What shade should we color our blog, and what hashtag should we use, to show solidarity with a Netscape millionaire unjustly deprived of his natural right to be CEO and a bigot?
Open thread.
Open Thread
by @mistermix.bsky.social| 137 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
flukebucket
Puke green and #freedumb
OzarkHillbilly
TAKE BACK THE RAINBOW!!!
scav
white on white?
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Maybe we can change the name of the site to Brendan Juice?
JGabriel
Color: Lime background and Mauve.text. Or vice versa. It could go either way.
Hashtag: #Hitler!Victim
CONGRATULATIONS!
White like the special costume made from sheets they all like wearing on Saturday nights.
srv
Did you know worldssmallestviolin.com is not taken?
Ben Cisco
@scav: It ain’t going to get any better than that, might as well stop now.
The Dangerman
Fescue.
RoonieRoo
It should stay blue and be renamed Blue State.
Gin & Tonic
Am I the only one thinking this BS doesn’t really warrant three threads in the past 24 hours?
Board lets CEO go for stepping in shit. Film at 11.
PaulW
The blog color should be BLINDING BEIGE and the hashtag should be #WeReserveTheRightToHateOnGaysBecauseWeCherryPickLetivicusForOnlyTheGayStuffNotTheProSlaveryAntiTattooAntiWomanAntiFabricAntiBeerStuffSinceWeLikeTHATPartOfTheBibleAmen
Ash Can
Just superimpose the blog over a background of a big portrait of Ayn Rand, to show support for market forces over a tyrannical government — oh, wait.
MomSense
Obtuse puce.
#freedumbplies
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Gin & Tonic:
It’s a slow news cycle.
Roger Moore
@scav:
I’d suggest white on black, but we all know that’s never punished.
Amir Khalid
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Eww.
When something like this happens, do the cops and firemen involved get disciplined?
NotMax
Gray background, black text. Blinking. :)
C’mon, this is like the 11th post about Mozilla. There must be something else going on.
/cranky
scav
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: That poor beeping black box all alone in the big ocean is suddenly asking where all the news crews went.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
This looks like a mismatch from go. One side rescues people and makes damn good food, the other side beats up and kills people for a living.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Amir Khalid: That was a little weird.
piratedan
@Gin & Tonic: it’s just nice to see the invisible hand of the free market deal a blow for “justice” once in a while, especially with the perpetual onslaught of fundamentalist bullshit being passed in the state legislatures attacking women’s rights, voting rights and moar guns plus the national level taking the usual denialist tack on the legitimacy of the Presidency.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
Any particular comment about Malaysia banning Noah?
Elizabelle
News about two wonderful people for all time (instead of the usual dire critters under discussion):
No word if Rolling Rock will be served. 33.
jeffreyw
Thread needs moar puppeh.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
Rolling Rock brewing was moved to New Jersey years ago when they were bought out. IIRC, the brewery was taken over by Iron City.
Latrine</strikeLatrobe is still a pit. Arnold Palmer and Fred Rogers can’t change that.PurpleGirl
@Amir Khalid: I think they have in the past when there have been fights. But the two forces disdain each other and the tensions between them are historic and deep.
danielx
I say…pink. Pink by all means, and with a new logo to include crossed riding crops surrounded by a coiled bullwhip with the motto Lots Of Mockery prominently featured.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: I think it needs more kitteh. Himz went to space and got a first page on both ICHC and ICHC/lolcats!
PurpleGirl
@jeffreyw: Awwwwwww. sweet puppeh.
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
The ban and the reason given are pretty much what I anticipated. No surprise there whatsoever. I do think that had the film been allowed here, you’d have seen a similarly angry reaction from local Muslims and evangelical Christians.
mike with a mic
@piratedan:
Don’t let them get off the hook though. Boycott Mozzila for what? Safari… apple is up to it’s eyeballs in wage fixing, blood/conflict minerals, security forces killing workers in factories, and off share tax havens. Google is marginally better on the blood/killing scale, but worse when it comes to privacy violations. Microsoft oddly comes out the most innocent of them but only because they are up to their elbows instead of their eyeballs in the exact same shit.
