this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Now do Finnegans Wake.
Hard: And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs, yayis, and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland’s tay or a dzoupgan of Kaffue mokau an sable or Sikiang sukry or his ale of ferns in trueart pewter and a shinkobread (hamjambo, bana?) for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt and as rash as she’d russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve (metauwero rage it swales and rieses) my hardey Hek he’d kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn’t peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough.
Easy: Something something... crash
James Joyce was widely regarded as a pretentious ass even back then. Tons of people have done stream of consciousness much better. The only people who should bother with Finnegan are academics. There is literally no substance or point to the story - it is entirely narrative fart sniffing.
It may be pretentious and impenetrable but that doesn't make it bad. There are puns you have to know multiple languages to get, densly layered references, unusual structures and fun wordplay abounds. The word quark came from FW. It's challenging, but fun to read because it's challenging.
I'm not saying git gud, no one should have to read FW. It's kind of uniquely just a joy to read for the sake of enjoying the sounds of words and how they play together. Reading it for the plot or the characters is kind of missing the point, I think.
That's the whole problem with the AI summarizer: it requires you to believe that the only reason to write anything is to communicate some simplistic idea: a command, a moral, or an instruction. But writing isn't just to convey a plot or moral lesson in the least, smallest words possible. Writing is poems and songs, plots and novels, screenplays and anecdotes, slogans and slogs. Writing can just be fun for the sake of words and doesn't have to always convey some easily summarized or quantified concept.
Don't get me wrong, I generally agree with the sentiment that it's got plenty of artistic merit lurking around in there, but about 90% of that is going to be anachronistic to a modern reader who isn't using a heavily annotated version, at which point a lot of the genuine wit gets beaten down by footnotes. Art has a way of losing its impact when you need it explained.
That's why I say most people shouldn't bother. It is legitimately almost impossible for a modern reader to experience the book the way it was written to be experienced unless you spend a graduate degree working up to it. Instead what you will get is akin to a painting which has been blurred over by a foggy window, with someone standing on the other side trying to describe it to you. There are just many better ways to spend a dozen or so hours.
Any recommendation or favourites?
The Great Gatsby is actually a good one. Catcher in the Rye. As I Lay Dying. The Waves.
Yo, what? Is the book all written like this?? Kinda badass, but also super challenging to wring meaning from
Pretty much, yes. In fact this bit is on the clearer side compared to most of the text. It's very challenging and one should probably not dive into it unprepared (there are a lot of side literature and guides to accompany it). However it's well worth the effort once you learn how to read it (e.g. the words draw their meanings via how they're sounding in addition to how they're written).
Sounds fun
""Occasionally she'd cook meals(?) of fish for him and place on his heartsfoot [hearth's foot? heart's foot, figurative language for joy?] her meddery [???] eggs, sausages, and stainish [burnt/crispy] bacon on toast, and a wishy-washy cup of Greenland tea or soup-can(?) of coffee, milk and sugar, or Si-Kiang sugary [some sort of sweet tea?], or ale of ferns [herbal ale?] in trueart [skillfully crafted] pewter, and a bit of bread "??? ???" to please him and keep his stomach porky, until her (???)knees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her joints shucked [peeled] with gout; and as rash as she'd rush with her peak-load of provisions up on her sieve [???] "(???) rage, it swells and rises", my hardy Hek [Hector?], he'd cast them from him, with a stour [force] of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sorrow, and if he didn't peg it flat on her (tail/head/heel?), believe you me, she was safe enough.""
I don't know what kind of rural Irish hell this comes out of, but some of the words don't even look English. I hated trying to decipher that and I'm sure I wasn't accurate for half of it.
A woman often cooks various meals for a man, but he consistently rejects her efforts despite her persistence, even when she's physically struggling. Still, she remains safe.
Brought to you by ChatGPT 4.0
That's actually not that bad. Of course missing all the smells and taste of the text, allusions and double meanings, but as a very coarse synopsis it'll do.
Oh it did give a longer response initially, then I asked to reduce the sentence to its essence, just like the ad from this post did. The longer version was:
Interesting. I'd definitely skim through such a version, albeit it totally abolishes the intricacies of FW.
Yep, but it opens it up to a broader audience. Even though that's probably exactly the opposite of what he intended.
Many parts of FW work a bit like an abstract painting where each viewer finds their own interpretation, each of those equally valid and independent of what the author possibly intended. An AI dumbed down version would just show one path through the work, the one it thinks is the main road. But yes, at best, such version could sparkle an interest and function as a gateway to the work. Or extinguish all interest for good.
