Quote:
Originally Posted by Empire Man
This chemical engineer dude and I have a few friends in common and he knows I have a lit background and last week he emailed me out of the blue and asked in a 100% non-trolling way about books; his questions basically boiled down to "what makes great art great?" and "what makes lousy art lousy?" and "are protactors made out of clear plastic because that way it's easier to read Hamlet through them?"
He's a really good guy and (also like a lot of my family) an exclusively left-brain dude, if he had a slogan it would be "UTILITY!" and yeah, what I should have done was write him a three-sentence response back about how those are some genuinely good and important questions and how they're also kind of unanswerable, at least in alphabet.
But naaaaaaaaah, I went the other way and spent the next five hours writing him an 8000 word reply. And it honestly was 8000 words, and I'm sure he'll (correctly) ignore most of it. And that's fine, bc you pick your spots, and it was good for me to think about that stuff for a few hours--but still I'm def not going to **** up the FAQ thread even more than I already do by writing posts that are too long.
Imo part of the problem with this conversation is that "reading" is too broad a word; passive reading and active reading are like two totally different sports and there's a place for each. Same thing with "Film Watching" and "Painting Looking" and "A Million Other Things." But when people who only are equipped to watch/read something passively are exposed to something that can only successfully be watched actively then it's no wonder that they think it sucks. It's not because they're dumb, it's obviously not that, it's because active reading is for the most part a learned skill, that they've basically never been taught, maybe bc they're not really interested in learning it, which is fine. The world is big and round.
But this kind of split happens over and over and over again on 2p2 and nobody ever understands each other and it's prob doomed to stay that way, mostly bc of the nature of poker. But for all non-readers, trust me, the literary devices that we sometimes like to talk about are not a bunch of made-up phony conspiratorial conceits agreed upon by some academic cabal in the basement of castle wolfenstein that is hellbent on making everybody who isn't a star-bellied sneetch feel like a philistine. They're just stuff we learned to spot that helps us figure out wtf a writer is thinking and why the story might actually be really interesting. Sorry, mini-rant over, I'll post shorter.
I think I can actually understand both sides. I was a slow reader, and hated it even though I felt compelled to read the classics from a young age. Growing up in Bum****, AL I was still way the best reader in my class. Then I found out about techniques for reading much faster which were never taught in school. In school we were taught to read outloud and pronounce correctly, then to read silently which of course would be at a conversational pace--half my classmates still moved their lips mouthing the words. But that was it--no refinement from there. Nobody ever ****ing told me that you could then just begin registering the words without pronouncing them in your head! Once you start doing that, you can process written text much faster. In fact, once you get the fundamentals down, the limitation becomes eye movement speed and stamina.
Reading became much more stimulating and fulfilling once it became possible to read a novel in about the time it takes to watch a long movie. Lately I don't have much time for reading so I've been listening to audiobooks in the car--which is fine but spending a week getting through a book takes me back to a lot of not-being-able-to-remember-what-happened-in-the-beginning-of-the-book-by-the-end-of-the-book, and I'm at least listening at double speed. Considering just listening to podcasts and the audio version of the Economist instead, except both of those often talk up interesting-sounding new books.
If locked in that conversational pace while reading, I could see how it would be a total turn-off, especially for someone with ADHD. Just not enough input.