So what’s the real lesson here? Destroying the middle class and killing people in other countries is a-OK, as long as you abide by big city cosmopolitan social values? This entire thing is laughable and anybody who bothered with that boycott can easily be told “so ruining the middle class is fine and dandy but being on the wrong side of gay marriage is bad”.
Elizabelle
If you think it’s getting harder for our wired brains to stay attuned to reading novels and longer form reading, you’re right.
WaPost re Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”
Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say
and
Some of the classics were challenging enough before the advent of online reading, but haven’t you noticed this in your lives too?
I am sliding back into my “good” novel reading habit with Elmore Leonard. Gonna try to read his works, one after the other.
And the new Wiley Cash!
Elizabelle
my comment’s in moderation
probably too many linkies
PurpleGirl
The NYPD has a long history of being paid thugs. I’m not sure when they were first called “New York’s finest” but it was/is more of a PR thing to try and change the institutional culture of thuggery. Once the cops had a slogan, the firefighters needed one — although “the bravest” is a lot truer about their nature. (Willingly go into a burning building, yeah, that’s (crazy) brave.)
IIRC the Corrections Dept officers and the Sanitation workers also have mottos, although I can’t remember them. The idea is that the uniformed services get mottos.
jeffreyw
Fair’s fair: puppeh gets the Milk-Bone and the kittehs get the box.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
At the very end of this story, The Grauniad asks an intriguing question, one I hadn’t considered.
Chyron HR
@mike with a mic:
“Mike with a Mic gets really pissy when you treat f*gs like human beings,” apparently.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: I is dead from the cute.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
They have to do a lot worse than that.
Far, far, far worse. And then it’s most likely a slap on the wrist.
I’ll bet at most they might get a day off without pay. And I’ll bet they don’t get that.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@jeffreyw: Want. That’s at least the second time you’ve posted that particular puppeh and I’m beginning to think you don’t like me.
SatanicPanic
I’d rather talk about this than that plane flight. Went to the gym yesterday and it was still on the news. The plane crashed- it’s sad but I’m not seeing the mystery.
shelly
Love that Newsmax headline. “Romney may enter race in 2016”
If you click on it, it’s pretty obvious that Romney has said ‘no f*cking way’ in his own manner. But it’s Fox news apparently reading their own private tea leaves to excitedly speculate that he’s secretly considering it.
Cervantes
@mike with a mic:
Re Apple, here’s something:
It’s from Apple’s most recent Supplier Responsibility Progress Report (published annually).
You may want to challenge the report, or revise your rhetoric accordingly.
WaterGirl
@Elizabelle: Loved the new Wiley Cash. I read that first, and I loved it. Then I started A Land More Kind than Home. Just could not get into it – too much snake stuff for far too long. I had to quit reading.
jeffreyw
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): She’s a minpin x hound dog mix. There are three left of the seven.
Amir Khalid
@SatanicPanic:
Well, there’s been a lot of filler in the past few weeks. So I don’t blame you for losing interest. But what’s new today is that the searchers seem to be growing more confident that they’ve heard pings from the “black” box, and might soon even be able to locate it and the wreck of MH370. If that pans out they can go on to a recovery phase and a proper forensic investigation.
Punchy
Was I the only one that missed that John Pinette died?
Rob in CT
Hmm, so far Vox >> 538.
The “how politics makes us stupid” article is important*, but the title is off a bit, IMO. It’s more “how smart people are predictably stupid in certain contexts.” Politics doesn’t make us stupid. We’re inherently “stupid” (and it’s not actually stupidity) and politics highlights this.
