMA crowds, as soon as they manage to make the magical connection that is enshrined in Nathaniel Hawthorne's prose style as well as in this and other chemical substances. What's still up - and will continue to be be up - - is to find the other way round to transcnedence, as Heinrich von Kleist put that, and he continued: Now,that the direct way to paradise is blocked***.
***note that that was in accordance with what modern - theology was saying too - - so teh genius Kleist's was a n enlightned, but not a anti-regilion/transcendence approachReplies: @JimDandy
I thought of the opening of Gatsby, actually–as well as the opening of Bartleby, which is a great (and pretty funny) story. I cant help wonder now if Melville’s narrator was a parody of the gasbag who narrates Scarlett Letter.
Hm?
It is claer that books talk to one another though. - Nowadays that phenomenon is called intertextuality. - Strange & stiff name, but no wrong name methinks.Replies: @JimDandy
Waugh and Orwell were only five years younger than Hemingway so surely can be taken as contemporaries; and Churchill was much older – but I guess you are referring to their floreats, which started later than Hemingway’s.
Nah. It’s simpler. People are getting dumber and lazier and have less capacity for concentration due to phones etc. I see it in myself as well. Years ago, I would be able to read whole novels by Hawthorne, Melville*, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Nowadays, I struggle to even read without skipping Ron Unz’s and Freud-Jung’s mere 10,000 words blog posts… And even some admittedly shorter but equally boring posts about NFL statistics by Steve.
(But at least I have the excuse of relative old age.)
*Well, I could never finish Moby Dick, but found Bartleby the Scrivener really good, and not hard at all.
I admit, I’ve never been able to get into the mood of writing something I deemed truly important, without beginning in a confessionary spirit very much like that evinced by Hawthorne’s opening paragraph. The point is to overcome the reluctances experienced in a writing process in which one attempts, as it were, to “elope” with the reader, to become the spiritual husband of someone who is at first perhaps not entirely willing, to offer them something which you know to be a true good but which initially comes as a pretty tough sell. As a result of these implacable conditions, the form of such utterances naturally includes the following elements:
1. The Autobiographical. I know that what I have to offer is mainly “myself,” i.e. whatever I have been gifted by God and nature, what I have made through my own will and efforts, whatever experiences Providence has guided me by.
2. The Remorseful. This self of mine is my most cherished possession, the most valuable thing I have to give away. All the same, I recognize its insufficiencies. Some of the tediousness here is my attempt to make up for them. Furthermore, I apologize for carrying you off in this rude and rough manner, but I had to take you before somebody else did. Nobody else will care about you as much as I do.
3. The Appeal to Friendship. I have faith that in time we will become kindred spirits, that eventually you will come to cherish my soul, which is my gift, as much as I do; and that in doing so we will come to realize the true meaning of charity, which loves the neighbor as itself, in spite of all the blemishes of sin.
When all this is factored in, the style of the prose inevitably tends towards something highly wrought. Occasional bursts of rhetorical flourish are not a sign of arrogance but more of a concession to nature, a recognition that even a good end is not always achievable without some drama to juice it along. But more then that, the complexity of expression, sentences full of subordinate clauses and modifiers, a reliance on the gesticulatory effects of inventive punctuation, is above all a sign of respect for the reader. The intent here is to assure the close reader that you’ve anticipated his concerns and objections, that you’ve thoroughly explored the territory, that what might initially seem an unpromising vein is actually the true path, and that in your own tortuous route of discovery you’ve experienced all the same difficulties, so you can be trusted as a guide. There is nothing wrong with a paragraph that must be read four times to understand it, as long as the reward for such efforts is a real increase in wisdom.
For writing is yeoman’s work. All real men have a certain inborn contempt for reading and writing, a contempt which they cannot overcome lest they present the endeavor to themselves as some kind of quest for gain; something which, like the harvest and the hunt, like the sowing and the reaping, brings a reward at the end of all the toil. The purpose of reading and writing is to gather to oneself the fruits of the spirit—the rarest, finest, most quintessential matter which cannot be compressed or contained except in a pure vessel.
Real writing must burnish the vessel before it fills it.
Whaddaya gonna do: as some guy once said, The road that can be spoken of, is not the real road.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
A couple of special ed/rides the short bus neighbor kids help me out during the summer at my truck patch. They cannot do simple arithmetic, but can read and send texts at a functional level. The same type of kids in my high school during the 80s struggled with arithmetic AND literacy.
These two kids taught themselves to read and write using the immediate feedback of autocorrect.
If a kid is dumb, give him a smart phone, if he is smart, give him a book.
Spell checkers, in my experience, know nothing of context and grammar. Frequently a word with a different meaning is substituted for the incorrectly spelled, or a fat finger typo, intended word.
Ending up with people who can read a tweet, but go into a trance when faced with anything more than a short paragraph.
"Idiocracy" was supposed to be a parody of the future.
The best, tour de force commentary on the “awkward and long-winded” style of early American literature is Mark Twain’s droll essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” which is online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm
Cooper is fantastic. And I speak as someone who's read about 20 of his novels, not just The Leatherstocking Tales.
It’s tragic that our dumbed down generations can’t even approach the Scarlet Letter. It’s a perversion that their teachers, and commentators at large, make excuses for keeping them locked within their empty, self referential bubbles.
At parochial school, we had nuns who were narrow, some were very stupid, some were gracious and generous, but they all were determined to filter some knowledge into our thick skulls. We also had a sort of great books program in grammar school in the 70s. Your parents forked over ten bucks and once a week a volunteer mother led a group in reading classics for kids. It was a condensed box set. The parent volunteer wasn’t Lionel Trilling, but she was good natured and organized, and led discussions. The summer before attending all boys, college preparatory, Jesuit High School, we were forwarded a list of 20 or so books to read before entering. We picked five, all considered classics of American and British literature.
Our current crop of automatons are encouraged to be thick as bricks. They could all get something out of 19th century literature if they weren’t coddled in their idiocy.
Foe his time, Hawthorne was quite a progressive and not ashamed to blur the facts to support his point.
Many early settlers would be wearing scarlet letters on any particular day. The idea any one of them would feel extreme shame and be ostracized is possible but unlikely. They were in a new harsh environment in which group survival depended on keeping everyone in line
Bit of trivia since we’re discussing The Scarlet Letter: adultery was a crime in colonial Massachusetts, and Hackett-Fisher’s research indicated men were punished more harshly/frequently than women. Unlike Virginia, where male adultery was frequently ignored.
One of the interesting themes you can detect in the many published reminiscences of Civil War officers is how consciously they imitated the style of Caesar and Xenophon in regaling us with their martial glory.
“I won the battle of Gettysburg” became quite the cottage industry in the officer corps present those fateful days, with Chamberlain emerging the clear winner after half a century of self-promotion. Even that fool Dan Sickles thought he should get the laurels; though for me the most memorable postwar thing about him is a 20th century newsreel of him hopping around on that one remaining leg.
Not only would the comma and hyphen be missing, but the title would be reversed around the colon.
“A Story of Wall Street: Bartleby the Scrivener”
I reckon we live in the age of doing strange things with colons of every kind.
The reason the Scarlet Letter was taught in the first place has nothing to do with its value as literature, but with the fact that it is a “classic” where the Christian society is portrayed as small-minded and hypocritical.
The aldultress is not just portrayed as sympathetic, but saintly. The adultery is “okay” because they had a genuine romance or some crap like that.
It is not unreadable though. These Harvard kids don’t have the patience to sit through a black and white movie, let alone read a real book.
We live in a post literate culture.
I had to read it in HS and was indifferent to the writing itself. But, I could see that there was some serious puritan-hating going on in the mind of the author, and I didn't like that at all.
I feel the same way about To Kill a Mockingbird and the Crucible, two other books kids are fed.
These books help to lay a foundation of scorn for Christianity and white American culture.
Both Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale sin, but Hester expiates her sin and thus becomes free. Dimmesdale, by contrast, is too vain, cowardly, and attached to his status as preacher to confess and pay the penalty, so his sin literally eats away at him and and destroys him physically--while Hester becomes ever stronger.
You have to recall, too, that Hester thinks her husband is dead when she takes up with Dimmesdale, and she in fact confesses to Chillingworth that she has wronged him. Her sin, though, is a sin of passion, whereas Chillingworth, who seeks to destroy Dimmesdale, acts out of pure malice. It's a contrast between the concupiscent and irascible passions.Replies: @James Braxton, @Inquiring Mind
I’ve been told that they reject most National Merit Finalists who apply.Replies: @J.Ross
(William Carlos Williams)Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease
“When I want to know the news, I read Byron.”
— Frank O’Hara
Hawthorne’s utopian “Blithedale Romance” is a hoot, too. Who knew a commune of like-minded liberals could come to such an inauspicious end?
“In general, American prose styles back then seemed awkward and long winded.”
I wonder when this style changed. Ulysses Grant’s autobiography, for example, is very accessible. Of course, it was written at least a half a century after the Scarlet Letter.
Sorry, that’s fucking terrible. I love to read, and I couldn’t even get through that paragraph. I’d love to go back in time, grab Hawthorne (and Edward Gibbon for that matter) by the neck and slap them back and forth while saying “Short. Choppy. Sentences. Motherfuckers.”
For example, Steve says:But I don't think there necessarily is such a thing as a separate "vocabulary IQ." Rather, one's ranking in vocabulary has been traditionally highly correlated with, and is thetefore a tool to measure, general intellectual ability (or "g"). But if the culture changes in some way that deemphasizes the utility of vocabulary, then absolute vocabulary knowledge could decline, while relative vocabulary knowledge could still correlate just as highly with g.
The Flynn effect still mystifies Academics. But it seems to me it just reflects changes in the culture in which the test items that used to correlate most closely with g are simply becoming more commonly distributed. But that doesn't necessarily change the actual mean intelligence of the people taking the tests. It just means that g is still being being measured based on relative rankings, which exist within a new cultural norm that either emphasizes or deemphasizes the ability to aquire particular skills and knowledge.
One has to remember that "The map is not the terrain." IQ test questions don't, by themselves, define "intelligence." It is only their reliable and objective correlation with whatever outcomes we separately define as "intelligence" that matters as a measurement tool.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @bomag
I suppose. Less need today for the skill of reading and navigating by map, now that we have GPS.
But I like to think that an IQ 115 person today would learn travel geography to the same extent as an IQ 115 person in 1970: many people then had no need to worry about general navigation, but then as now, I would think there is a general presumption one should learn the basics of river systems, mountain ranges, etc.
Same with math: I presume basic math skills are still important enough that we could expect similar levels of achievement today. But, to echo Achmed E., it’s rather astonishing to experience the innumeracy of store clerks today.
Graham writes:
How many American schools teach Hawthorne, let alone Aristophanes or Plato?
Are there Sailer readers who went through IB programs or similar foreign ones like Bac or Abitur and could opine?
I’m thinking that computer programming; and our interaction with computers; was a driver in this.
Only admitting the 85th percentile or above to college would mean that an IQ of about 115 would be the minimum. So much for diversity.Replies: @bomag
I suppose that was one push to require advanced degrees for jobs previously requiring lesser credentials.
Alas, even that is being contaminated.
Your spergy, geeky first husband who you “took to the cleaners” in a divorce settlement after you left him for the lead actor in your community theatre musical play, this ex of yours admires Roger Prynne as the hero of this tale (that’s this character’s real name, sistah; Hester was not one of those liberated women who kept her birth name).
Even high-school English teachers just don’t “get” what The Scarlet Letter is about. It is about high school, and if K-12 teachers could teach it that way, this book would become immensely popular. But then my junior-year English teacher couldn’t help this, because she was a girl who had your interpretation.
Yes, indeed you are a girl. A girl swooning over some knuckle-brained sports hero, who regarded this one boy as a creep, the guy your mother couldn’t stop talking about who is in AP Calculus, Latin Club and wants to become an aeronatical engineer.
Medicine tech engineering all those fields are No White Men Need Apply. And have been for decades. Between the US government’s anti White laws and the tech companies insane preference for non White foreigners,
The White boy you described would never be admitted to an aeronautical engineering program today. It’s 2023.