I read 4 words of that and was already fantasizing about guzzling the entire contents of a bottle of ADD meds
I don't get why we can't all objectively agree how boring that is?
It's a lot of things, but definitely not boring...
I'd like to see Willem Defoe shouting it into a camera while not blinking.
None of this is vocalized. It's all inner monologue.
Which makes me less bored because...?
For a reader who likes weird books it isn't boring. For someone required to endure it as part of a class and wants to go to a good school to become a marine biologist or chemistry major, it's very boring.
For many people, they can't easily avoid slow books like this with strange language because it's required as a general prerequisite in high school or college. And getting into a "good" school usually requires feigning some interest in this type of dross.
The skill of reading weird old language that is circuitious and painful really only teaches boredom tolerance for those who don't like literature of olden days.
Sheesh, it's not even a hundred years old yet.
So there you have your answer why we can't all collectively agree that it's boring. Some people like it and/or get something out of reading it.
You could say the same about anything that requires effort, like learning a programming language for example. Of course a lot of people are going to find it boring and obtuse - but no one questions why it's sometimes a requirement to learn it. That being said, I doubt aspiring marine biologists are being forced to read Finnegans Wake in particular.
Not Finnegans Wake in particular, but something boring and slow with old labyrinthyian language that gives people a headache to follow.
Most people take programming as an elective whereas as old slow books are generally required for everyone.
Well, let me put it this way then: with your strategy, in 50 years there will be no one left alive who would be able to use or understand the word labyrinthine.
That's not true. People who like language will naturally gravitate towards learning weird words
Just like people who like using their hands will gravitate toward air conditiioning repair and woodworking over time
Why does EVERYONE need to be bored right now?
This is a naive position. In a class society, the upper classes see to it that their kids get educated. If you're the daughter of an AC repairman, and you like books with weird words in them, your chances to have a career in the field where you would thrive are slim to none. The best way to counter this is to offer a lot of education, to everyone, not just to the people "with a good head for reading" that just happens to also all have rich parents. For this noble cause, taking the risk that a few kids might be bored for a few hours seems like a reasonable prize to pay. You never know what kid is going to respond to what subject, this is why a broad education is important.
It's SO boring to people who don't like it.
If we ensure everyone is able to have functional literacy, people begin to know.pretty quickly whether they do or do not like reading.
People have limitied time and the daughter of the AC repairman may be better served by being able take "easy" physics courses as a freshman and take a two year mechanical engineering course after to see if she likes that. She may not want to spend 80 hours on Finnegan's Wake or expend effort having to pretend to like that incoherent diatribe. Grade school and high school take a long time and the idea that intelligent people of all classes couldn't start learning more advanced topics and no one shouod specialize in what they learn is a Polyannaish attitude towards time and resource management that has lead to our clusterfuck society of "everyone needs a college degree just to work at enterprise rent a car" and results in people putting off child birth towards ages at which they are less likely to be fertile and have babies with fewer genetic defects. (That is not eugenicism. Everyone has genetic defects and most people have 6-7.) In an Internet age in which information is readily available, strategies, strategies for educating the populace should change and try to.reduce student apathy and disengagement, which ca nbe caused by teaching boring things students don't like. I am not against a semester or two of high school English, but 4 years is 3 too many at least for those uninterested.
Tl;dr we should stop providing well-rounded educations and once it becomes obvious that a child is uninterested in more intellectual pursuits they should be put in a trade school.
Pretty much, but I think it should be a bit less limiting. Trade classes, not trade schools, but also specialized classes for different interests, without AP and Honors classes wrighted to penalize specialized courses lacking those designations.
Those sure are some labyrinthine sentences you managed to conjure up there. Now, if only I didn't find the task so boring, perhaps I might be able to untangle a coherent thought or two, who knows?
I never claimed to be well at english
Because a broad educational background is important and people can't know if they'd be into old literature without being exposed to it.
I guess, but broad exposure goes on for a very long and boring time, imho. Couldn't there just be a 1 semester broad exposure class to find out such things instead of years of painful obtuse prose students mostly just pretended to read?