* depressing, too, but reality often is.
scav
Is BGinCHI back yet? They’ve begun to announce the casting for the next Hollow Crown. Henry VI and Richard III.
jeffreyw
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Here’s one more.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
Is it that, or has the English language shifted far enough away from the language of Victorian times that it’s more difficult for us to read? Most people find Shakespeare difficult to read because the syntax and usage is so different than the way we speak today — has the same thing happened with the literature of 200 years ago?
I say this as someone who had a really hard time with Jane Austen in high school almost 30 years ago, because the syntax was so complex. And that was well before the internet days.
Suffern ACE
@Punchy: I say, “Nay Nay” to that. I noticed that too. I didn’t know he suffered from other addictions. The stand up routines that I have heard through his records were very funny. I wish I had been able to see him live.
Elizabelle
The Borowitz Report:
PurpleGirl
@Amir Khalid: As to the naming thing: When Noah named his son Ham, I don’t think the cult/tribal religion had yet formed the food laws and pigs hadn’t been carved into hams and bacon, etc.
Suffern ACE
@PurpleGirl: I had to read a paper once on the militarization of the sanitation workers – how they got their uniforms and the drills they had to go through so that they could march in parades (yes, Sanitation Worker parades). The transformation into sanitation soldiers was part of the “professionalisation” of the job and it actually was part of good goverment reform. It is a very old form of progressivism.
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, Eliot and Joyce and the Jameses and Proust — maybe not the best authors to use as examples.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any 18th century authors people read for pleasure …
And Jane Austen can be hard, too, for the social status information conveyed in an aside that doesn’t make much sense to modern readers. (Thomas Hardy is more accessible.)
A shame, because the world Charles Dickens described is becoming more prevalent, and better to learn history than live it anew …
SatanicPanic
@Amir Khalid: That’s great and I hope they find it. I just started tuning out the coverage when the usual suspects started theorizing.
Elizabelle
@Punchy:
Who is John Pinette?
scav
@PurpleGirl: But but but! Finally PROOF! that God, Noah et al spoke TEXAN ‘MERCAN!
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
Most big city police departments are the same way; their primary mission has long been protecting the rich and powerful from the poor and weak. The New York police have a long and sordid history, going back at least as far as the New York Police Riot. For those who don’t want to bother following the link, the riot was a fight between two different police forces, one of which had just been dissolved because they were too corrupt even for mid-19th Century New York.
Mike in NC
@shelly:
The human race? Highly unlikely.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
I suspect people find Will Shakespeare’s plays rather more difficult to read than his poetry. The language in the former is meant to be heard as part of a stage production, rather than read alone at home.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
Here are two: Swift, Sterne.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
Maybe they’re the ones used as examples because that kind of writing is the only one affected by the alleged phenomenon. Though saying that today’s students are having a hard time with Joyce is kind of like saying that today’s middle school students are having a hard time with Algebra; it’s not exactly a novel phenomenon.
TooManyJens
Shanesha Taylor’s fundraiser has now raised over $91,000.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@scav: Because it’s going to take a couple of days to figure out if they’ve actually found the black boxes, and everyone’s tired of “did we find it yet? did we find it yet?”
Elizabelle
NYTimes story on Jeb Bush considering the 2016. By Republican stenographer Peter Baker.
Don’t bother so much with the article; the reader comments are where it’s at, and they are having none of this.
Amir Khalid
@PurpleGirl:
And besides, Noah wouldn’t have named his son Ham in English …
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
I’ve not read any Thomas Pynchon, but isn’t he a hard read as well?
Interesting they didn’t mention any of the great Russian novelists.
Re novels: there is a large audience for contemporary young adult lit, well written or not.
