Patronage/Matronage

[7Wannabe5]

Mmm..muffins.

One thought I had on my morning power walk around the apartment was that a lot of popular music is stuck at Level 2 or 3. For instance, the Johnny Cash classic, is clearly 2 towards 3, with thought structure of “because you’re mine, I walk the line.” OTOH, the Pixies reflection on choosing to experience “wave of humiliation” would have to be Level 4. Yet, I find it difficult to assign more value to the more complex work of the Pixies vs the simpler work of Johnny Cash. Perhaps, this is simply indicative of the difficulty of measuring complexity? On second thought, it is more likely due to fact that “true” artistic rendering of any stage of emotional development is indicative of complexity.

[7Wannabe5]

@Alphaville:

Ah, gotcha. I suck at writing fiction. However, I suppose I could make attempt if I stuck to a first person diarist style. As in, what might have happened if I had come up with the “lentil baby” concept when I was younger and my butt didn’t hurt.

[jacob]

... a lot of popular music is stuck at Level 2 or 3.

That's 70% of the population. In terms of the market (teens?) it might even be bigger than that (Jason?). It would explain why adult artists^H^H^H^Hcommercial professionals keep writing "teenage drama" songs despite having grown out of that phase themselves.

The same argument could be made for books being edited down to a 6th grade reading level. Is that because authors are stuck in middle school or because the average reader can no longer be expected to process compound sentence structures?

[Smashter]

Is that because authors are stuck in middle school or because the average reader can no longer be expected to process compound sentence structures?

Maybe related to this, I have noticed a stylistic shift away from compound sentence structures. It's no longer cool to write long sentences. Everything has to be short and choppy. Trendy writers like Morgan Housel, David Perell, James Clear, etc beat this drum on Twitter.

This is the case even with content marketing for tech companies (my profession) where you are supposed to be writing blog posts for a highly educated audience.

There is a commonly used app called Hemingway that can take a piece of writing and suggest edits to make it better. Making it better in their eyes always means shorter sentences and simpler words.

For fun, I put in this post of Jacob's . Hemingway app says it's at a grade 10 reading level. They call this "okay" and suggest that you "aim for 9."

Apparently Grade 6 reading level is "good"

[7Wannabe5]

Is that because authors are stuck in middle school or because the average reader can no longer be expected to process compound sentence structures?

Lately, I am thinking “both.” For instance, I picked up a book entitled “Jane Austen Ruined My Life” the other day, and I was expecting something “light”, but at least written at the level of somebody who could appreciate Austen’s wicked, understated social wit. Instead, I wasted 20 minutes of my life inhabiting perspective of protagonist at Level 3 barely approaching 4 created by an author still at Level 3 barely approaching 4. My thought is that the proliferation of books like this is directly related to the scandal involving affluent “Full House” actress buying SAT scores towards Ivy League admittance for her slow-witted daughters. The reference to Austen simply serves as a social signifier rendering the novel as appropriate accessory to trans-Atlantic flight.

[Alphaville]

@Alphaville:

Ah, gotcha. I suck at writing fiction. However, I suppose I could make attempt if I stuck to a first person diarist style. As in, what might have happened if I had come up with the “lentil baby” concept when I was younger and my butt didn’t hurt.

ha ha ha ha ha

ok but you're great at comedy so there's that.

there's a formal beauty to narrative structure that is different from real life or the diary. life is a chaotic mess that proceeds randomly, narrative creates meaning. the thing is more like a concentrated extract, a distillation. i think a lot of pointless details kill narrative but a lack of significant detail kills it too. it's a tricky balance.

in any case what i like about my imagining of a lentil baby story is not the "biography" aspect of it but rather the... demonstration? of certain forms or beneficial relationships which are unfathomable by normies.

a lot of things are not reducible to mathematics or basic elements, and things are by necessity best portrayed with significant detail, rather than reduced to elements that don't add up to the total thing. and so we can grasp things intuitively in a way close to the way we grasp lived experience, but with extra "meaning sauce."

so for me a good narrative accomplishes that.

[7Wannabe5]

@Smashter:

Horrifying! I can’t even imagine what it would do if fed a page of Faulkner.

@Alphaville:

Gotcha. I will give it a whirl after my new refurbished laptop arrives. Maybe the first lines will be something like:

“One easy way in was expressing the benefits in terms of his health. Like a native child whispering into ear of midlife-crisis-ing Ponce de Leon. Numbers could also prove useful, but only if well swaddled in tact. For instance, she might apologize for advertising that her waist-to-hip ratio was .7 when in reality it was closer to .72. Lull...lull...lull...she allows him to be distracted by his firm control of wheel and stick, while she drifts off secure in her possession of his passenger seat.”

...except funnier.

[7Wannabe5]

The problem with creating the character of the Lentil Baby is that she represents an ideal, so she is going to be a Level 4 Idealist. Kind of like a saboteur who feels little compunction about taking down Level 2/3 Calorie Kings and redirecting their stocks and flows towards her cause. However, this does not necessarily reflect the more complex experience of the more easy-going rationalist who amuses herself by creating the character of the Lentil Baby.

[Alphaville]

The problem with creating the character of the Lentil Baby is that she represents an ideal, so she is going to be a Level 4 Idealist.

yeah she's gotta show "level 4" through actions

showing is precisely what narrative is about-- to illustrate not to abstract

sometimes shit is done too on the nose and you end up with "lesson" books & movies, where the fucking character ends up with a sappy explanation to the audience. ugh! "life is like a box of chocolates..." stay put right there forrest, and don't run, so i can shoot you right between the eyes.

anyway

However, this does not necessarily reflect the more complex experience of the more easy-going rationalist who amuses herself by creating the character of the Lentil Baby.

yah, people are not characters and characters are not people. characters are "people whiskey". and good whiskey is often a blend.