I used to think the average age of the Men of UNZ is about 70. Now I think it’s about 95.
What “Kid’s Today” think about Scarlet Letter. Why didn’t she just get an abortion?Replies: @Mr. Anon
Young people today miss-out on the richness of everyday life. They are oblivious to the little ironies and metaphors and interesting connections and meanings that enrich one’s day, all there for the taking. I, a relic, manage to do a pretty good job of noticing and understanding and enjoying these. Thanks, high-school English teacher, who made me realize that, while I could not explain why The Ancient Mariner shot the albatross, if I worked harder, I would be able to do it.
My biggest critique of much of the high school curriculum is that students don’t have the life experience to appreciate much of it, especially literature. Only after one has had the first full-time job can one appreciate Bartleby’s position. We also have students read Lord of the Flies but they aren’t introspective to realize that we are calling them savages.
As for me, I had to read Bartleby the Scrivener immediately after reading Moby Dick, so I was all tired out of Melville to appreciate it at the time.
As AE (please come back) pointed out, as the share of the population that goes to college increases, the quality of the average student decreases. Higher education is a bona fide business at this point, so the goal is to get as many warm bodies in the door as possible, make sure you have degree offerings that are simple enough for the bottom 50% to muddle through, relieve them of their borrowed money, and make way for the next batch of suckers/students.
Prof Hochman, whose tweet is pictured above, accidentally owns himself by pointing out that while traditional humanities courses that require students to contemplate the external world and other eras/cultures of history are in decline, those that specialize in racial navel-gazing are going great. In other words, schools have expanded offerings for dimwit kids that just want to talk about themselves.
That these degrees are essentially useless in the real world and their holders tend to settle into jobs with mediocre salaried make-work jobs with their residual student loans being a financial anchor is never discussed.
If those 1850’s authors seem overly wordy and hard to read, you would probably enjoy Mark Twain’s review of The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. Twain says The Deerslayer committed 114 “offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.”
https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/HNS/Indians/critic.html
Was Twain the first American author to write in the way that people actually spoke?
Could early American writers have used the comma more often because Americans were the cream-of-the-crop, and thus had the attention span for it?
I am jesting. I thought it was kind of weird, when I was reading some French author and he started mentioning James Fenimore Cooper.
of course everything is declining, but it’s also time to drop these really old books and texts from the curriculum. not for the reasons the cranky leftists want, but for practical reasons. English Department 2023 needs a complete overhaul.
this stuff is super irrelevant. writers from 150 years ago don’t have anything to tell us about the modern world. fiction writers born 200 years ago have zero useful observations about life to impart on us, no useful information to transmit to the average person of average capability in 2020. the world has changed so much that your own grandparents are very wrong about everything, and cannot even perform the usual function of passing down wisdom to younger generations. they will give you completely incorrect information about how to meet people to marry, how to find a job.
“But the point is to become more facile at the language itself, so it’s good practice to read master writers from any era.” Is this even a useful exercise, in the English department itself? remember that today, the students read and write A LOT more than ANYBODY from 100 years ago. they are on the internet all day every day. they are texting on their phones all day every day. they are bombarded with English from age 2. they’re good at reading and writing for practical, useful purposes in 2020. they have to be, to survive economically now.
students today who “suck at English” are 10 times better and faster at writing than people 100 years ago. it’s the format which has changed due to tech. 400 page paper books are not relevant anymore and never will be again, so why are we training a million students to be good at engaging that kind of material? you’re training them to be good at working with horses and wagons.
the English skill set of the boomers and older generations, of having the patience to read a few dozen long paper books, and being capable of hand writing paper letters sent in the mail, but NOT being able to use a computer, use a keyboard, use the internet, write an email, or read anything on phones or online, IS OBSOLETE. these people are going away and that skill set will never return to being relevant or useful. complaining about old, irrelevant books not capturing the interest of the student body is like complaining that cursive handwriting is going away and that poetry has vanished.
At least I know it's not AI, only a human is capable of writing such drivel.
Not really, that’s pretty standard for the time. And still, it’s easier to read. Why?
The Flynn effect is bullshit, people are clearly getting dumber. In the past, writers could present multiple ideas per sentence (because they knew their readers could deal with them) and communicate them all clearly. This is why you should read old books when you really want to learn something, especially with sciences that haven’t changed much with their basics like astronomy.
Modern books have one idea per book that they very slowly build up to by increasingly less vague hints.
Old books:
Idea 1 and idea 2, incidentally idea 3, therefore idea 4.
New books:
Introductory chapters dealing with the writers feelings and the things she was going through which made her write the book. Pompous yet superficial overview about how we as humans have related to the idea through history. Anecdotes about the idea and how it’s been in the news lately. Enormously vague hint about what the idea might be. Slightly less vague hint. Obvious hint. And then…the idea. Thanks, book. Thanks for robbing me of my time.
IOW, they have no power of concentration. That’s what concentration means: being able to read “Wall-Street” and understand the convention. I suppose “Wall St.” would confuse them as well.
No wonder pronouns puzzle them.
Derr, what rub? I don’t get it. You must be a weirdo. Stop harassing me, weirdo. I’ll message HR.
I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in Brother John Doran’s tenth grade American Literature class and didn’t like it. My eyes glazed over….
In general, I didn’t like the prose style of most of the pre-Civil War American writers we were assigned:
In general, American prose styles back then seemed awkward and long-winded…..I can’t imagine rereading The Scarlet Letter.
In other words, Steve hasn’t developed as a intellectual since the 10th Grade.
Notice, not one word about what Hawthorne, Emerson, or Thoreau were actually saying.
Steve simply stopped on the surface and let it go at that. Of course, his eyes glazed over because he wan’t up to the challenge presented by the writer’s style. So instead of practicing a bit so as to overcome his obvious defeciency as a reader, he dismissed the writer’s work with a shallow value judgment.
A good reader is supposed to read a work from the perspective of the writer, not just the reader. That way they can develop their skills as a reader. It’s also how one develops the intellectual quality of Perspective. In this case one’s historical perspective, which in turn helps develop one’s contemporary perspective. That way they’re better able to operate out of a wider frame of reference.
If the reader is so disoriented by the style that they can’t get to the substance of what they writer is saying, let alone make a connection between the two (because of course they’re connected) then the reader doesn’t judge the book, the book judges them and finds them severely wanting.
And by the way, forget Brother John Doran’s valuation of the book. What was his analysis of it? Let me guess. Teacher Right/Writer Wrong.
As a teacher he’s supposed to make analytical statements, not value judgments. And for a simple reason devoid of any complexity – his taste determines nothing. He likes it. He doesn’t like it. Whoop Dee Do! From this perspective value judgments are just a way to dismiss something you don’t understand. That’s teaching?
If teachers like that developed their analytical skills they could spare us their value judgments. Of course, it wouldn’t solve all of our problems. But there’s no question that the quality of life would improve immediately the world over.
Mark TwainReplies: @Inquiring Mind
One wonders whether the rise of the penny press spurred authors to prune their excess verbiage.
Wait til you see the pre-Civil War II curriculum
150 years ago, pace of life was much slower, life was much more boring. people had to time waste on long, drawn out prose for books, where spending hundreds of pages telling a bland story was fine because there was no such thing as a movie that got to the point in 90 minutes. people actually wrote poetry because they were so bored. mail moved at a creep, so it was fine to waste an hour writing a carefully worded letter in cursive. baseball and unlimited rounds boxing were considered interesting.
not taking into account the DRAMATIC increase in pace of life is one of the biggest background errors here. people in the past had time to master their language because LIFE WAS SLOW AND BORING. so they could do that as there was a lot less else to do. today, you better spit it out, cause we all got other stuff to do. teach people good English skills for the modern world. 2 minutes to write an email, 30 seconds to read. 30 seconds to write a text, 10 seconds to read. or whatever the ratio should be. 4 to 1, 3 to 1. you can write scripts for television shows that go on for years, but it has to be digestible in 60 minute chunks. undergrad English instruction should be relevant to the world we live in, not 1850.
also, the writers back then WEREN’T THAT GOOD. just like sports or any other endeavor, the population explosion by 1900, of even smart people, combined with everybody being forced to go thru 12 years of school, meant that there were way more and better writers in the 20th century. Moby Dick is boring as hell. Melville is just not a good story teller compared to guys that came after. none of the old guys are that good even at writing entertaining fiction. they’re like 19th century baseball players. you can write novels if you want too, but the general population moved on from that long ago. you aren’t going to be the next Rowling or Martin, and even they became way more famous after movies were made out of their books.
of course there’s an ideal compromise somewhere between short attention span twittering and youtubing from millennials versus being a master modern writer like Heinlein or Dick, but we should be leaving the 19th century stuff in the past by this point.
The basic point here, is that at one time, if someone said “I can’t figure out what this guy Hawthorne is saying,” it meant, and the humble student might feel as well, that that means either he’s 1. stupid or 2. needs to learn how to read Hawthorne (like you need to learn how to read Shakespeare : “Wherefore art thou Romeo” doesn’t mean “Where is Romeo” but “Why are you [called] Romeo”). That’s what “education” meant, you know, learning new things. From the Latin for “to draw out.”
Today, in the same way “tolerance” now means “forced to accept,” the inference is “There’s something wrong with Hawthorne, he writes funny; away with him.”
Thank you. I read YGB way back in high school and I shall never forget it as long as I live. Hawthorne FTMFW! As we say nowadays.
in summary, extreme language mastery to the point of wankery was the product of a low tech world. that world is gone now and will never return. Shakespeare was deeply bored. if born today, he wouldn’t have written any of that stuff. this is a thesis i haven’t seen suggested anywhere else – increasing tech level itself necessarily reduces language mastery. just as it reduces birth rate.
yes, the average undergrad in the English department today is less smart than they were 100 years ago. they aren’t as good at English as they used to be. but also, the actual smart guys aren’t going to bother with an English degree. they COULD become the language master wankers which the English professors want to see, but they recognize that this would be a stupid waste of their time, so they do STEM or finance instead.
English departments today get third rates students because English mastery today is largely a waste of your time. all your peers will pass you up in life after studying things which are much more relevant to 2023 life. in fact, it goes even further than that. learning a second language today is often a waste of your time now, considering the pace of computer language translation. it’s very situational, and not automatically scholarly or erudite anymore to spend years picking up certain other languages. programming languages are what matter, not human languages.
Funny. I read the Scarlet Letter in Brother Edmund’s 11th grade class. I’m mean, I attempted it. Maybe I’ll try to justify the old boy and try it again at this late stage.
I think Harvard knows which students are the top verbalists from interviews and essays — the male Jewish students, for example — it simply rejects a lot more of them. Henry Kissinger was obviously just such a top verbalist at Harvard. When he wrote an undergrad honors thesis weighing in at nearly 1000 pages, the liberal arts departments enacted page limits for the first time. Contrast Henry Kissinger at Harvard in the 30s to Sonya Sotomayor as a Princeton undergrad in the 70s. Her reading skills were so abysmal that she used to read children’s books to improve her literacy. And to this day, without her army of sharp clerks, I doubt she could write a coherent Supreme Court opinion to back up her utterly predictable left wing decisions. But soon even those sharp clerks will be replaced by ChatGPT. So there you have it. Even as far back as the 70s, Ivy schools were test driving admissions policies to admit idiots with woke biographies, in their mad dash to make the elite class look more like the third world hoards which poured in when Hart and Cellars threw open the immigration gates.
Isn’t saying “prose style “ a redundancy error? I mean, “style” is listed as a synonym of prose in the thesaurus. Saying on or the other should be fine.
Or am I just being critically critical?
I’m intrigued that no commenters yet have mentioned the double entendre of the title. You MBA weenie, you. I was hoping something in the post would connect that aspect also. But it seems like just a cute title–no observer effect in the article, itself.
I agree with the dislike for the style of Hawthorne, both your initial para and the intermediate para that Calvinist quoted. And yes, I don’t like ridiculously multi-clause sentences.
I do remember reading that novel in 11th grade (non honors) English and finding it digestible. I think I could get past the prose style because of the relatable human drama of the adulatory and the shaming. On the other hand, trying to get through Absalom Absalom for 12th grade AP was too much.