Still, it’s important to have a sense of the classics and the pre-industrial and Industrial Revolution society they convey, because the more things change …
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
More importantly, most of his poetry is short. A sonnet is small enough that you can wrap your mind around the whole thing. If you run into difficulties with the language, you can stop to look up an unfamiliar word or phrase without losing track of where you were. The plays are much more difficult because you have to go back and forth between the story and the language, which interrupts your concentration. I think that’s why the Folger editions, with the text on one page and explanatory notes on the facing page, are so popular; it makes it a lot easier to unpack the language quickly enough that you don’t get lost in the story.
scav
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Networks seemed apparently content with the assumption that people weren’t more than tired of 24/7 ‘still missing, still missing, still missing’ coverage. They just moved to some other 24/7 topic. They consistently don’t report the News anymore, the report the singular New and drive it into the ground until the next singular New becomes the Pet Rock they all leap on simultaneously with loud glee.
muddy
@Amir Khalid: It’s so much easier to understand when you hear it as speech. When my son was 11 I took him to a performance of Macbeth. At first he made the noises like kids do. I asked him if I were likely to do things that were boring and hateful just to look cultured? I said it has sword fights and fart jokes. He ended up loving it, and even belly laughed at some lines.
We discussed it afterwards, how it was a bit hard to understand for 10 minutes, but then it was easy. Like getting used to an accent. We were undecided as to whether it got better because our ears and brains tuned in or whether the performers got into the rhythm of it better once they got rolling (it was an amateur performance on the opening night). Probably both.
eric
#Invisible_Hand_Jobs_Man_Who_Hates_Gays!
PurpleGirl
@Amir Khalid: Weeeellllll, there are fundamentalists who think the Bible was written in English, King James English specifically. (And therefore we can surmise that Jesus spoke English…)
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: I like Austen and Dickens and actually find them more readable than contemporary fiction. I agree with you about Shakespeare, it is hard to read beyond say a couple of pages at a time.
SatanicPanic
@Elizabelle: Most of them. There are a few of these, from Mr Richard Luettgen:
This might be a classic of the VICTORY! genre on a par with It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.
Patricia Kayden
@TooManyJens: So nice to hear. Wishing her well.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
pink
Seanly
@Mnemosyne:
My mother was a 19th century American literature professor (her dissertation was on Hawthorne). When Ken Burns Civil War was on, I remarked to her about the language from the letters read on the show. They sounded so eloquent, yada yada. She said that a lot of the letters from the period were too wordy & stilted. Kind of surprised me that she would poo-poo the style prevalent in her own period of study.
Language is a living thing. The intent is to provide information to others. Yeah, Chaucer or Proust may prefer to say “I found this particular item so outrageously humorous that I let forth a most loud displace of mirth”, but doesn’t “LOL” contain just as much information?
Violet
@Elizabelle: I don’t think that brother W’s new painting hobby is going to do Jeb’s presidential run any good. The paintings are good enough, but a former president painting world leaders is just weird. And it makes people wonder WTF he was doing while president, and we all know he wasn’t doing the actual job very well. It sort of solidifies that impression.
I’m sure the rehabbing of their dad’s presidency is part of the run up to Jeb’s announcement though.
Elizabelle
@SatanicPanic:
Richard Luettgen comments frequently. He’s a reliable dead ender Republican. Although occasionally he does have an interesting comment.
Some guy (Paul?) out of White Plains, NY is so reactionary he makes my head ache. I scan right past him.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@scav: Would it have helped if I had added that the guy driving the search ship finally roared “We’ll find it when we find it!” and they went looking for something else to relieve their boredom?
IOW, I was saying what you just said, just with more childishness and less ravening zombie horde.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
I assume that part of the problem with them is exactly that social difference. You can’t start reading 18th and 19th Century novels the same way you’d pick up a contemporary novel because they’re describing a different society. Until you get a handle on the culture they’re talking about, everything has a bizarre mix of familiar and foreign elements. You read along until you get to something that doesn’t make sense to a contemporary reader and then have to work to understand how their society was different from ours. And it’s not the same as a modern novel set in those times, because there are so many cultural assumptions embedded in the writing that a modern author would feel a need to explain to the reader but that a author writing about their own time would be free to assume their audience would understand implicitly.
