The Slackers did a song about The Brothers Karamazov
/youtube the Slackers Peculiar
Some literary shoutouts by Thomas Kalnoky in “Here’s to Life,” first with Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution, then covered by his other band, Streetlight Manifesto.
Can you do multiple links? I guess I’ll find out:
/youtube botar here’s to life
I have some others, but as you can see my musical tastes are mostly garbage…
Nope. Nope. Nope. This list mostly conjures up nightmares of high school and college English/Lit teachers apparently hell-bent on making all of us hate reading. Let’s just say that “1984” and “The Grapes of Wrath” were not on my list of favorite books before I had to turn in papers listing “touchstones” in each chapter and essays on how the books related to my life. There should be a special hell for teachers who make students hate books, right next to the ones for history teachers who make history a boring list of dates and places and names to be memorized for exams.
@rockblossom I was that student that got almost all As with a few Bs throughout school. I got a D in my English class because of the book Jane Eyre. The book was so terrible that I couldn’t read it. Most of the entire class grade was on that fucking book. Because of that D they took me out of honors English the next year. When I went to regular English, I quickly realized that everyone in my class didn’t give two shits about learning. Because of all my other grades in the previous years, my mom convinced the school to put me back in honors English that year and I finished the class with an A because I didn’t get stuck reading some god awful shit.
It’s not modern, it’s slow, and Mr Rochester acts like a creep frequently. But Jane also makes her own choices along the way - difficult in that era.
And there’s the famous line, almost scandalous for that era: “Reader, I married him.”
The controvery was that the character Jane asserts that she married him, not vice versa. I’ve been told this just wasn’t said that way. Too forward, too assertive. Till Charlotte Brönte, in the voice of Jane, asserted it.
@rockblossom@RiotDemon Most HS students don’t hate reading… they hate working at it. Reading classic literature is not for the faint of heart, or the lazy.
High school might be too soon to study some of these works, but what suggestions might be given as replacements?
@compunaut
I think a lot of kids that age are put off because they don’t understand either the customs of the era, and the delimma that result, or the relevance to the present. And they don’t understand what they’re supposed to be looking for while reading, or how a novel or story or character “works”.
If teachers would actually teach these books - explain the economic, legal, and social worlds of the era, in what ways these books were revolutionary for the times, and how they relate to “now” - and if teachers would show how to look at the structure of a novel or story, how language facilitates the writer’s goals, how symbolism helps deepen the story, how a story carries the reader along, how a character comes to live and breathe - that would help.
My teachers gave us some reading assignments. They asked if there were questions. They tested on factual details to see if you’d read it. Then they said “write a paper” without ever once giving any teaching about how educated readers or gifted writers approach a novel, or how a student might write a good paper.
You just turned in a bunch of on topic BS about the book - 3rd grade book report stuff - and if your sentences and paragraphs were good, you got an A.
So because no one could see the point, and the teachers never offered a point, most of my classmates resented doing the reading.
@f00l I don’t know what it was about that book. I tried to read it. It just annoyed me to no end that I wasn’t comprehending what I was reading. Rereading the same paragraphs over and over because I’m so bored out of my skull, that I can’t understand it, made me super stabby. I think I got about a third of the way through and said, fuck it. I don’t really like anything from that time period. I couldn’t even watch the movie to try and fake it through the test.
/image stabby
@compunaut When I was in middle school, maybe 6th grade, I remember doing this reading project where books were assigned certain point values. If you read enough to meet certain points, you got some kind of prize. I don’t remember what it was. I looked through the list at some of the harder books to see if anything caught my eye, and it was Dracula. So I read what felt like an insanely long book, but I actually enjoyed it.
There was several other times where I got to choose which books I had to read and write essays on, or other projects. There was one time we had to tell a story about our book, wearing a t-shirt we had made, and some kind of other item. I had chosen some fairly unknown book about werewolves so I drew a scene of a werewolf on a plate and made a t-shirt with the name of the book that looked all bloody. I actually enjoyed that.
In high school I did have to read a lot of other obligatory books. 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, etc. I actually enjoyed the first two. I didn’t understand that Animal Farm was political, I just thought it was a bunch of terrible animals. Lord of the Flies made me annoyed at how awful all the children were.
