When did reading become a thing to hate?
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And we wonder why people are getting dumber... I've been told that things like "belittle" and "ignorance" (ironically) are too big words... it's pathetic. I've got a fair share of my own books. I've got a number of the classics, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, etc. Two copies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as others by Tolkien, including The Silmarillion. I've also got a number of modern novels, such as Frank Peretti's The Oath, and many by Ted Dekker. A lot of my reading is non-fiction though, I've got numerous books by C.S. Lewis (his apologetics and philosophical writings, not his fiction). Also works by Ravi Zacharias, Lee Strobel, and Frank Beckwith.
I also do quite a bit of my own writing, maintaining a blog and composing my own poetry, short stories, and essays.
Though I think there's less subjectivity than the deconstructionists would have you believe in interpretation, for each author composed each work for a specific audience during a specific time period, coming from a specific past, all which played influence on the author's intent in writing the work. If meaning simply generated itself, then all written works would be ultimately worthless, no one better than any other.
I also do quite a bit of my own writing, maintaining a blog and composing my own poetry, short stories, and essays.
Though I think there's less subjectivity than the deconstructionists would have you believe in interpretation, for each author composed each work for a specific audience during a specific time period, coming from a specific past, all which played influence on the author's intent in writing the work. If meaning simply generated itself, then all written works would be ultimately worthless, no one better than any other.
deALPHAmale,
Indeed each written word is derived from the position in time and space in the real world, but even if the author and consumer (addressing not just reading here) are in the same time period the fact that they have completely different experiences often precludes conclusions in one from the other.
If one were to look at my writing they may notice I write at length, with few contractions (the ones existing tend to be to a point), but if you weren't trained in psychology you may not notice that I have OCD (yes, and truly).
Indeed each written word is derived from the position in time and space in the real world, but even if the author and consumer (addressing not just reading here) are in the same time period the fact that they have completely different experiences often precludes conclusions in one from the other.
If one were to look at my writing they may notice I write at length, with few contractions (the ones existing tend to be to a point), but if you weren't trained in psychology you may not notice that I have OCD (yes, and truly).
The roommate that I mentioned was of similar mind. I could not understand his inclination to explore philosophical topics at length, but refuse to use lengthy, arcane, or esoteric vocabulary. ?:|deALPHAmale said:
i just hate it when teachers say "we've got it hard compared to everyone else", not saying they don't have a tough job, nothing in life is easy. my parents work 10+ hours a day not including weekends and a lot less time off.The_root_of_all_evil said:
try being a network admin with a bunch of clueless adults, at least with a teacher and kids being stupid you got a good excuse they don't know any better (for the most part). i deal with adults who can't tell me what they do on a day to day basis because "they don't know computers" and ppl wonder why i'm jaded, that's not to mention all the crap we are accused of on a daily basis by the same clueless users who don't know what they're doing but are convinced they know we're up to something
my mom actually works for the gov in hr, the stuff teachers deal with she does but with adults, she recently had to deal with a few child porn incidents at work and that's not even counting the union crap she deals with.
tho i swear there's a special lvl of hell reserved for some special needs teachers, while it
CAN be tough with 3 teacher and several aids it's not that hard, we had TONS of problems with them tho. the most deplorable was when the gov gave us money for child care for my mom's fiance's son who has autism and down's when the teachers went on an illegal strike. his teachers asked for the money back and when we rightly told them where to stick their request, they started filing violent incident reports and threatened to remove him from the school. that was until we showed them the timeline of the reports and when we returned the letter and threatened to unleash the evil ***** harpy that is our lawyer, who we keep locked up and at that time played hootie and the blowfish, micheal bolton and celine dion on an endles loop while poking her with a stick, on them did they apologize and stop doing those reports
actually a bit of an addendum to this, if you want to see jobs that have it worse off than teachers look at fireman, emts (ambulance drivers), emergency room nurses/doctors or cops. the amount of crap, death and bloody bodies they have to put up with on an almost daily basis doesn't hold a candle to most any other career.
edited for that last paragraph
Lucky you, having an English teacher that isn't bat-shit insane.thebobmaster said:
Like others have said, Shakespears works were completlely lost on me because of having to over-analyze them. Although to be fair, even without that I still would've said that his books were irrelevant and boring.
Totally agree, although I've a few horror stories of my own. Not for a public forum though.cleverlymadeup said:
In an ideal world: Pay = Skill+Enthusiasm+Time Spent+Experience x Necessity x Real Shitty Stuff.
That leaves Beckham with £10 a goal and the good people on a living wage.
Anyway, back to books : Who do you think is the most over-hyped author?
the funny part about shakespeare is if he wrote his stuff today it would be banned and declared vulgarGenHellspawn said:
while the nobles, who speak in iambic pentameter, are generally polite, the common folk are rather vulgar in what they are saying and contain a ton of sexual references, that most ppl don't understand because it's written in an older form of english we don't understand anymore
Most over-hyped? Well, I'll get slaughtered for saying it, but I'd have to say J K Rowling. She's a superlative storyteller (when she can keep track of what she's said and when, and when she's not introducing new plot elements four minutes from the end when poor old Chekov's had his shotgun lying about since book two) but she really isn't a particularly good writer.
That's not necessarily a criticism, of course - as long as it's readable and reasonably correct in terms of SPaG, poor writing won't necessarily detract from a well-spun story. Just look at Matthew Reilly's stuff, where the writing's mediocre and the stories are barely on nodding terms with reality, but they're told so well that it's easy to ignore all that and just ride along. But when Rowling's held up as a paragon of writing rather than storytelling, it skews the way people look at writing and in the long run can have a detrimental effect.