No, that wouldn't actually provide a baseline understanding of a variety of topics. Things like media literacy can only be taught by reading and watching and analyzing a wide range of things, and that takes several years of just one general thing. Basic biology, enough to understand fundamental things like how/why vaccines work or the importance of diet and exercise also builds on many years of learning. Math should be confidently understood at least through algebra in order navigate taxes, bills, budgeting, and other legally important but boring situations.
A lot of stuff doesn't feel important while you're learning about it and partially that's just teachers doing a bad job contextualizing the lessons but yes many topics just aren't intrinsically interesting to everybody. It's still good to have a robust base of understanding because that makes tangentially related things easier to parse.
And that's not even getting into "electives" that would be super useful for most people if they had the time, things like cooking and shop class so folks are more self-reliant, or music or art or crafting because hobbies can also be menaly stimulating and fulfilling, or better or more varied PE types because it's also important to develop some decent health habits early in life. In a perfect world a lot of that would be introduced or reinforced at home by family and friends and neighbors, but that's not the world we have.
It's not a terrible point, but media literacy seems to be quite low no matter what and lessons are easily forgotten. Teaching scientific literacy through ecology courses would have a better impact.
Pretending to read instead of engaging with the lesson is going to do that, yeah.
Ecology is my favorite, and the focus of my secondary education, but it can't come before chemistry and biology and those build on algebraic math and require and understanding of science built from "general science". Should probably also have some statistics. Geology and cartography are going to be in there, as well as the history of conservation, there should be some anthropology... It's all very iterative. Ecology specifically encompasses a ton of disciplines.
I'll add that introductory stuff can happen early. In my state we learn about the salmon life cycle in grade school and that includes a tiny bit about watersheds and streams and clean water. But it's very rudimentary.
So many people don't understand climate science. It's unfortunate these topics couldn't be integrated into a.climate science class. It may be too late anyway to change the impending global destruction trajectory.
Well, if you mean literally, a little boredom is good for the brain.
If you mean why should we strive to make kids have a good vocabulary, it's so that they can communicate with others and be able to understand the world better.
If you mean why should we strive to make kids appreciate art, it's because art is good for kids' brains, for everyone's brains.
If you just mean you can't force all kids to be into the same things, yes, I agree. But all should learn math, reading at an adult level, comfortably, sciences, art of some sort, and physical education of some sort.
You aren't better off just always doing what comes easy to you. Forcing your mind and body to do things that are difficult is what makes you stronger and smarter. The learning difficult books that you disdain so thoroughly will make it both easier and more fun to read, eventually, but also just trains your mind to handle language better.
I read plenty of books in school, well over 5 cover to cover, and I still hate reading.
There is no truth in any book that I can't learn from a good Sean Cody film.
I think your platitudes sound nice, but in a world of limited time, we'd be better off scrapping 1-2 years of English and replacing it with Genetics classes or Ecology classes at the high school level. Fiction books are mostly just an older technology of Netflix, and yet people cling to the idea of books being virtuous for Emeperor's New Clothes-style pretentiousness.
The environmental catastrophy the world seems intent on diving head first into.(without knowing the depth) seems more pressing than some teenager becoming a sesquipidalian via extreme boredom.
5?
OK you have to be trolling.
Why is that trolling? At least 5 but cover to cover. Like that i read all of it, not just like parts and the back cover.
I skimmed many books, well over 10.
I dont get why some people have a hard time believing some people find reading boring?
I stand by everything in the prior post.
I can't imagine a school that would teach only 5 literature books, my kids did more than that EACH year and even the terrible incomplete education I got in K-12 here when we were the bottom of the barrel state in the bottom of the barrel nation in terms of education involved more than 5 books a year.
My kid who dislikes reading and wants to go into trades, even that kid has read more than 5 books voluntarily outside of school, and certainly more than 60 in the course of their education so far. I can't imagine all of them being boring - I read some of them too, if my kids recommended them to me - Brodek's Report was one I remember reading after my kid had to buy it for school, it was so good.
I just thought your " I read books, five of them at least" had to be a joke. If my kids here in the state of Florida have to do more, I can't imagine any educational system requiring only a few.
They required a lot more, probably hundreds. Very few I read cover to cover. Reading is boring to me. I have no reason to waste my tike on things I find boring or increase my sufferring level. I probably skimmed briefly and read the back cover of hundreds of books.
I promise you Finnegan's Wake is not required reading for any non-English major, and even then likely not until the graduate level (and probably only excerpts unless it's a whole class on just the book).
It's Finnegans Wake, without the apostrophe. Obviously a book full of puns and riddles must have them in its title as well.