I’m not sure about US versus UK style. I think maybe those other writers had better story telling also. I would say that for antebellum US lit, Poe is very readable still–The Gold Bug, for instance.
I read a lot of older math texts and find that flowery writing (long paras) and/or poor typography (e.g. not separating equations from text) makes them harder to digest. And in general, I see this (imperfectly) correlated to older texts and to UK (not US) texts.
You’re crazy but nevertheless hitting the mark this morning!
….hat tip!
Prof Hochman, whose tweet is pictured above, accidentally owns himself by pointing out that while traditional humanities courses that require students to contemplate the external world and other eras/cultures of history are in decline, those that specialize in racial navel-gazing are going great. In other words, schools have expanded offerings for dimwit kids that just want to talk about themselves.
That these degrees are essentially useless in the real world and their holders tend to settle into jobs with mediocre salaried make-work jobs with their residual student loans being a financial anchor is never discussed.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
“degree offerings that are simple enough for the bottom 50% to muddle through, relieve them of their borrowed money, and make way for the next batch of suckers/students”
Couldn’t agree more. Along with this then comes degree grade inflation (firsts are common now in the UK, it used to be that some courses only awarded one every couple of years) and degree quality inflation (my son, with a first and looking for a job after three years enjoying himself/teaching English abroad, said he’d pretty much HAVE to add a Masters to get a job in his field).
A third in 1975 is a 2-2 now – hell, a FAIL in 1975 is a 2-2 now.
At the same time living standards are dropping – I bought my first house at 25 working at a very low-paid job, now 30 year olds with doctorates are sharing houses as if they were 19.
It doesn’t bother me that Harvard is getting dumber, or that these students who can’t read Hawthorne will end up with a fancy (and fraudulent) degree.
The problem is that smart students who want to read Hawthorne and discuss it intelligently have no place to go. Is there an English department left in America that still allows the scholarly study of English literature?
Also, it is wrong for these colleges to have such an influence on our society in the first place. In a free market I would expect successful business leaders to come from all types of backgrounds. Only a few would come from Ivy League colleges. Political leaders, including the elected leaders and the staff they appoint, would come from the people who elect those leaders. Very few Ivy League grads should be in positions of political leadership in a Republic. Cultural leaders should come from whatever grows naturally, like Shakespeare packing his bag to go to London, sell plays, and open the Globe theater. In that world an Ivy League degree don’t mean shit.
Perhaps once you could argue that the “best and the brightest” went to these schools and then just naturally succeeded in the world. I look at this and think “What a racket!”
There’s an analogue here with (of all things) rock music albums. Weed out the wimps with the first track! Examples include Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, which starts with “The Song Remains the Same,” and the Pretenders’ S/T debut, with “Precious.”
I’m confident that others here can add to this list.
Since it's fantastic song, it'll just have to appear here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDQ1FUUjPs
I like Hawthorne but think he may be overrated as a component of the literary canon. The Scarlet Letter, in particular, challenges traditional values (Safe to say that a modern-day Hawthorne would be a liberal.). Much of the reading material selected by English teachers reflects their personal values which are usually left-leaning with a focus on the subjective. (Aren’t we supposed to be more concerned with Chillingworth’s cruelty than with Dimsdale’s failures of moral and spiritual leadership?) Consciously or not, the women who typically teach high school English have inculcated a set of liberal values to generations of students. I’m not saying I didn’t devour every book and short story I read for highschool English but, looking back, the material was too limited in scope, challenging the establishment but not necessarily the reader. Female teachers also tend to choose material that appeals more to females than males. I would think most male students wouldn’t like anything written by Hawthorne though Cooper and Melville would certainly be more appealing.
Overall, the compartmentalization of liberal arts subjects is an inherent weakness in our school system. I somewhat envy the students who now have the option of Classical education and even bought a book with a reading list for adults to glean a little of the experience for themselves. Sad to say that though I read some of the books and enjoyed them, I am so distracted by the more mundane aspects of life l find it difficult to stick with the program. While school hasn’t been blown to pieces, it is certainly out for the summer and could be out forever for someone my age. I would greatly encourage increasing the number of schools using the Classical approach, however, since I’m certain such a foundation will influence young adults to take a more active role in society. Maybe future generations would not only be better leaders but would also be more capable of setting into long-term relationships and raising families. Tolerance and forgiveness are all well and good but we simply must get on with the business of living.
You have to read between the lines here. (Modern academic speak is even more impenetrable than Hawthorne).
In other words, blackety black black. Hawthorne – we see your lips moving but we cant’ hear you. We can’t even tell the verbs from the nouns. Where are the black people in your stories?
Maybe they could publish Bowdlerized versions of Hawthorne’s books where more of the characters are black. You know that if they made a movie version of any Hawthorne book, half the characters would be black. They would put blacks into Puritan New England. Hester Prynne would be black – what could be more black than a single mother?
A little lower down in the article, they stop with the euphemisms:
English literature be too white. All those dead white men. That’s all it comes down to. Even though the “capacities” of the current Harvard students are diminished (cough, black – it’s time to cancel that racis’ Claybaugh woman – I see right thru her fancy academic vocabulary – “ethics of representation” my ass ) they are not THAT diminished. It’s just that they don’t care about dead white men.
https://archive.org/details/angelmachinerati0000jone/mode/2up
The Scarlet Letter has survived as a mainstream heritage novel up to this day. However, Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha has completely disappeared.
Hard to beat Raymond Chandler IMO, who arguably qualifies (Dulwich, and supposedly the same English teacher as P. G. Wodehouse.).
“with the fact that minoritized (e.g., AfAm, Latinx, Indigenous Studies) and interdisciplinary fields (e.g., Environmental Studies) are BOOMING right now.”
Shakespeare/Mozart/Wagner/Newton —–> Aerospace technology, modern medicine, etc.
Latinx Studies ——–> more taco trucks (well, not even the trucks, just the tacos)
Environmental Studies ——–> bug diet, mud huts, cholera
AfAm Studies ———> corner office in wypipo firm. Yo, Madeleine, what does this copy machine do? Also, when you gonna get wif me?
Agreed.
So, how does one fight this?
In general, I didn’t like the prose style of most of the pre-Civil War American writers we were assigned:
In general, American prose styles back then seemed awkward and long-winded.....I can’t imagine rereading The Scarlet Letter.In other words, Steve hasn't developed as a intellectual since the 10th Grade. Notice, not one word about what Hawthorne, Emerson, or Thoreau were actually saying.
Steve simply stopped on the surface and let it go at that. Of course, his eyes glazed over because he wan't up to the challenge presented by the writer's style. So instead of practicing a bit so as to overcome his obvious defeciency as a reader, he dismissed the writer's work with a shallow value judgment. A good reader is supposed to read a work from the perspective of the writer, not just the reader. That way they can develop their skills as a reader. It's also how one develops the intellectual quality of Perspective. In this case one's historical perspective, which in turn helps develop one's contemporary perspective. That way they're better able to operate out of a wider frame of reference.If the reader is so disoriented by the style that they can't get to the substance of what they writer is saying, let alone make a connection between the two (because of course they're connected) then the reader doesn't judge the book, the book judges them and finds them severely wanting. And by the way, forget Brother John Doran's valuation of the book. What was his analysis of it? Let me guess. Teacher Right/Writer Wrong.As a teacher he's supposed to make analytical statements, not value judgments. And for a simple reason devoid of any complexity - his taste determines nothing. He likes it. He doesn't like it. Whoop Dee Do! From this perspective value judgments are just a way to dismiss something you don't understand. That's teaching?If teachers like that developed their analytical skills they could spare us their value judgments. Of course, it wouldn't solve all of our problems. But there's no question that the quality of life would improve immediately the world over.Replies: @Inquiring Mind
“I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read “Pride and Prejudice” I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Mark Twain
The aldultress is not just portrayed as sympathetic, but saintly. The adultery is "okay" because they had a genuine romance or some crap like that.
It is not unreadable though. These Harvard kids don't have the patience to sit through a black and white movie, let alone read a real book.
We live in a post literate culture.Replies: @SFG, @Anon, @Charlotte Allen, @Not Raul
I mean, that’s why that particular book is chosen, I think, rather than something like ‘The Blithedale Romance’ that mocks educated liberals, but he was a very important author of that era.
They never assign ‘The Bostonians’ when it comes to James, either. 😉
Most men of that era could probably beat up most men of ours (maybe not you)-more physical labor.
It is impossible to assess, especially if we use different criteria for high imaginative literature. Various prose fictions have become permanent universal classics, while others have dimmed or simply became not interesting to the wider reading public.
So- it is one thing whether an author is esteemed & highly regarded by educated readers; or he’s just popular; or he is canonical, but not read too much. And social-cultural influences play a crucial role.
As far as literary prose goes, American highly regarded authors from 1830-1840 (the end of Romanticism) to 1900 are: Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, Henry James..
For British prose authors: Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Bronte sisters, Trollope, Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Ruskin, George Eliot, R.L. Stevenson, John Henry Newman, Oscar Wilde, ..
Highly regarded & still read are Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde. Others have different fortunes.
In Italian, I think that Giovanni Verga is the only one who is appreciated & read.
Among Russian authors – Gogol, Leskov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Herzen,.. All are read, although Leskov is virtually unknown
The French: Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, Zola,… Hippolyte Taine was influential, but has vanished.
German language authors are paradoxical – prose fiction writers are not much appreciated (Keller, C.F. Meyer,..). The most important German authors are readable philosophers: Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Nietzsche, even Marx in some works, ..
Of course, these authors are impossible to compare. Trollope & Goncharov inhabit different universes & for the modern mind, Goncharov is more “alive”, while Trollope has the charm of a social historian. And- Max Stirner, writing in the 1840s, belongs to the 20th C, while most other authors are clearly dated.
The aldultress is not just portrayed as sympathetic, but saintly. The adultery is "okay" because they had a genuine romance or some crap like that.
It is not unreadable though. These Harvard kids don't have the patience to sit through a black and white movie, let alone read a real book.
We live in a post literate culture.Replies: @SFG, @Anon, @Charlotte Allen, @Not Raul
Bingo.
I had to read it in HS and was indifferent to the writing itself. But, I could see that there was some serious puritan-hating going on in the mind of the author, and I didn’t like that at all.
I feel the same way about To Kill a Mockingbird and the Crucible, two other books kids are fed.
These books help to lay a foundation of scorn for Christianity and white American culture.
Recall “The Old Man and the Sea” specifically and Hemingway generally being such a refreshing change in high school literature. Simple, straight declarative sentences that didn’t try to blow you away with how erudite the author was and yet easily conveyed his story simply and directly . And he nonetheless set the scene, but he didn’t feel the need to beat you over the head with it.
Mark TwainReplies: @Inquiring Mind
Do any of those appreciating fine literature even “get” iSteve’s pun about The Hawthorne Effect?
Hawthorne was the name of a Bell System (Western Electric subsidiary) factory in the greater Chicago area. Efforts to scientifically improve working conditions were confounded by every change the investigators made resulting in improved productivity. Turns out that the employees were conscious of being watched and stopped slacking during the investigation.
A similar observation was made in England about the difficulty quantifying improved fuel economy from changes to a steam locomotive. One Chief Designer remarked that even “painting the smoke- stack blue” had a beneficial effect because during the test, the engine crew gave their best effort because they were under observation.
The Hawthorne Effect is right up there with the Flynn effect in quantitative psychological experiments, but that went “woosh” over a lot of people’s heads.
You sound like the Smithers to the Schoolmarm's Mr. Burns. Hurr durr, I wonder how many people will get that?
Been reported Mark Twain was the ghostwriter of Grant’s acclaimed autobiography.
Hawthorne edited Journal of an African Cruiser in 1845. It’s an account by one of the officers serving on the flagship of the Africa Squadron under Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry during a cruise to West Africa. I bet Harvard College kids these days would like reading African Cruiser more than the Scarlet Letter. It would be an exercise in identifying white wash and the hiding of atrocities against the local African population done by the US Navy. Nominally the Africa Squadron was a slavery supression mission forced on the US by a treaty with Great Britain settling the Maine border. Per treaty obligation to dispatch ships and at least 80 guns, the Africa Squadron turned out to be an aggressive military expedition which burned down African villages punitiviely. They killed the leader of the tribe in a Black Lives Matter questionable style encounter.