After you’ve read a few works set in the same milieu, you get the general picture and don’t need the explanation, but going in for the first time is a lot more effort. I wonder if the phenomenon they’re observing is more about changes in curricula in primary and secondary school than anything else. Back when secondary school literature classes focused primarily or exclusively on dead white authors, undergraduate English majors could be assumed to have read a few novels from the genre before and have already started to get their minds wrapped around the cultural assumptions. Now that the secondary school curriculum has started to expand beyond the classics, students don’t come in with the same background and are having to pick it up as undergraduates. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that today’s students have a much easier time than students a generation or two ago getting into stuff other than the traditional canon, but professors aren’t paying as much attention because unexpected problems are easier to spot than unexpected ease.
scav
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Sorry, I was so round the bend I wasn’t checking for company.
PurpleGirl
@Roger Moore: When I told a friend that I had trouble reading Jane Austen because I kept remembering the where the wealth came from and the conditions under which the poor lived, my friend told me to pretend that Austen was science fiction. She asked, “You don’t have trouble with SF do you?”
The Other Chuck
@Elizabelle:
Yes, but more for long rambling narrative in general rather than any torturous construction. He paints an evocative (and often grotesque) scene, but he’s not one for getting to the point.
Joyce’s stuff was notoriously unreadable the day it was written.
gene108
@NotMax:
Per the Old Testament, Noah did invent booze. I think that’s a good enough reason for him to be unpopular to Muslims.
Amir Khalid
@gene108:
But he is not. He is among the 25 named Prophets in the Quran so he’s a pretty big deal.
Elizabelle
@The Other Chuck:
Thank you. Have heard Pynchon is worth reading, though.
Once I gets my attention span back …
Roger Moore
@Seanly:
I think she’s right. People wrote very differently from the way they spoke. They wrote as if they were trying to impress their reader with their sophistication, which seems to have led them to stretch their vocabulary and grammar to and beyond their capabilities. Modern writing tends to be much closer to the way we speak. That may be pushed too far in things like text messages and tweets, but at its best it gives modern writing a power and immediacy that the convoluted sentences of 19th Century writing lack.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
That’s a great assessment. Good point also on the expanded reading list, and exposure to other cultures, although I don’t know those books make the canon unless they’re well written (and maybe even more so).
I’m wondering if television, now around for 50 years, is also a culprit. Make it fast and make it visual. Still plenty of great stories, but differently told and broken up for commercial advertising (that novel readers need not contend with).
Also: were it science fiction, maybe readers would enjoy prising out the arcane facts and connections and social structure, but tell them it’s history, which is also a foreign sphere and … zzzz.
scav
@Roger Moore: It was moving and appropriately placed for them and their conventions for the different modes of communication. For all it may not be pleasing to certain contemporaries of ours, the tide may again swing and some later contemporaries may “rediscover” it and find very little of interest in our incomprehensible and dense bursts of memes and slang.
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
The thing that gets me is differences in their attitudes toward money. People today obviously think about money when considering marriage, but we aren’t as blatant and open about it. One of the first things you learn about a character in 18th and 19th Century English fiction is how much they’re worth. We don’t talk about money the same way today, though somebody’s profession carries some of the same information.
Amir Khalid
@Seanly:
19th century prose often feels to us impatient modern types like the writer is taking their own sweet time to get to the point. But literature is a mental conversation between reader and writer: brevity isn’t the only virtue in prose, and the bare narrative far from its only reason for being. As far as conveying information goes, you could certainly reduce a long sentence to three letters of LOLspeak. But then you’d lose the context that makes the information worth conveying, for both writer and reader.
muddy
@scav: Memes and slang will eventually become Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
Not all of the great classics were written the same way. The newspaper serial writers like Dickens and Dumas also had a tendency to have their action broken up into digestible pieces, and it doesn’t seem to have done their writing any great harm.