Anyway, yes, books. I like books muchly. A few years ago I took a quick poll of one of my more representative bookcases, and multiplied that by the number of bookcases and bookcase-equivalent bookshelves we have kicking about the house. A conservative estimate - I shall have to count one day - put the family collection at somewhere in the region of 80,000 books. Yes, that's four zeroes. But of course that was in 1999, and I've discovered the marvellous combination of Amazon and debit cards since then.
And yes, I have read a large chunk of them. Probably just under half, at a guess - all the ones that interested me, anyway.
Oh, I like books.
EDIT: Oh, and CleverlyMadeUp, you're absolutely right about Shakespeare. Just look at every other word Hamlet utters, for instance, particularly the "country matters" conversation with Ophelia. And for an even bigger laugh, look up the etymology of Threadneedle Street, where the Bank Of England lives...
That's not necessarily a criticism, of course - as long as it's readable and reasonably correct in terms of SPaG, poor writing won't necessarily detract from a well-spun story. Just look at Matthew Reilly's stuff, where the writing's mediocre and the stories are barely on nodding terms with reality, but they're told so well that it's easy to ignore all that and just ride along. But when Rowling's held up as a paragon of writing rather than storytelling, it skews the way people look at writing and in the long run can have a detrimental effect.
Anyway, yes, books. I like books muchly. A few years ago I took a quick poll of one of my more representative bookcases, and multiplied that by the number of bookcases and bookcase-equivalent bookshelves we have kicking about the house. A conservative estimate - I shall have to count one day - put the family collection at somewhere in the region of 80,000 books. Yes, that's four zeroes. But of course that was in 1999, and I've discovered the marvellous combination of Amazon and debit cards since then.
And yes, I have read a large chunk of them. Probably just under half, at a guess - all the ones that interested me, anyway.
Oh, I like books.
EDIT: Oh, and CleverlyMadeUp, you're absolutely right about Shakespeare. Just look at every other word Hamlet utters, for instance, particularly the "country matters" conversation with Ophelia. And for an even bigger laugh, look up the etymology of Threadneedle Street, where the Bank Of England lives...
I think it's all tied to the whole "Smart vs. Cool" thing in high schools, and it seems here in California it can vary from each ethnicity. Many Latinos and Blacks tend to view being intelligent as being "whitewashed", which is just fucking stupid and insulting. Funny enough, despite my friends ragging on me for not getting high GPAs like they do,(I'm Vietnamese) they constantly say "Oh so you're smart and white now?" whenever I make an "eloquent" manner of speech. This also appears to create backlash from the "white" community and as a result they try to individualize themselves from their stereotype and now we've got this huge clusterfuck to deal with. I hate high school.
It's sad that anyone would think that literacy isn't cool. This is probably the same sort of person that can't spell or use grammar correctly to save their life, because he shuns reading. I mean, don't be a bookworm- extremes on either side are bad- but it's just that mentality of "books are for geeks" is irksome. After all, he's a gamer, isn't he? He's already a kind of geek in his own rite. He has no real room to talk. I remember in high school when people would ask me how I made straight A's. I just kind of blinked at them and said, "It's easy if you actually do the work."
That's what it is, really. People are just too lazy to read. It's so much easier to play a game or watch a movie. And America is horrible for this, the majority of our citizens are some of the laziest people on Earth (which explains our rampant obesity as well).
That's what it is, really. People are just too lazy to read. It's so much easier to play a game or watch a movie. And America is horrible for this, the majority of our citizens are some of the laziest people on Earth (which explains our rampant obesity as well).
One of the coaches saw me reading and said that if I read too much my head would explode, he also suggested not eating to lose weight.
actually the even sadder part is with some companies opening up places in the states, toyota recently started to make a plant in canada, tho they got less monetary incentives to do so, over a plant in the southern states because it would cost them a lot more money to train the ppl which negated any monetary incentives they receivedkiokushitaka said:
they couldn't give them a manual, they had to make signs with pictures and diagrams because a lot of the ppl couldn't read properly, which is very sad indeed
actually reading while training or doing athletic activities is one of the best times and things to do for your brain and your body believe or notBuckminsterF said:
when i get more into bjj and biking i find myself reading more and absorbing a lot more info than if i'm slacking off doing anything productive and playing video games
Anti-intellectualism is a sad thing, but you can escape from it if you know where to look. I work at YSP [http://ysp.org/] as a volunteer, and that is one of the last surviving refuges of intellectual freedom. To see children not just act, but understand stories that most adults these days find incomprehensible, it's just phenomenal.
The "nobles" could get pretty risqué too, when they could get away with it. One of the recurring themes of Shakespeare's work is how differently those in power act when they think nobody's watching them.
Oh, and verse isn't limited to the noble characters, it's more linked to mood. In Twelfth Night, Olivia starts out talking in prose when she's in mourning, but as she starts falling for "Cesario" she leaps right into verse.
Ah, the eroticism of Shakespeare's language. ;-)cleverlymadeup said:
The "nobles" could get pretty risqué too, when they could get away with it. One of the recurring themes of Shakespeare's work is how differently those in power act when they think nobody's watching them.
Oh, and verse isn't limited to the noble characters, it's more linked to mood. In Twelfth Night, Olivia starts out talking in prose when she's in mourning, but as she starts falling for "Cesario" she leaps right into verse.
i finished war and peace in year 9 took me a week...worst piece of crap ever but that's beside the point i started reading because we had no TV and ever since then i just cant seem to stop it has however at some points in my life meant that I've been a social outcast.