I like the pre-Hemingway Saki: H. H. Monroe, particularly his Clovis Stories.
For once, the Wiki Bio isn’t bad.
Just one more life senselessly wasted.
You must have me mixed up with someone else. I’m still married to my first husband.
I like the pre-Hemingway Saki: H. H. Monroe, particularly his Clovis Stories.
For once, the Wiki Bio isn’t bad.
Just one more life senselessly wasted.
He was in his 40’s.
OT: Two men from Honduras kill a bald eagle in Nebraska which they intended to take home and eat. They live in Johnny Carson’s hometown of Norfolk. Guessing these two work just down the road at the Tyson factory in Madison though. Just doing the jobs Americans won’t do. Like the New York Times, USA Today buries the fact that they are immigrants near the end of the article, hoping their readers quit reading before then and assume it is white rednecks.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/03/03/two-men-shoot-kill-bald-eagle-eat/11389417002/
My brother-in-law teaches English at a vocational college in Yorkshire, i.e. to mainly white students of just above average intelligence. As a comprehension exercise he set them the opening passage of Bleak House about London fog (family reading in its day). Expecting them to find it tough, he made a list of difficult words and phrases which he thought would stump them, but the list was not long enough. To his surprise, none of them understood “Kentish”, the adjective referring to the county of Kent. In fact, none of them had heard of Kent.
So, I could easily believe such a story about Hawthorne and students in general, but it does seem a bit incredible when told about Harvard.
My kids are not yet college age, but one thing that the spouse and I agree on is that we are definitely going to steer them towards career paths where credentials matter a lot less than actual ability or output. There are too many DIE barriers in a lot of fields these days and too much credentialism as well, so in my mind either being self-employed or working for a relatively small private company is the way to go to avoid all that. Some of this reflects our own personal biases given our own backgrounds, but it’s given us a lot of flexibility and an upper middle class existence too, and I’d like for our kids to have the same.
Look at the salaries that AI guys are getting:
https://aipaygrad.es/
Not many people have the brains to do this kind of work. Latisha with the African Studies degree can't do it and the tech cos. know it. They are all competing for a relatively small pool of truly talented people. I don't know what kind of abilities your kids have but if they have that kind of ability don't think that they won't be able to have a middle class existence. Now real estate in Silicon Valley is expensive but if your compensation package is high six figures you will be able to afford it.Replies: @Alden, @Steve Sailer
Or as my grandsons and their friends say; “We’re not at the bottom of the totem pole. We White men are buried in the dirt under the totem pole”
Nice to read a rare comment from someone who knows what year it is.
“Maybe it’s because I’m a girl, but I loved The Scarlet Letter when I first read it in high school…”
I’m a girl who first read The Scarlet Letter in high school and was really disappointed by it. Not enough sex. Henry James suited me much better since so many of his works concern passion, whether unrequited, thwarted or illicit.
If Hawthorne included in The Scarlet Letterbanything like this from James’s The Portrait of a Lady, I missed it:
“He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.”
Or I like literature where the distaff presence is either peripheral to the story or absent altogether. Heart of Darkness or Moby Dick. Or Kim.
The aldultress is not just portrayed as sympathetic, but saintly. The adultery is "okay" because they had a genuine romance or some crap like that.
It is not unreadable though. These Harvard kids don't have the patience to sit through a black and white movie, let alone read a real book.
We live in a post literate culture.Replies: @SFG, @Anon, @Charlotte Allen, @Not Raul
I disagree. Hawthorne certainly turned a critical eye onto Puritanism, with which he was fascinated, but Puritanism is not the only form of Christianity. And indeed The Scarlet Letter can be read in a very theologically conservative way–as Hawthorne undoubtedly well knew, since his daughter became a Catholic nun.
Both Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale sin, but Hester expiates her sin and thus becomes free. Dimmesdale, by contrast, is too vain, cowardly, and attached to his status as preacher to confess and pay the penalty, so his sin literally eats away at him and and destroys him physically–while Hester becomes ever stronger.
You have to recall, too, that Hester thinks her husband is dead when she takes up with Dimmesdale, and she in fact confesses to Chillingworth that she has wronged him. Her sin, though, is a sin of passion, whereas Chillingworth, who seeks to destroy Dimmesdale, acts out of pure malice. It’s a contrast between the concupiscent and irascible passions.
Sort of on topic, I’ve posted in the past extracts from A.G. MacDonnell’s 1930s England Their England – he wrote another now-forgotten hit in the 1930s, the Autobiography Of A Cad.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.208881
It’s the tale of an unscrupulous type who “licks up and kicks down”, avoids WW1 combat but ends with a medal and a safe Tory seat. But it’s fascinating on the anti-hero’s sex life. Well worth a read on the social/sexual changes after WW1.
As a journalist and playwright in London for a good deal of the 20s and 30s, I presume he knew whereof he spoke.
Management Summary, highly abridged
pre-WW1 – chorus girls – ye olde Victorian tradition. If you had a favourite and the feeling (and the deal was acceptable – money/clothes/jewellery) was mutual, you’d house her in Maida Vale and pop in for a couple of hours after leaving the House of Commons.
post-WW1 – just as in post-WW2 Russia, there was a surplus of women, and adjustments were made accordingly. Middle and upper class girls became available.
Even smart people can’t manage such prose nowadays because the internet is re-wiring our brains:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
I myself used to be an avid reader and, in my younger days, thought nothing of attacking a thousand-leaf tome by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But now, I just can’t do it. Many others have had the same experience.
Also, everything he talked about has been hyper-accelerated since then. Ironically, to the point that no one has the attention span to read an entire book on the subject.
It's a double-edged phenomenon, for sure. Attention spans are down. But people have also gotten better at cutting to the quick and there are some really funny and insightful masters of pith plying their trade on the internet.
I'm a girl who first read The Scarlet Letter in high school and was really disappointed by it. Not enough sex. Henry James suited me much better since so many of his works concern passion, whether unrequited, thwarted or illicit.
If Hawthorne included in The Scarlet Letterbanything like this from James's The Portrait of a Lady, I missed it:
"He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession."
Or I like literature where the distaff presence is either peripheral to the story or absent altogether. Heart of Darkness or Moby Dick. Or Kim.Replies: @Charlotte Allen
Not enough sex in Hawthorne? Dickens must drive you crazy!
Not enough sex in Hawthorne? Dickens must drive you crazy!"
Lol! Not a fan of Dickens at all. How did you guess?
Skimmed Great Expectations one night because I had to pass a test on it (got an A) and because the prof told us to take a month reading it, that we couldn't possibly read it in one night and pass the test.
I did read on my own and enjoy The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I thought John Jasper was a terrific character. (His sexual obsession might have had something to do with that.). Also, being only half-finished, it wasn't too long.
My taste in all the arts is like a fjord, deep but very narrow. I don't even bother trying to widen it any more. At my age, it's enough that I'm still discovering new-to-me books to enjoy. By the way, have you read anything by Megan Abbott? Great fun. I actually bought two of her novels, which is huge for me because in addition to being narrow, I'm frugal.Replies: @Charlotte Allen
The aldultress is not just portrayed as sympathetic, but saintly. The adultery is "okay" because they had a genuine romance or some crap like that.
It is not unreadable though. These Harvard kids don't have the patience to sit through a black and white movie, let alone read a real book.
We live in a post literate culture.Replies: @SFG, @Anon, @Charlotte Allen, @Not Raul
How did kids like that get in to Harvard?
I’ve been told that they reject most National Merit Finalists who apply.
Shame on your teachers: Putting the American Romantics in front of a generation reared on television without properly framing the craftsmanship inherent in the writing style is like casting pearls before swine.
I would not expect new brown and yellow Americans to care about old white American novelists, at all.
When the Boomers and Xers pass, hardly anybody will buy the old books, or visit old national Civil War battlefields, or want to hear about old “white-era” wars like WW1 or WW2 or Korea. The old America will be regarded as a bad old place of prejudice and slavery. This is what the Left wants, and they always win eventually. We will be as forgotten as the Hittites and Trojans by then.
You’re right about Hawthorne. A lot of his work is extremely sexually charged. Just thinking about “The Birth-Mark” almost makes me laugh.
I'll give the modern kids credit for being able to write 144-character tweets with only 2 or 3 typos average each time in 7.3 seconds on average, using only 2 fingers, and being able to figure out who's responding to whom.
Otherwise, yes, the Nineteenth Century WAS long ago. Good think it hasn't been 500 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIRDCR8xSO0Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Hypnotoad666, @JimDandy
That clip perfectly represents life in the present day.
Both Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale sin, but Hester expiates her sin and thus becomes free. Dimmesdale, by contrast, is too vain, cowardly, and attached to his status as preacher to confess and pay the penalty, so his sin literally eats away at him and and destroys him physically--while Hester becomes ever stronger.
You have to recall, too, that Hester thinks her husband is dead when she takes up with Dimmesdale, and she in fact confesses to Chillingworth that she has wronged him. Her sin, though, is a sin of passion, whereas Chillingworth, who seeks to destroy Dimmesdale, acts out of pure malice. It's a contrast between the concupiscent and irascible passions.Replies: @James Braxton, @Inquiring Mind
I won’t disagree with your analysis, but none of that is why this book, above so many other possibilities, has been selected by schools all across the country over the decades.
Our Cad has moved on to 1923 (the era of the Bright Young Things)
American literature was a morass of verbal complexity until Melville and Poe came along
Both Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale sin, but Hester expiates her sin and thus becomes free. Dimmesdale, by contrast, is too vain, cowardly, and attached to his status as preacher to confess and pay the penalty, so his sin literally eats away at him and and destroys him physically--while Hester becomes ever stronger.
You have to recall, too, that Hester thinks her husband is dead when she takes up with Dimmesdale, and she in fact confesses to Chillingworth that she has wronged him. Her sin, though, is a sin of passion, whereas Chillingworth, who seeks to destroy Dimmesdale, acts out of pure malice. It's a contrast between the concupiscent and irascible passions.Replies: @James Braxton, @Inquiring Mind
I guess metaphor is lost on some people.
Yeah, Hester thinks hubby is dead but he is only held captive by Indians until the Puritans scare up some ransom money? Good excuse for her affair. I’m sure the Puritan colony followed Common Law, and that there was a process for having Roger declared dead for having gone missing too long, and freeing Hester to marry the Reverend?
A quick search of Internet high-school English cheat-sheets reveals that Roger is physically deformed as an outward sign of his inner evil. Kind of like the alt-Right regarding Victoria Nuland’s ungeglichte gesicht as a sign of something, too?
Women face an uncountable number of difficulties, but men face one rather large difficulty–the uncertainty of propagating their genetic endowment. Studies of the Y-chromosome suggest that this privilege was conferred upon a small minority of men, explaining the patriarchy, Puritan morality, the Victorian Double Standard and the modern-day Internet man-o-sphere.
Ol’ Roge was ugly, too, so we can ignore his point of view.
Roger Prynne is the hero of this novel. He is a tragic figure because he has been grievously wronged. He is tragic because he doesn’t either forgive or merely “move on” from this wrong but practices occult and dark arts to get his vengeance on Dimmy. Such is a moral failing that I agree destroyed his soul, but it is a stretch to assume he start out this way, and Hester was complicit in this by keeping his identity as her husband a secret.
The Scarlet Letter celebrates a strong woman character and speaks truth to patriarchal power? OK, whatever.
You’re showing your age ancient old man who graduated from high school in 1955. And from college in 1959 when aeronautical and astronautical engineers were still high intelligence mathematical White American men. Who went to Stanford MIT cal tech university of Illinois and put a man on the moon..
Medicine tech engineering all those fields are No White Men Need Apply. And have been for decades. Between the US government’s anti White laws and the tech companies insane preference for non White foreigners,
The White boy you described would never be admitted to an aeronautical engineering program today. It’s 2023.
I used to think the average age of the Men of UNZ is about 70. Now I think it’s about 95.
What “Kid’s Today” think about Scarlet Letter. Why didn’t she just get an abortion?