[Alphaville]

and omfg i skipped it earlier but it hurts my eyes to see poor hemingway so misinterpreted in the hands of . "hemingway for dummies."

that was a guy who said writers didn't need dictionaries because they were supposed to have read them all, and whose simplicity of writing always said more than just the words on the page, being reduced to bullshit.

i'd like to see james clear write an opening paragraph like this:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a
village that looked across the river and the plain to the
mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and
boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was
clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops
went by the house and down the road and the dust they
raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the
trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and
we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust
rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the
soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white
except for the leaves.

--

@smashter, could you please put actual hemingway through that thing? i'd love to see results ha ha ha.

the problem with long sentences actually it's not that they are bad in themselves but that people have become utterly incompetent at handling the syntax, both on the writing and reading ends.

i say make them suffer.

[7Wannabe5]

showing is precisely what narrative is about-- to illustrate not to abstract

Strong agreement. However, I am lacking innate talent, and I am too lazy to master craft of it. Therefore, it might be easier to just create Lentil Baby website/blog. I am much better at making lists and bullet-points. Or some other format, maybe something like performance art morphed with the visual display of information? That’s it! I will make a Lentil Baby dashboard

ETA: I must admit I have never been fan of Hemingway. I would even go so far as to kick him right off Modern Library Top 100 of 20th Century List.

[Alphaville]

Strong agreement. However, I am lacking innate talent, and I am too lazy to master craft of it. Therefore, it might be easier to just create Lentil Baby website/blog. I am much better at making lists and bullet-points. Or some other format, maybe something like performance art morphed with the visual display of information? That’s it! I will make a Lentil Baby dashboard

you could have a journo interview you and then tell the tale. which is not the same as a novel but it would be a start

ETA: I must admit I have never been fan of Hemingway. I would even go so far as to kick him right off Modern Library Top 100 of 20th Century List.

eh! he's great! read "a moveable feast." great little book. actually it's a memoir. and he picks some great details for it, so it reads like some awesome fiction.

[7Wannabe5]

I have read Hemingway. I don’t like him. I could easily make a list of 200 other authors to be found in the literary fiction section of mega-bookstore whom I prefer. Since I used to work in such a bookstore, I could even attempt to do it in alphabetical order off top of my head:

1) Abe
2)Achebe
3)Allende
4)Allison
5)Anderson
6)Atwood
7)Austen
8)Baldwin
9)Barker
...

[Alphaville]

hahahahaaaa!

damn, you really hate him

ok, i won’t argue taste, which is pointless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Frita]

Observation: People read and write less. Skills are decreasing. In three decades in the US’s public education system, this was apparent. I predict that popular fiction will decrease from 6th grade level.

[7Wannabe5]

@Alphaville:

Yeah, it’s not that I don’t judge him to be better than decent writer. Just don’t like.

@Frita:

Co-sign. Even on this forum, you can witness the growing tendency towards getting/sharing information from videos and podcasts. Pretty easy to imagine future dystopia in which majority of population is illiterate and then the internet fails.

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

Current society is majority illiterate in many important languages — Latin, Greek, Python, Elizabethan English, music, bridge bidding systems, etc., mainly to the consternation of specialists. What’s one more? :p Not saying literacy isn’t valuable, just that all of the above have declined because people have judged them less valuable than whatever they spent time learning instead. Words (written and spoken) are themselves only a model!

@Alphaville: they’re not necessarily misunderstanding Hemingway, probably just profiting off his reputation. For many high school teachers and their former students, I suspect his name signifies “good writing” in a way that feels reassuring. This reminds me of how when I first walked into Chicago’s Eataly after it opened, there was a giant portrait and plaque in the foyer declaring that this pasta and olive oil emporium had been “dedicated” to him.

[Alphaville]

decreasing literacy was already observed by marshall mcluhan who saw the rise of mass media as the return of oral culture from the temporary dominance of the written word. i forget in which of plato’s dialogues writing is decried as harmful to memory. phaedrus? anyway there went my memory. i blame writing, ha ha,

sound and image are great. i prefer to listen to the economist than to read it, it’s entertaining that way. i also enjoy visual communication and often work with it. many things are better demonstrated than explained which makes youtube a goldmine. what i hate is videos where a narcissist will use a crummy demonstration of something that would take 30 seconds as an excuse to babble on endlessly. also, some concepts are best grasped in an interactive scenario like a game than in a dry text.

don’t get me wrong, i love reading, i enjoy writing more than talking, but for some things text is not great.

as for the causes of bad writing, cipolla would offer a different, ahistorical explanation

[Alphaville]

@Alphaville: they’re not necessarily misunderstanding Hemingway, probably just profiting off his reputation.

hahaaaahaaaa eataly! that’s hilarious. wat. who comes up with that stuff?

my complaint with naming a silly app after him is that popular myths self-perpetuate, and then hemingway becomes the language simpleton everyone thinks they know but never bothered reading,

before that it was the myth of the great hunter or fisherman or whatever which i never cared for.

i actually don’t care too terribly for many of the stories he tells, ha ha ha—but his syntax!

[ertyu]

Even on this forum, you can witness the growing tendency towards getting/sharing information from videos and podcasts. Pretty easy to imagine future dystopia in which majority of population is illiterate and then the internet fails.

this is a bit of a derail, but to me getting info from podcasts vs. reading isn't necessarily due to a fall in reading levels. The deal with reading, though, is that you can't do other activities while you engage in it. Whereas if you listen, you could at the same time be taking a walk, doing chores, engaging in simple exercise / stretching...

When I do read, I find my conditioned lack of attention (due to constant screen-hopping in various apps) to be the biggest hurdle to sticking with a book (which I normally also read on a screen) for a long time.