The big difference is that SF is written from outside the culture it’s describing, while the classics were written from inside. Exploring a weird alien culture is part and parcel of reading that kind of SF, and the author usually feeds it to you deliberately in digestible pieces so it’s fun. Jane Austen was writing for people who already knew about the cultural setting, so the explanations of what is going on are either external to the writing or are only contained obliquely. It’s a different, harder challenge.
scav
@muddy: Eventally?
damn, where is that facing page annotation aka the Urban Dictionary? Or, That’s a Chapter in Sense and Sensibility I’ve forgotten.
Ninedragonspot
@Elizabelle: among 18th-century novelists, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are thoroughly enjoyable reads. Sterne only tries the patience when he means to. The 18th century was a great age for the comic novel.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Elizabelle: Having to tease out details about the story’s world is one of the biggest things people cite when they give you a serious answer to the question “Why don’t you like science fiction?”
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
Right, but Thomas Hardy was writing 60 years later than Austen, so his world is closer to us than hers. As it recedes into the distance, 1810 can seem like science fiction, but without all of the useful explanations of how the world works. When Emma Thompson was writing the screenplay of Sense and Sensibility, she had to put exposition into the screenplay to explain why the Dashwood women couldn’t just go out and get jobs if they didn’t have any money — we’re so far removed from that time that a lot of people didn’t understand why they couldn’t.
Cervantes
@TooManyJens:
I have been in touch with her. She is in court this morning. The kids are safe with family.
As of the week-end she had been unable to reach her public defender. I’ve been trying to get her some help from white-shoe firms in Phoenix. A couple of attorneys have expressed support and offered preliminary interviews. (These are good people and the $91,000, managed properly, does not necessarily preclude pro bono help.)
Roger Moore
@Cervantes:
So she’s going to court without having a chance to talk to her lawyer first. So much for access to counsel.
Another Holocene Human
@Elizabelle: Nice. Didn’t know Rogers was from Latrobe.
Another Holocene Human
@mike with a mic:
Don’t mistake the Mozilla flap as anything other than an intra-industry contretemps.
Though your broader point resonates to me… I mean, this isn’t an isolated incident. You could replace the environment with race and not be wrong at all. As a queer person I’m grateful all these privileged people want to stick up for me … I guess … but I feel really weird about it.
Origuy
I came across a letter from Winston Churchill, the future Prime Minister, to Winston Churchill, an American author and magazine editor. At the time, the American was better-known, so the British Churchill wrote to him offering to publish his books under his full name, Winston Spencer Churchill. The letter, and its response, are impressive in their Victorian syntax and formality. Today, one would send an email saying, “Hi. I have the same name as you and I’m going to put out a book. I’ll use my middle name to avoid confusion, OK?” and get back, “Sure, no prob. LOL”.
Bob In Portland
Anyone opposed to allowing the eastern regions of Ukraine a vote on the question of independence from Kiev?
Did the Mighty Wurlitzer decide not to discuss Ukraine anymore?
Another Holocene Human
@Elizabelle: In the midst of “these kids” and “my lawn” perhaps what’s getting lost here is that Henry James always sucked and has had a reputation since his first book was in its first printing of being impenetrable and being a hard slog through turgid prose to reach a questionable result, unless you were a cross-Atlantic Brahmin like him, in which case you were all, “OMG, somebody wrote a BOOK about MY LIFE!!!” but, you know, said deliberately slowly with a kinda Britishy accent that reveals your extreme privilege to have been educated overseas.
Chopin. Flaubert. Authors worth reading. Fuck Henry James. Even the people who like him don’t like him.
What the study doesn’t control for is that young people read many more words now than previous generations did at that age. And the more you read, the more impatient you get with narcissistic, awkward crap. I guess they’d better start their Privileged Men canon on 8-year olds, they’re pure and haven’t yet read any good books to give them a sense of judgment that their time would be better wasted watching last week’s Colbert Report.