Don’t knock credentials, especially when combined with actual ability (e.g. a STEM degree in an in demand tech field).
Look at the salaries that AI guys are getting:
https://aipaygrad.es/
Not many people have the brains to do this kind of work. Latisha with the African Studies degree can’t do it and the tech cos. know it. They are all competing for a relatively small pool of truly talented people. I don’t know what kind of abilities your kids have but if they have that kind of ability don’t think that they won’t be able to have a middle class existence. Now real estate in Silicon Valley is expensive but if your compensation package is high six figures you will be able to afford it.
Nowadays the people doing the hiring are Indians and Asians who only hire their own. Not just ethnic but clan religion and tribe. Or college back home. Like that diploma mill in India IIT.
White Americans still make a lot of money in SV. Not by wasting 5 years and $300to 500 hundred thousand in college tuition and living expenses. But by investing that money in apartments and even single family homes to rent to the immigrant job thieves. Renting to Americans is risky. Because of layoffs.
But when there’s 8 to a one bedroom apartment and 30 to a 3 bedroom plus garage and garden shed at least some of the tenants are always getting a paycheck. And they don’t mind bedbugs roaches mold rats because they bring them from home.
Agree agree agree that Whites, especially men should try to be independent rather than peons begging for jobs who are at the bottom of DIE preference.
Or as my grandsons and their friends say; “We’re not at the bottom of the totem pole. We White men are buried in the dirt under the totem pole”
Nice to read a rare comment from someone who knows what year it is.
For starters, Steve, you didn’t quote the start of the novel. That’s the tiresome introduction Hawthorne added, of interest only to scholars. When I taught “The Scarlet Letter” to witless teens, I just skipped that. It’s unbearable. Also, it’s not even fiction. This is the actual opening of the novel:
A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
And that’s pretty damn good. Nevertheless, Hawthorne certainly does not write in any kind of modern way. And the dialogue is especially weird to our ears, but you know, Puritans and all.
“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is she here set up to public shame?”
“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion, “else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne, and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.”
Anyhoo, so what does the “A” actually stand for? Did you know that the world “adultery” or “adulteress” never appears in the book? A hint that the A doesn’t really stand for either, and that Hawthorne is up to something else. Does it stand for America? Maybe. In any case, there is complex symbolism around flowers and weeds, and colors, and lots of other crap I can’t remember because I taught it 30 years ago.
One final fun thing. Whenever you read a novel or short story, check out the first word or two and the last word or two. You will very often find it makes a kind of commentary on the book. In the case here:
“A… GULES.” Gules of course being the heraldic term for red. See? An ‘A’ in red.
In “Moby Dick” you get:
“Call me… another orphan.” Which is one of the essential themes of the work, and indeed of Melville’s life, as he was left fatherless at a young age, his father having died from being forced to walk in a snow storm (now you know why the whale is white and why Bartleby stares at blank walls).
Speaking of “Bartleby,” which you mentioned, you get:
“I am… humanity.” Hmmm.
In Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” you get:
“Young Goodman Brown… his dying hour was gloom.” Basically the entire story.
And so it goes. So now everyone, start pulling the books of your shelf and play this game. It doesn’t always work out so nicely.
Consider a real-life quote from the general time period of the novel, something uttered by a famous person who in fact inspired the Puritans.
“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. "
When I am stuck behind a slow driver, I mutter that, all the time!
By the way, that preamble to The Scarlet Letter is called the Custom-House Essay. My high-school English teacher told the class to not read it, that it was awful. Was that "reverse psychology"? Years later I read it and found it delightfully entertaining. The essay is loosely biographical of Hawthorne, who early in life held a "cushy government job", and his description of life working in the government sector shows it hasn't changed in over 150 years.Replies: @Ralph L
Hey Jack, FYI, your favorite columnist at Unz, E. Michael Jones, did his doctoral thesis on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and has written other books on his philosophy.
https://archive.org/details/angelmachinerati0000jone/mode/2up
K–12 teachers are quitting. What would make them stay?
March 2, 2023
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/k-12-teachers-are-quitting-what-would-make-them-stay
“K–12 schools in the United States are finding it increasingly difficult to retain teachers, with potentially far-reaching ramifications for society. Over the past decade, the annual teacher turnover rate has hovered around 8 percent nationally and is more than double that for schools designated for Title 1 funding (federal funds for schools with high percentages of low-income students). By comparison, the annual turnover rate in high-performing jurisdictions, such as Finland, Ontario, and Singapore, is approximately 3 to 4 percent. . . .”
Geography! Thank you, Bomag. I neglected to mention the total lack of geographical and navigation skills/thinking nowadays. I have no doubt that the iCrap is the reason, but still, if you grow up without that part of the brain that matches the landscape with that map in your head, then you are simply dumb about this. (That’s not saying you could never pick it up, but it’s harder the older you get.)
Again, there’s nothing genetic about this, but people are dumber about it. Example, this friend who’s over 60 y/o could do fine without that GPS nav in his car only 2 years ago. A few weeks ago we were going to take a look at one of his vehicles at a paint shop in a small town 50 miles away. He’d forgotten his phone at home with the directions, well, director, on it, and that was way out of the way. No! It’s a small town. You’ve been there once.
I took a few screenshots from bing maps of the roads, we got to the town, and we made our way, as it started coming back to him. Geeez! Here’s hoping he could still do that again on his own, when and if they ever get around to his car.
Women tend to care less about these things. People who don't drive at all and are only passive passengers (Including children) seem to have no clue about the physical space of the world. They just get in a box, wait awhile, and then find themselves in a new place.
Once again, the tech can cut either way. You can turn off your brain and be a passive recipient of spoken directions. Or, you can use your phone to zoom out and see exactly where you are in the world. If you're curious, you can explore the coast of Madagascar or wherever on Google Earth.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Only thing is, Renard, Houses of the Holy isn’t anywhere on Houses of the Holy!
Since it’s fantastic song, it’ll just have to appear here:
https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/HNS/Indians/critic.html
Was Twain the first American author to write in the way that people actually spoke?Replies: @R.G. Camara
No, Twain was just a proto-SJW of his time: a snobby *smart* boy from the provinces who was really mad his small-town “hicks” couldn’t see how great he was and worship him. The first chance he got he high-tailed it to urban enclaves and then wrote travelogues and novels about how stupid yokels were.
Re-read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with this mindset in mind and you’ll see the abject hatred and cheap shots Twain takes on small-town Americans at each point. He’s basically pissing on them as idiots to assuage his own ego.
Anyway, Twain’s attach on Cooper was pitiful; he was attacking a dead man who’d had a long string of literary successes, but who’s style had fallen out of favor. Twain’s style was both a mimicry of European styles (Twain was Euro-snob of the kind you find in SJWs of today) and also created and paid for by the explosion of literary magazines for the middle class in the Civil War and post-Civil War era, which demanded word-count chapters that were short, interesting stories strung along into a larger narrative. Thus Twain’s nasty, provincial little attack on Cooper would be akin to a TV crime writer today attacking the slow pace, lack of blood, and small stakes of a 1950s TV show.
I read a lot of Twain at one time. My favorites are Gilded Age , second part of Life on the Mississippi and his travels in Hawaii.
How do we know? This here’s the internet.
“
Not enough sex in Hawthorne? Dickens must drive you crazy!”
Lol! Not a fan of Dickens at all. How did you guess?
Skimmed Great Expectations one night because I had to pass a test on it (got an A) and because the prof told us to take a month reading it, that we couldn’t possibly read it in one night and pass the test.
I did read on my own and enjoy The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I thought John Jasper was a terrific character. (His sexual obsession might have had something to do with that.). Also, being only half-finished, it wasn’t too long.
My taste in all the arts is like a fjord, deep but very narrow. I don’t even bother trying to widen it any more. At my age, it’s enough that I’m still discovering new-to-me books to enjoy. By the way, have you read anything by Megan Abbott? Great fun. I actually bought two of her novels, which is huge for me because in addition to being narrow, I’m frugal.
Young Goodman Brown is a fantastic mystical short story that Hawthorne wrote and can be re-read today and garner a hundred different contradictory meanings.
The Scarlet Letter works better if you have a working imagination of the vast untamed wilderness that was America until the 20th Century and the low technology of the time period. Describing the small town clannishness (necessary in a vast frontier with hostile natives and nature) and Prynne’s husband disappearance and reappearance are harder to grok if you can’t get out of your cellphone GPS-internet connection-cameras everywhere worldview.
Look at the salaries that AI guys are getting:
https://aipaygrad.es/
Not many people have the brains to do this kind of work. Latisha with the African Studies degree can't do it and the tech cos. know it. They are all competing for a relatively small pool of truly talented people. I don't know what kind of abilities your kids have but if they have that kind of ability don't think that they won't be able to have a middle class existence. Now real estate in Silicon Valley is expensive but if your compensation package is high six figures you will be able to afford it.Replies: @Alden, @Steve Sailer
I don’t mean to start an argument Jack. But you live 3,000 miles away from Redmond, Seattle and Silicon Valley. Maybe in 1980 the people who did the hiring were White American men trying to conform to government affirmative action mandates. And could squeeze in a few White American men here and there.
Nowadays the people doing the hiring are Indians and Asians who only hire their own. Not just ethnic but clan religion and tribe. Or college back home. Like that diploma mill in India IIT.
White Americans still make a lot of money in SV. Not by wasting 5 years and $300to 500 hundred thousand in college tuition and living expenses. But by investing that money in apartments and even single family homes to rent to the immigrant job thieves. Renting to Americans is risky. Because of layoffs.
But when there’s 8 to a one bedroom apartment and 30 to a 3 bedroom plus garage and garden shed at least some of the tenants are always getting a paycheck. And they don’t mind bedbugs roaches mold rats because they bring them from home.
That was a tour-de-force of stupidity, written by some kind of cretin-savant.
At least I know it’s not AI, only a human is capable of writing such drivel.
Kurt Vonnegut is only a 100 years separated from the Scarlet Letter but he feels fresh as a daisy
Math is important. Plato and the Ancient Greeks thought it was foundational.
I.e.: It’s not that I want to talk about me, but let’s all talk about me.
ERR: SENTENCE COMPLEXITY INDEX > MAXCLAUSES
END COMMUNICATION
This then would mean that Bartleby is not meant as a deep existential statement, but as a satire?
Hm?
It is claer that books talk to one another though. – Nowadays that phenomenon is called intertextuality. – Strange & stiff name, but no wrong name methinks.
I’d take that risk. That’s how strongly I feel.
Thanks.
I wasn’t making any profound point by choosing “The Hawthorne Effect,” it was just a catchy title for somebody who majored in business like me a long time ago.
Right, “The Old Man and the Sea” ought to be universal on reading lists in heavily Latino high schools. Boys can read it and they can like it. When dealing with 90 IQ boys, the important thing is to show them reading can be fun and uplifting, and The Old Man and the Sea is the best classic for that.
I put that paragraph through https://hemingwayapp.com/ which I use myself sometimes.
Here are the unsurprising results:
Readability: Post-Graduate
Poor. Aim for (grade) 14.
Words: 376
6 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer.
3 uses of passive voice. Cut to 2 or fewer.
0 of 9 sentences are hard to read.
7 of 9 sentences are very hard to read.
It is because our society has polluted and saturated the postsecondary education market with “students” (by which I mean human beings who have little if any interest in education) who, in years gone by would have been standing on assembly lines, answering telephones, taking dictation, repairing automobiles, trucks and buses, pushing brooms, etc., etc., etc. They have no reason to go to college other than they have or can borrow the money for tuition, room and board and they want to party, party, party, not to mention the types of semi-skilled (by which I mean menial) jobs that used to be available are gone overseas. Today’s colleges and universities, once the upper ten per cent of students are excluded, simply act as glorified babysitters for cases of arrested development. I wouldn’t mind so much, but they are also aggressive propagandists for their left-wing ideology. Talk about a self-licking ice cream cone! If I had the power, I would immediately prohibit the borrowing of money to fund college attendance, or perhaps, put the burden on the college to act as sole financier, subject to the proviso that all such college debt was treated the same as all other unsecured debt in bankruptcy. Of course, I do not discount entirely the idea that today’s students are, by-and-large, simply a lot stupider than their predecessors.
Most epic poems from the 19th C (authors Victor Hugo, Robert Browning et.c.) are so dated that no one bothers to read them.
Plus, it has a Latinx setting.
— You’d like to go back in time and tell Edward Gibbon to write “Short. Choppy. Sentences.”? I’ve always loved his style, but I agree it may be an acquired taste. My favorite sentence of his is actually quite short (for him): “But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”
Here are the unsurprising results:
Readability: Post-Graduate
Poor. Aim for (grade) 14.
Words: 376
6 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer.
3 uses of passive voice. Cut to 2 or fewer.
0 of 9 sentences are hard to read.
7 of 9 sentences are very hard to read.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
The idea that I think The Scarlet Letter “speaks truth to patriarchal power” is absurd.
Not enough sex in Hawthorne? Dickens must drive you crazy!"
Lol! Not a fan of Dickens at all. How did you guess?
Skimmed Great Expectations one night because I had to pass a test on it (got an A) and because the prof told us to take a month reading it, that we couldn't possibly read it in one night and pass the test.
I did read on my own and enjoy The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I thought John Jasper was a terrific character. (His sexual obsession might have had something to do with that.). Also, being only half-finished, it wasn't too long.
My taste in all the arts is like a fjord, deep but very narrow. I don't even bother trying to widen it any more. At my age, it's enough that I'm still discovering new-to-me books to enjoy. By the way, have you read anything by Megan Abbott? Great fun. I actually bought two of her novels, which is huge for me because in addition to being narrow, I'm frugal.Replies: @Charlotte Allen
I had never heard of Megan Abbott, but I looked her up, and she seems to specialize in crime fiction. Crime fiction is exactly what I need when I’m stuck on an airplane or in a hotel room–so I’ll keep her in mind. Jo Nesbo was my go-to guy in that department, but I’ve now read practically everything he’s written.
Great. She wrote well-received neo-noirs early in her career. I really liked Die A Little, set in the 1950s. Then she turned to crime involving teenaged girls in contemporary suburban settings, which sounds imitative of so-called mean girl stories but isn't. I really liked Dare Me (made into a TV series) about cheerleaders and You Will Know Me about gymnasts.
Perfect escapist fare with dark undertones. But she also says something about power, who has it, who acquires it, who loses it.
The Scarlet Letter works better if you have a working imagination of the vast untamed wilderness that was America until the 20th Century and the low technology of the time period. Describing the small town clannishness (necessary in a vast frontier with hostile natives and nature) and Prynne's husband disappearance and reappearance are harder to grok if you can't get out of your cellphone GPS-internet connection-cameras everywhere worldview.Replies: @Charlotte Allen
And in the movie department regarding Massachusetts Puritan culture, I highly recommend recommend Robert Eggers’s The Witch. It is a frightening story about the damnation of the soul of a beautiful and affectionate young girl who deserves better. It is also about the perils of religious sectarianism, especially in the “vast untamed wilderness” that you mention. The Puritans were the original dissenters, and the Mayflower Pilgrims were dissenters even from Puritanism. Then, in the movie, the girl’s father, expelled from the Pilgrim community on some heresy or other, marches off into the woods to start his own dissenting church, consisting of his family. Then, well, the devil has plenty of scope to wreak havoc.
I am one of those people who have been reading great literature for decades (more than half a century) and about 40 years ago I started to understand how easy it is to look at writers like Waugh and Steinbeck and Hemingway as very decadent modernists. (Compared to their great predecessors like Dickens and Wodehouse – who used to golf at the golf course I learned to play golf at, a few years after his last round there- and to their more vintage contemporaries, like Tolkien and Undset and Faulkner) …
Old movies – basically every movie pre-1960, and most of the adult movies afterwards (even in the early 70s, for the record, John Wayne was starring in movies where one of the plot points was he was looking for a wife) are, to almost anyone born after 1965 or so, movies that were filmed in a language that is sort of foreign – I read an observation recently from someone (I forget who) who said that there is an overlap between young people with a gift for foreign langauges and young people who can watch old movies and follow along without being befuddled by the now vanished language used by the actors in vintage movies …
If I were young and if I could go to any college I wanted to I would not go to college, I would learn a skill so I could earn a living to support a family, and study the originals. I am sure there are many young people doing this, and I have hope that after I am gone there will continue to be American writers who know how to write in the way that artists write, as there have always been …
Nothing against Waugh and Hemingway and Steinbeck but just saying that it is not hard to see the decadence in their styles …
Charlotte A. – after you have finished reading all of Mr. Nesbo’s published works, you can try Simenon, Agatha Christie, Chesterton, Doyle and Dickens, all of whom wrote lots of great “crime fiction” (Inspector Bucket from Dickens’ Bleak House is still the greatest detective invented in a novel, in my humble opinion) – and there are a few good American fiction crime writers, too, depending on your ability to overlook the faults they all have … You may have already known that, of course.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
“And let’s not even talk about how they are taught no history whatsoever.”
Feature not bug. What passes for history in the US is mostly nonsense anyway.
British colonies SECEDED from Great Britain and we call it a REVOLUTION though there was no attempt to overthrow King George as head of the British state.
Six states SECEDED from the United States before Lincoln was president and the governing regime at the time, Buchanan, let them go. Later an army assembled by the Lincoln regime engaged the Army of SECEDED states in Northern VA and we now call that engagement a CIVIL WAR even though nobody used that terminology at the time, seceded states were no longer part of The UNION and the confederacy was not seeking to replace the United States as governing power over non-seceding states.
This just scratches the surface.
Mark Twain invented the modern American prose style that remains familiar and intelligible to this very day.
This was no accident. He took great pains to develop a clear and direct diction that avoided rambling discursions and needless ornament.
He fiercely criticized fellow famous authors who fell short of such standards. See, e.g., http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/HNS/Indians/offense.html
All the talk about how today's "students" have a hard time reading some of these authors is especially interesting when taking into account that most of these men had relatively little formal education themselves. Twain and Melville never went to college. Neither did Dickens. Neither did O. Henry, a very underrated writer (another journalist) who should be mentioned along with the other great writers of the era. The great American poet of the era, Walt Whitman, never went past the 4th grade. And of course, Lincoln, probably the greatest writer to be President, had no real schooling to speak of.
We've lost an awful lot since then.
“I had never heard of Megan Abbott, but I looked her up, and she seems to specialize in crime fiction. Crime fiction is exactly what I need when I’m stuck on an airplane or in a hotel room–so I’ll keep her in mind.”
Great. She wrote well-received neo-noirs early in her career. I really liked Die A Little, set in the 1950s. Then she turned to crime involving teenaged girls in contemporary suburban settings, which sounds imitative of so-called mean girl stories but isn’t. I really liked Dare Me (made into a TV series) about cheerleaders and You Will Know Me about gymnasts.
Perfect escapist fare with dark undertones. But she also says something about power, who has it, who acquires it, who loses it.
Medicine tech engineering all those fields are No White Men Need Apply. And have been for decades. Between the US government’s anti White laws and the tech companies insane preference for non White foreigners,
The White boy you described would never be admitted to an aeronautical engineering program today. It’s 2023.
I used to think the average age of the Men of UNZ is about 70. Now I think it’s about 95.
What “Kid’s Today” think about Scarlet Letter. Why didn’t she just get an abortion?Replies: @Mr. Anon
That’s ridiculous. You are completely wrong.
I did not care for Hawthorne when I was supposed to have read The Scarlet Letter in high school, but perhaps that was due to the theme. I did kind of like his short story My Kinsman, Major Molineux – it had a good twist at the end.
I agree with your point about American authors of the time being too prolix compared to their English contemporaries. Melville and Hawthorne were a struggle to read, but I very much enjoyed reading Dickens.
I generally favor English novelists over American ones. However, over the last couple of decades, whenever I’ve read a book by an English writer (I’m speaking of non-fiction here), I find thier prose style to be flippant and breezy and off-putting. I don’t know what happened to them – they all seem to have become unserious.
Hm?
It is claer that books talk to one another though. - Nowadays that phenomenon is called intertextuality. - Strange & stiff name, but no wrong name methinks.Replies: @JimDandy
Yeah, I think Bartleby makes a deep, existential statement and works as a comic satire. The characters are all Types, and the more I think about it the more I start to see the loquacious narrator as, perhaps, a guy who once had dreams of being the next Hawthorne, but ended up the elderly proprietor of a scriveners office, wherein human beings are reduced to proto-Xerox machines–dehumanized to various degrees, but even the most broken of them all, Bartleby, still retains enough will to balk at one type of assignment. Or else he has become such a machine that he shuts down when someone tries to pull him out of his routine? Yes, books talk to one another. I heard a good novelist once say that when someone writes a novel they are having a dialogue with all the novels they ever read. The problem with the lit-crit types who come up with words/concepts like “intertextuality” is that they tend to be ignorant of the creative process. A lot (most?) of it is subconscious, some of it is calculated parody or outright theft, etc. It’s ironic that Bartleby’s backstory is that he worked for the US postal system at the Dead Letter Office. Is there a better metaphor for the countless bullshit Phd theses floating novel theories of intertextuality in stories like Bartleby?
That said: The better (=tiny, productive) part of the intertextuality crowd would agree pretty much with all you said! Especially the uncounscious part of novel-writing (of art, creative processes in general - I'm a photographer (tweet one every day - under my name), and I tells you that: Taking them little things is not least unconsious - that's up to the point where I don't get them - sometimes for years... - I can't quite understand what I photographed. Iknow: This is as true as it sounds strange - - I know I know.
Plus: The process is mentally exhausting up to the point of a state of mind like the state of the body after a tough workout: Not unpleseant at all. But really done, so to speak.
Although it does contain such sentences as “Later he would eat the tuna.”
I love Bleak House, which I think may be Dickens’s greatest novel. I read a lot of Conan Doyle as a child because the same neighbor who gave me Tanglewood Tales had a whole shelf of Sherlock Holmes that I devoured. I’ve also read a bunch of Father Brown stories and Agatha Christies but never any Simenon. He’s hard to find in bookstores.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven’t been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven’t tried him.
One problem that I have with recent crime fiction is that a larger and larger fraction of the books is about the personal life of the detectives (invariably messy) rather than the plot itself. I like Sherlock Holmes stories as this stuff is confined to a few sentences at the start to get Mrs Watson out of the way (e.g. visiting a sick relative) so that Holmes and Watson can get on with the story. A modern writer would tell me more than I wanted to know about the Watson's love life.Replies: @Mark G., @J.Ross, @Kylie
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
I also recommend Simenon. He was astonishingly prolific — he wrote hundreds of novels, including dozens of Maigrets, in addition to countless shorter works.
I’ve only read a small percentage of his vast oeuvre, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read. His style (in translation, for me) is laconic but vivid.
His personal life was dissolute and messy; I don’t know how he found the time and energy to produce publishable work at the rate he did.
I’m also a dedicated Chandler fan. He was an incandescent stylist, although his plots are too cute sometimes.
I’ve only read a small percentage of his vast oeuvre, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read."
Okay, you've convinced me to give Simenon's books another try. I started one but got distracted. I absolutely loved the movie Monsieur Hire, based on one of his novels. Have you seen it?Replies: @Known Fact
Tbf, to the younger generation, it’s annoying how many “knowledgeable” geezers reach for the calculator app on their phone if they have to do math.
Thanks for the Simenon recommendation. I’ll check him out.
Geez, get over yourself. I got it as soon as I saw it, and I’m sure that others did, too. What do you want, a cookie?
You sound like the Smithers to the Schoolmarm’s Mr. Burns. Hurr durr, I wonder how many people will get that?
Reminds me. Back in my days teaching at Boyle Heights’ Lincoln High, English classes were divided into ESL, Level Two, Level Three, Level Four, Honors.
One young Turk used to assign Moby Dick to his Level Twos. Partly, it was indeed so that he could say ‘yeah, I’m giving them the Dick again,’ but he claimed it actually worked pretty well. Read two pages each day, discuss what it means. It would take care of the year.