Another Holocene Human
@PurpleGirl:
What about livery drivers? They wear uniforms in NYC. What’s their motto?
Faster than a traffic cop, bolder than a firetruck driver?
Another Holocene Human
@jeffreyw: Kittehs know who got the better end of that deal.
Amir Khalid
@Bob In Portland:
You refer, I believe, to the gradual annexation, by inches at a time, of Ukraine by Russia. I think everyone already knows how that vote will go.
Ruckus
@schrodinger’s cat:
I don’t understand this. I read Shakespeare when I was a lot younger and liked it. But then I also read Dostoyevsky and many others who wrote involved complex novels or used language differently than I did. It helped open my mind that everything is not the same as what I see out my tiny window.
Mnemosyne
@Amir Khalid:
And Bob’s A-OK with Russia illegally annexing Ukraine because somebody told him the Ukranians are all neo-Nazis, so he doesn’t care what Russia does to them.
Another Holocene Human
@Mnemosyne:
Many 19th century novels are written in “rhetorical English” which was only a spoken language for posh snots in certain social contexts and also to some degree used in speeches, actually, you might just call it “written English” but it’s a particular, ornate variant that relies on writer and reader having spent several formative years learning Classical Latin, which was the language of Latin rhetoric (books, speeches–a political language, mostly). Vernacular English is to such language as Vulgar Latin is to Classical Latin–though used contemporaneously, even the grammar is quite distinct.
Mark Twain deliberately wrote in vernacular English and as such is only difficult if you are unfamiliar with the dialects used in his novels. His essays, written in a mostly vernacular style but not in dialect, are easily accessible.
I’m sure a philologist could step in and give all the precise technical terms for this.
English language use has shifted, but not as much as all that. However, the big revolution was changing grammar school from Latin to English. This means that written English–as opposed to spoken English–has gone through a LOT of change. This goes back to the early 20th century with the experimental novelists, who as part of their programme stripped much of that Latin grammar and flourish out of their English. (They were doing a lot of other stuff too, of course.) What we could consider even the most formal English today bears little resemblance to formal language in throughout the 19th century.
tBone
@The Other Chuck:
Oh, I don’t know. Some of Joyce’s writing is rather more direct than a modern reader might expect. I think anyone teaching Joyce ought to start with his love letters, which are guaranteed to capture the imagination of almost any teen.
(I somehow missed seeing these up until a few months ago. And now I can’t unsee them.)
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore:
Joyce and Proust are famous for being difficult. When they were writing, many Americans ended their schooling at the 6th grade level, girls maybe 8th grade if they were lucky. Both are senior high school level if you’re lucky; Ulysses and Remembrances of Times Past are definitely undergrad level and very few Americans went to college before the GI bill.
So you wouldn’t even be comparing the same population. The percentage of total youths in college track courses in high school has gone up steadily for 100 years due to a number of societal and educational changes.
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: It’s many kids first experience with reading a text in translation. Oh, sure, it’s in “English” but there is so much unfamiliar it might as well not be and it’s on a high proficiency level.
I experienced the same frustration reading college level German texts, but it depended who the author was. (I mean, Hesse wasn’t that hard to read.) Shakespeare is telling jokes. So more like trying to do a crossword in German. Unmoeglich! Verflixt!
fidelio
@TooManyJens:
Isn’t it remarkable how often things can improve if we’re just willing to throw enough money at it?
Yeah, I know Shanesha Taylor is probably going to need more to sort things out than a big wad of dollars. But a reliable roof over her head is a big step in the right directio, and thank FSM she’s managed that, thanks to a lot of people’s generosity.
But if we were to throw some money at things like housing and childcare, think how many people would be better off, instead of the way public moneys are handled now.
Mike E
@Elizabelle: I worked one of his concerts and Ma went out of his way to say hi and shake my hand…same after the show, he was so gracious. Nicest celeb ever.