True story.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
I myself used to be an avid reader and, in my younger days, thought nothing of attacking a thousand-leaf tome by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But now, I just can't do it. Many others have had the same experience.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @Hypnotoad666
I find myself reading shorter novels, and fewer of them.
>an orientation to the present
So not better than animals.
I’ve been told that they reject most National Merit Finalists who apply.Replies: @J.Ross
BLACK LIVES MATTER [repeat 100x]
These two kids taught themselves to read and write using the immediate feedback of autocorrect.
If a kid is dumb, give him a smart phone, if he is smart, give him a book.Replies: @Dieter Kief, @Anon
Pragmatism. – (Hat tip.)
Ok.
That said: The better (=tiny, productive) part of the intertextuality crowd would agree pretty much with all you said! Especially the uncounscious part of novel-writing (of art, creative processes in general – I’m a photographer (tweet one every day – under my name), and I tells you that: Taking them little things is not least unconsious – that’s up to the point where I don’t get them – sometimes for years… – I can’t quite understand what I photographed. Iknow: This is as true as it sounds strange – – I know I know.
Plus: The process is mentally exhausting up to the point of a state of mind like the state of the body after a tough workout: Not unpleseant at all. But really done, so to speak.
The days of the Ivy students being gentlemen-athletes-scholars are long, long gone along with America's golden years.This is but one of the reasons why I love my children reading and debating about the Great Books, both at school and at home. They should be familiar with, and have intelligent opinions about, the literary foundations of the European civilization (and those of East Asia to a lesser extent).
I stopped doing this, but I used to get quite distressed interviewing high school students in my area - supposedly some of the most accomplished in the country - for my almae matres. They were extremely shallow in their knowledge and understanding of the classics. When I asked about virtue, I'd get that deer-caught-in-a-headlight look from the vast majority of them.Replies: @Jenner Ickham Errican, @Redneck farmer, @cityview
Your writing isn’t at all awkward. You are a very skilled and very clear writer.
Look at the salaries that AI guys are getting:
https://aipaygrad.es/
Not many people have the brains to do this kind of work. Latisha with the African Studies degree can't do it and the tech cos. know it. They are all competing for a relatively small pool of truly talented people. I don't know what kind of abilities your kids have but if they have that kind of ability don't think that they won't be able to have a middle class existence. Now real estate in Silicon Valley is expensive but if your compensation package is high six figures you will be able to afford it.Replies: @Alden, @Steve Sailer
You can’t say the AI guys aren’t earning their huge salaries recently.
“I also recommend Simenon. He was astonishingly prolific — he wrote hundreds of novels, including dozens of Maigrets, in addition to countless shorter works.
I’ve only read a small percentage of his vast oeuvre, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read.”
Okay, you’ve convinced me to give Simenon’s books another try. I started one but got distracted. I absolutely loved the movie Monsieur Hire, based on one of his novels. Have you seen it?
This was no accident. He took great pains to develop a clear and direct diction that avoided rambling discursions and needless ornament.
He fiercely criticized fellow famous authors who fell short of such standards. See, e.g., http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/HNS/Indians/offense.htmlReplies: @AceDeuce
Twain trained as a journalist, which influenced his style, much like a similar background influenced Hemingway, among other great writers.
All the talk about how today’s “students” have a hard time reading some of these authors is especially interesting when taking into account that most of these men had relatively little formal education themselves. Twain and Melville never went to college. Neither did Dickens. Neither did O. Henry, a very underrated writer (another journalist) who should be mentioned along with the other great writers of the era. The great American poet of the era, Walt Whitman, never went past the 4th grade. And of course, Lincoln, probably the greatest writer to be President, had no real schooling to speak of.
We’ve lost an awful lot since then.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
Elmore Leonard.
Anyhoo, so what does the "A" actually stand for? Did you know that the world "adultery" or "adulteress" never appears in the book? A hint that the A doesn't really stand for either, and that Hawthorne is up to something else. Does it stand for America? Maybe. In any case, there is complex symbolism around flowers and weeds, and colors, and lots of other crap I can't remember because I taught it 30 years ago. One final fun thing. Whenever you read a novel or short story, check out the first word or two and the last word or two. You will very often find it makes a kind of commentary on the book. In the case here:"A... GULES." Gules of course being the heraldic term for red. See? An 'A' in red. In "Moby Dick" you get:"Call me... another orphan." Which is one of the essential themes of the work, and indeed of Melville's life, as he was left fatherless at a young age, his father having died from being forced to walk in a snow storm (now you know why the whale is white and why Bartleby stares at blank walls). Speaking of "Bartleby," which you mentioned, you get:"I am... humanity." Hmmm.In Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" you get:"Young Goodman Brown... his dying hour was gloom." Basically the entire story.And so it goes. So now everyone, start pulling the books of your shelf and play this game. It doesn't always work out so nicely.Replies: @Inquiring Mind
Wad’ya mean the dialogue is weird to our ears?
Consider a real-life quote from the general time period of the novel, something uttered by a famous person who in fact inspired the Puritans.
“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. ”
When I am stuck behind a slow driver, I mutter that, all the time!
By the way, that preamble to The Scarlet Letter is called the Custom-House Essay. My high-school English teacher told the class to not read it, that it was awful. Was that “reverse psychology”? Years later I read it and found it delightfully entertaining. The essay is loosely biographical of Hawthorne, who early in life held a “cushy government job”, and his description of life working in the government sector shows it hasn’t changed in over 150 years.
That sounds bowdlerized. This is Wikipedia's https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Long_Parliament final paragraph:
Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!
Bah. Twain was an obnoxious twat. If he were alive today, he’d be bleating about how black lives matter on Twitter.
Cooper is fantastic. And I speak as someone who’s read about 20 of his novels, not just The Leatherstocking Tales.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
Dashiell Hammett was even better than Chandler. Less fancy but straight, brutal and to the point.
I’ve only read a small percentage of his vast oeuvre, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read."
Okay, you've convinced me to give Simenon's books another try. I started one but got distracted. I absolutely loved the movie Monsieur Hire, based on one of his novels. Have you seen it?Replies: @Known Fact
Try novelist Max Frisch; also Italo Calvino and Stanislaw Lem for imaginative and often light-hearted stuff. Although Lem’s Solaris is dead serious and a magnificent novel
So I got some input from my wife, who often taught The Scarlet Letter in high school. She says the girls (Bronx ethnic types) needed a lot of hand-holding with the writing but enjoyed the sexism angle to the plot (how come the woman is getting punished worse than the guy?)
Hackett-Fisher covered this a bit in Albion’s Seed. Puritans were so, well, puritanical that I think just about every adult in the Massachusetts colony was brought up on a morals charge at least once in the 1600s. Hell, I believe sleeping in church was a petty offense.
Bit of trivia since we’re discussing The Scarlet Letter: adultery was a crime in colonial Massachusetts, and Hackett-Fisher’s research indicated men were punished more harshly/frequently than women. Unlike Virginia, where male adultery was frequently ignored.
I also think there’s an important question of “good” vs. “poor” writing. It HAS to be clear to the reader. Yes, moving from “modern” writing style, spelling, usage and syntax, to people like Austin, Scott, Dickens, Eliot and Thackeray requires an adjustment. But you soon get used to it, and then it just flows (you DO have to pay attention, but isn’t that what reading is all about?). But I must say, the cited section of Hawthorne was impenetrable, and let’s face it is just poor, poor writing, even for his period of time. Sorry, Nat, perhaps you have an undeserved reputation as a “good” writer.
I love reading, and I love ancient history. I couldn’t get through “Decline and Fall …” That wordy fucktard has positively ruined the study of ancient history for generations of college students.
I couldn’t do that one either. Six pages for whatshisname to climb in bed with the spear guy. Fuck man, speed it up!
It’s 2023, not 1963. You haven’t been near a college campus for 50 years. Times have changed. Latin club in a public high school? You’re living in the past. Might have more fun wearing a 1840’s outfight to a Dickens theme Christmas fair.
You’re so right that Twain really despised the small town western yokels. He ran away from home at 13. Which means home wasn’t pleasant. He never explained why he ran away. Nor did he ever explain where he got the $500 to buy his pilot’s apprenticeship.
I read a lot of Twain at one time. My favorites are Gilded Age , second part of Life on the Mississippi and his travels in Hawaii.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
Try the three Josephine Tey, novels: Brat Farrer, the Franchise affair, to Love and be Wise.
One problem that I have with recent crime fiction is that a larger and larger fraction of the books is about the personal life of the detectives (invariably messy) rather than the plot itself. I like Sherlock Holmes stories as this stuff is confined to a few sentences at the start to get Mrs Watson out of the way (e.g. visiting a sick relative) so that Holmes and Watson can get on with the story. A modern writer would tell me more than I wanted to know about the Watson’s love life.
Yes! I recently started an Award-winning detective novel, In a Dry Season, from the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. The writing was good, the plot intriguing but Banks's wife had left him. Uh oh, I thought but persevered. Then he's assigned a comely young assistant and in no time, they're in bed. Really irritating to have an interesting murder investigation sidelined by the details of his messy personal life. I didn't bother finishing it.
I like the Continental Op. We don't even know his first name. We know only that he's short and stocky (Red Harvest). None of this angsty nonsense about his personal life. But then, to me Hammett is the master.
These two kids taught themselves to read and write using the immediate feedback of autocorrect.
If a kid is dumb, give him a smart phone, if he is smart, give him a book.Replies: @Dieter Kief, @Anon
“immediate feedback of autocorrect.”
Spell checkers, in my experience, know nothing of context and grammar. Frequently a word with a different meaning is substituted for the incorrectly spelled, or a fat finger typo, intended word.
Ending up with people who can read a tweet, but go into a trance when faced with anything more than a short paragraph.
“Idiocracy” was supposed to be a parody of the future.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
Elmore Leonard is quite good too. 😉
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
I myself used to be an avid reader and, in my younger days, thought nothing of attacking a thousand-leaf tome by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But now, I just can't do it. Many others have had the same experience.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @Hypnotoad666
That Atlantic article is interesting because it dates from 2008, approximately the last time The Atlantic was any good. The author, Nicholas Carr, expanded it into a book, The Shallows, that was itself pretty good.
Also, everything he talked about has been hyper-accelerated since then. Ironically, to the point that no one has the attention span to read an entire book on the subject.
It’s a double-edged phenomenon, for sure. Attention spans are down. But people have also gotten better at cutting to the quick and there are some really funny and insightful masters of pith plying their trade on the internet.
Interest in geography is a very individualized thing, I’ve noticed. Some people have no sense of place or direction and don’t really care. Others always need to know where North is and where they are in relation to everything else.
Women tend to care less about these things. People who don’t drive at all and are only passive passengers (Including children) seem to have no clue about the physical space of the world. They just get in a box, wait awhile, and then find themselves in a new place.
Once again, the tech can cut either way. You can turn off your brain and be a passive recipient of spoken directions. Or, you can use your phone to zoom out and see exactly where you are in the world. If you’re curious, you can explore the coast of Madagascar or wherever on Google Earth.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think bing maps (I try to avoid the goolag) are a blast. I use them all the time and take screen shots for use later. I hardly ever type in addresses, as I zoom in/out and move around, just exploring some times. However, that's pretty much the opposite of having the car GPS units speak to you to tell you where to turn*. You may live somewhere for years and never actually know where it is in the world.
So, right, the computer tech can be good or bad. The good stuff acts as a teaching aid. The bad stuff is what most people rely on, and it makes them dumber for that.
.
* They've been programmed lately to be downright nags, as I wrote up in From TomTom to the NWA.
Isn’t the real secret of AI that a comparatively simple program does all the work by teaching itself? The programers don’t even know how it gets the answers, they just set it up with data and a feedback mechanism to tell it whether its outputs are getting warmer or colder.
(I mean: There seems to be nobody else around being able to take care of this part of the AI story other than - AI experts?!)
The really scary part comes when the AI figures out how to write its own AI code and gains an IQ of 600.
Cormac McCarthy’s new novel is driven by top-notch (and clean) literary prose. It’s almost as if the Faulkner-disciple decided to pay a little homage to Hemingway this time. (The companion book is interesting, too.) It’s depressing to see the ways Cormac cucks, though. His protagonist is a strong silent all-American intellectual named Bobby Western–who is also a Jew. Bobby Western has a very close and loving relationship with a New Orleans tranny, he seeks out a lawyer based on the fact that the lawyer is Jewish and thus can be trusted to defend him against the Deep State, and said lawyer retells an “insider POV” version of the JFK assassination story as an Italian mob hit against the most sinister and evil family (the Kennedys) in history.
I remember reading that book in the eighth grade. It was never required, but it was on the shelf of one of my teacher’s bookshelves. This was a time when some teachers had bookshelves with material we could read if we liked.
I’m not trying to get any points for this. It was a difficult read, and I forced myself to finish. Nevertheless, I did like it. Will I read it again, no! Once was enough, but the story left quite the impression on me.
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
Elmore Leonard’s “Tishomingo Blues” is terrifying. Fits right in with a main iSteve theme.
Women tend to care less about these things. People who don't drive at all and are only passive passengers (Including children) seem to have no clue about the physical space of the world. They just get in a box, wait awhile, and then find themselves in a new place.
Once again, the tech can cut either way. You can turn off your brain and be a passive recipient of spoken directions. Or, you can use your phone to zoom out and see exactly where you are in the world. If you're curious, you can explore the coast of Madagascar or wherever on Google Earth.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
I agree, Mr. Toad, except that my boy was reading maps at about 5 y/o. I had to give him real road maps, so he could follow and help me when I missed a turnoff. (I found a new route to get back and had him read out what turns were coming.) I guess someone’s gotta teach it or at least enable a love and understanding of maps.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think bing maps (I try to avoid the goolag) are a blast. I use them all the time and take screen shots for use later. I hardly ever type in addresses, as I zoom in/out and move around, just exploring some times. However, that’s pretty much the opposite of having the car GPS units speak to you to tell you where to turn*. You may live somewhere for years and never actually know where it is in the world.
So, right, the computer tech can be good or bad. The good stuff acts as a teaching aid. The bad stuff is what most people rely on, and it makes them dumber for that.
.
* They’ve been programmed lately to be downright nags, as I wrote up in From TomTom to the NWA.
I know I read ‘The Scarlet Letter’ in high school but I barely remember it; guess it didn’t impress me too much one way or the other. I do remember suffering through Shakespeare and ‘The Canterbury Tales.’ Absolutely hated James Joyce. When I was 15, I read ‘Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.’ For fun. Weird kid, I guess. And then the next summer I read ‘Justine’ by De Sade. Probably got a lot weirder after that.
Was a big fan of Poe and especially Lovecraft. Melville was always a bit hit or miss. ‘Moby Dick’ was painfully tedious but also contained gems like:
I’ve remembered that ever since.
One problem that I have with recent crime fiction is that a larger and larger fraction of the books is about the personal life of the detectives (invariably messy) rather than the plot itself. I like Sherlock Holmes stories as this stuff is confined to a few sentences at the start to get Mrs Watson out of the way (e.g. visiting a sick relative) so that Holmes and Watson can get on with the story. A modern writer would tell me more than I wanted to know about the Watson's love life.Replies: @Mark G., @J.Ross, @Kylie
I liked The Daughter of Time by Tey. Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant is in the hospital recovering from an injury. While lying in his hospital bed, in order to pass the time, he decides to examine the case of Richard III murdering his two nephews. He proves that someone else was the actual culprit.
The just part seems to be what they get their noticeable paychecks for. So: It seems to be quite something to get this done, methinks.
(I mean: There seems to be nobody else around being able to take care of this part of the AI story other than – AI experts?!)
One problem that I have with recent crime fiction is that a larger and larger fraction of the books is about the personal life of the detectives (invariably messy) rather than the plot itself. I like Sherlock Holmes stories as this stuff is confined to a few sentences at the start to get Mrs Watson out of the way (e.g. visiting a sick relative) so that Holmes and Watson can get on with the story. A modern writer would tell me more than I wanted to know about the Watson's love life.Replies: @Mark G., @J.Ross, @Kylie
Strong agree, the weakest part of the first season of True Detective is the wimpering wife.
To an extent it is crowdsourced (cf “such a powerful military weapon.”)
As for Americans, I went through a Raymond Chandler phase during the 1970s but haven't been back. Elroy Leonard is supposed to be good, but I haven't tried him.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @AceDeuce, @BB753, @AKAHorace, @Jim Don Bob, @anonymous, @Dieter Kief
Tom Kakonis: Treasure Coast. A Florida portrait and very insightful crime novel, set in stormy winter-time/hurricane season. Anyway: Great mostly overlooked book by a great writer.
Btw.: Tom Kakonis is often compared to ElmoreLleonard.
Ha ha! You can see why I haven’t read a word of Elroy!
I guess all those young, white, male aerospace engineers I personally know (talked to one just two days ago) are figments of my imagination, huh?
You are a loon – a delusional harpy.
The ethnic studies majors are few and far between. Just google any university of interst with the term top majors or most popular majors. African-American studies is no where near the top. In reality, american-american studies is usually a minor of some black person whose real major is pre-med, pre-law, or business.
To be sure, a set of very thoughtful observations. Great job. Part of me can’t help thinking that about two-thirds of what you’re getting at, can be achieved with a really well-chosen epigraph. But then again, most people don’t really take the time to meditate on why a writer chose a particular epigraph, so maybe you’re right to begin with.
Whaddaya gonna do: as some guy once said, The road that can be spoken of, is not the real road.
Yeah, “The Witch” has one of the most startling scariest endings for a movie that I’ve seen in quite a while. In this vein, you should check out “The Black-Coat’s Daughter” and “The Last Exorcism” too, if you haven’t already seen them.
And you should also read two stories by Arthur Machen: “The White People” and “The Inmost Light.”
The Inmost Light is perhaps the most evil thing ever written in the English language. Approach with caution.
People think The Witch is a feminist movie about a young girl liberating herself from a patriarchal society--dream on!Replies: @MGB
Thanks.
The texts of both “The Inmost Light” and “The White People” are on the internet, and I plan to read them–thanks.
People think The Witch is a feminist movie about a young girl liberating herself from a patriarchal society–dream on!
People think The Witch is a feminist movie about a young girl liberating herself from a patriarchal society--dream on!Replies: @MGB
All the best American literature and film tries to work through the mix of religion and fear of untamed nature. Like The Witch. Like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Like a few Westerns, and Deliverance. Mathew McConaughey has been turned into a bit of a flake by the tabloids, but Mud is one of the best recent movies. The scene with Joe Don Baker and his crew kneeling and praying in a cheap hotel before setting out to kill just seems to sum up something authentic about the ambiguity of the American south. A bunch of goombas in suburban NJ performing a similar ritual feels like contrived, Hollywood shite.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Conceptually it works the way you say but the statistical models that are needed to implement this are far from trivial. Tech salaries are high but if Google or Facebook are offering you a comp package worth $1M then it’s not because your job is easy.
The really scary part comes when the AI figures out how to write its own AI code and gains an IQ of 600.
Whaddaya gonna do: as some guy once said, The road that can be spoken of, is not the real road.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein
“Every great essay is but a long footnote to an aphorism,” is a saying I coined for myself back when I studied British literature.
Reminds me of the Nietzsche quote:
“A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”
“Every great essay is but a long footnote to an aphorism.”
Reminds me of the Nietzsche quote:
“A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”
Being forced to read a book for school can kill any enjoyment to be had from it.Replies: @nebulafox
I had a similar experience with Fahrenheit 451 recently. It is amazing-and enraging-that I let them destroy that. I can learn and make sure younger people don’t let the same happen to them, and set up a chain effect.
People always debate whether our society is turning into Huxley vs. Orwell. Neither. Bradbury. Only instead of burning books, they will be edited for reasons of “safety”. Get them in print, and start patronizing the new uncensored crypto book stores. Now.
General/President U. S. Grant, as has been often noted, was an excellent writer.
Hearsay opinion has long claimed that Mark Twain ghostwrote Grant’s Autobiography.
Consider a real-life quote from the general time period of the novel, something uttered by a famous person who in fact inspired the Puritans.
“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. "
When I am stuck behind a slow driver, I mutter that, all the time!
By the way, that preamble to The Scarlet Letter is called the Custom-House Essay. My high-school English teacher told the class to not read it, that it was awful. Was that "reverse psychology"? Years later I read it and found it delightfully entertaining. The essay is loosely biographical of Hawthorne, who early in life held a "cushy government job", and his description of life working in the government sector shows it hasn't changed in over 150 years.Replies: @Ralph L
“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. ”
That sounds bowdlerized. This is Wikipedia’s https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Long_Parliament final paragraph:
Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!
I enjoyed Hammett’s Continental Op stories more than The Maltese Falcon. Many authors, such as Wharton and Faulkner, are at their best in short stories.
Try reading Red Harvest or The Drain Curse. Those are masterpieces.
Yes! Red Harvest is so good that it kept me awake till nearly dawn finishing it. And that was the second time I read it. It moves!
It is one of my Top Ten favorite novels of all time.
As I just said, for me, Hammett is the master.
Whatever happened to Audacious Epigone? I liked his stuff. He seems to have disappeared like Griffe du Lion
Late last year I picked up my copy of Lord Jim…one of those nice editions for show in your bookcase. I liked the movie with Peter O’Toole so I figured the book would be good. Well, I struggled and struggled…the structure is a tale within a tale within a tale…and after a couple of weeks I had an epiphany. I don’t have to read this, it isn’t very good, and life is too short.
One problem that I have with recent crime fiction is that a larger and larger fraction of the books is about the personal life of the detectives (invariably messy) rather than the plot itself. I like Sherlock Holmes stories as this stuff is confined to a few sentences at the start to get Mrs Watson out of the way (e.g. visiting a sick relative) so that Holmes and Watson can get on with the story. A modern writer would tell me more than I wanted to know about the Watson's love life.Replies: @Mark G., @J.Ross, @Kylie
“One problem that I have with recent crime fiction is that a larger and larger fraction of the books is about the personal life of the detectives (invariably messy) rather than the plot itself.”
Yes! I recently started an Award-winning detective novel, In a Dry Season, from the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. The writing was good, the plot intriguing but Banks’s wife had left him. Uh oh, I thought but persevered. Then he’s assigned a comely young assistant and in no time, they’re in bed. Really irritating to have an interesting murder investigation sidelined by the details of his messy personal life. I didn’t bother finishing it.
I like the Continental Op. We don’t even know his first name. We know only that he’s short and stocky (Red Harvest). None of this angsty nonsense about his personal life. But then, to me Hammett is the master.
“Try reading Red Harvest or The Drain Curse. Those are masterpieces.”
Yes! Red Harvest is so good that it kept me awake till nearly dawn finishing it. And that was the second time I read it. It moves!
It is one of my Top Ten favorite novels of all time.
As I just said, for me, Hammett is the master.
I took an 19th Century American Lit class in college- not as famous works by famous authors- we read Hawthorne’s The Blythedale Romance- I liked it a lot. Another book I really likes was Howell’s A Modern Instance- but I don’t know if William Dean Howells is all that well known today.
Was a big fan of Poe and especially Lovecraft. Melville was always a bit hit or miss. 'Moby Dick' was painfully tedious but also contained gems like:I've remembered that ever since.Replies: @Veteran Aryan
I’m now getting internet advertisements for ‘The Canterbury Tales’. I used to think it was government that was the threat. But then the capitalists managed to monetize spying on the populace.
Really?
REALLY?Replies: @p38ace
True. There were a lot of short dwarfs running everything in those days.
March 2, 2023
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/k-12-teachers-are-quitting-what-would-make-them-stay
"K–12 schools in the United States are finding it increasingly difficult to retain teachers, with potentially far-reaching ramifications for society. Over the past decade, the annual teacher turnover rate has hovered around 8 percent nationally and is more than double that for schools designated for Title 1 funding (federal funds for schools with high percentages of low-income students). By comparison, the annual turnover rate in high-performing jurisdictions, such as Finland, Ontario, and Singapore, is approximately 3 to 4 percent. . . ."Replies: @p38ace
Fewer black students?
A memorable paragraph from the first chapter of the Scarlet Letter begins as follows
“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”
I suspect that this now qualifies as hate speech.