Another Holocene Human
@muddy: Don’t get me started. I grew up with textbooks from the 1970s, complete with “groovy” contemporary poetry.
The internet today can’t put a finger on that hippy dippy “hep” white person revolution thing.
eta: I had a book with a whole dialogue in “jive”, helpfully translated, something about buying a set of drums, painfully earnest and embarrassing. Can you dig it?
Origuy
@Bob In Portland: When is Russia going to allow a referendum for Chechnya to secede?
Mnemosyne
There’s also the possibility that some “classics,” like those of James Fenimore Cooper, are just crap.
(Of course, Twain notoriously didn’t like Jane Austen, either.)
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human:
I think you mean it’s their first experience reading a foreign language not in translation. I’ve heard that Shakespeare is more accessible to foreign readers than to English language readers because they’re almost always reading a reasonably modern translation, while we’re struggling with Elizabethan/Stuart English.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne: The only people in the world talking about “federalization” in Ukraine are Russian propagandists or those taken in by them. 64% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine should remain unitary.
Sources on the ground are reporting more and more people in eastern Ukraine speaking Russian with Russian accents (i.e. they are not locals.)
TooManyJens
@Cervantes: Thanks for the update, and for everything you’re doing to help! Please keep us posted.
Bob In Portland
@Amir Khalid: Well, if no one else wants to secede from Ukraine, then you have no problem with a vote, right?
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
I reckon Twain’s right about Cooper. About Jane, maybe not so much.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: So there shouldn’t be a problem with a vote in Donetsk, right? The Kiev crowd would win it, right?
Also, has Ukraine gotten their loans from the IMF to pay off their gas bills yet?
Interrobang
@scav: Jesus. I never thought I’d feel sorry for a CVR, but you just accomplished it. Now I feel weird. You brilliant, brilliant bastard.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: If you haven’t broken the law, then you have no problem peeing in this cup, right? And letting me in to search your house, right?
You can’t really be this stupid, can you?
Roger Moore
@Bob In Portland:
I would have no problem with a vote that actually followed the Ukrainian Constitution. One that was created ad hoc and didn’t follow the legal rules for how such elections are to be carried out, not so much.
ETA:
I’m not sure which side of the evil/stupid axis Pravda in Portland is on.
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: From the Ukrainian Constitution (unofficial translation.)
In 2012 there were just north of 36 million registered voters, so you’d need about 8% of all registered voters in the country signing a petition for a referendum. That’s a high bar to clear.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
It should be a high bar; a country that allows easy secession is not likely to remain a viable one for long. My point was that there is actually an established procedure for people who want to secede, so somebody who wants to complain about Ukrainian lawlessness should not run around supporting gangs taking over government buildings and demanding secession willy-nilly. If they want to secede, let them go about it lawfully.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: So you equate voting for independence with drug testing? How about genetic testing?
Bob In Portland
@Roger Moore: When you talk about taking over buildings, you’re talking about buildings in Donetsk and not the buildings in Kiev where they’ve been flying the swastika and the Confederate battle flag, right? That’s cool for you, but ethnic Russians who don’t want to be in Ukraine are hooligans for wanting to vote on it?
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: The last election for President wasn’t respected by Svoboda or the Right Wing or the bully boys in the street.
So let’s say that the western part of Ukraine wants to hold onto Donetsk, Kharkiv et al and don’t allow a vote. And with that initial vote after the coup (to ban Russian as an official language) they’ve shown that they don’t consider Russians to be equal to them. The petroleum princess among the plotters jokes about killing all the Russians.
The Kiev coupsters have illegally driven out the legal President of Ukraine who was elected with the votes from Crimea and the the eastern sections of Ukraine. And you think that this is going to end well? Can’t you enjoy a “free and independent Ukraine” by yourselves?
eyelessgame
Any color you want, so long as it’s not in the rainbow.