I wished that if reading was obligated in school, that maybe they could have a few different choices so at least if you hate the book, that’s on you.
I don’t read a lot of classic books. I’m not going to waste my time reading stuff just because it’s “important literature.” If I’m going to take the time to read, I’m going to read something I enjoy.
@RiotDemon@f00l I don’t read classic books, either, today. But there is a time & place for ‘obligatory books’, even if you’re allowed to choose from a list. 'Cuz otherwise nobody would ever read them. Imagine if nobody ever read Huckleberry Finn, or Catcher in the Rye, or The Great Gatsby? Or 1984, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Fahrenheit 451? These are not shit; they’re just not easy to make sense of (especially for teenagers). Like calculus, or statistics
@RiotDemon No, the world would not collapse if no one experienced the great works of art. Civilization would continue if consuming a diet of nothing but reality TV, bubblegum books & music, and fake news. However, it would not be better off. I’d rather a world of striving & thriving, than barely surviving. Why bother to think while we read, or listen…
Just read a quote, I think it was Werner Herzog (?): "Man will endure, but will he prevail?"
Not at the rate we’re going today…
I don’t know about total pessimism just yet, in spite of NY real estate moguls and Kardashians and rich housewives I would be prefer never to have heard of and to have to no reason to know of.
From Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech:
I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner, at the Nobel ceremony in 1950
Perhaps Auden’s “deserts of the heart” are not quite beyond saving.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Being a child of the fifties, I rocked to Led Zep for many a pot smoke filled evening, chugging some brews with the bros. These playlists have opened my eyes to some more modern music that I am only beginning to enjoy, thx!!
Gotta go with the Zeppelin! Good God does this take me back!
@springsteen did a Tom Joad song as well. he has influences from guthrie, so perhaps this was the inspiration?
/youtube ghost of tom joad with tom morello
Can we add a poll option for “I’m really not a fan of this weekly playlist thing and I’d like you stop”? Because I’d vote for that one.
The Slackers did a song about The Brothers Karamazov
/youtube the Slackers Peculiar
Some literary shoutouts by Thomas Kalnoky in “Here’s to Life,” first with Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution, then covered by his other band, Streetlight Manifesto.
Can you do multiple links? I guess I’ll find out:
/youtube botar here’s to life
I have some others, but as you can see my musical tastes are mostly garbage…
It’s not an actual book, but everyday, Elvis Costello writes it.
And in the same vein, Nick Lowe is going to write it, too.
So stoked to see the Noisettes get some attention!
“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane - Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.
“I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles supposedly inspired by Lewis Caroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”.
Nope. Nope. Nope. This list mostly conjures up nightmares of high school and college English/Lit teachers apparently hell-bent on making all of us hate reading. Let’s just say that “1984” and “The Grapes of Wrath” were not on my list of favorite books before I had to turn in papers listing “touchstones” in each chapter and essays on how the books related to my life. There should be a special hell for teachers who make students hate books, right next to the ones for history teachers who make history a boring list of dates and places and names to be memorized for exams.
Although this one makes me laugh because it’s so wonderfully awful:
And this one, because … um, because … well, just because:
@rockblossom I was that student that got almost all As with a few Bs throughout school. I got a D in my English class because of the book Jane Eyre. The book was so terrible that I couldn’t read it. Most of the entire class grade was on that fucking book. Because of that D they took me out of honors English the next year. When I went to regular English, I quickly realized that everyone in my class didn’t give two shits about learning. Because of all my other grades in the previous years, my mom convinced the school to put me back in honors English that year and I finished the class with an A because I didn’t get stuck reading some god awful shit.
@RiotDemon
Why do you hate Jane Eyre so much?
It’s not modern, it’s slow, and Mr Rochester acts like a creep frequently. But Jane also makes her own choices along the way - difficult in that era.
And there’s the famous line, almost scandalous for that era: “Reader, I married him.”
The controvery was that the character Jane asserts that she married him, not vice versa. I’ve been told this just wasn’t said that way. Too forward, too assertive. Till Charlotte Brönte, in the voice of Jane, asserted it.
@rockblossom @RiotDemon Most HS students don’t hate reading… they hate working at it. Reading classic literature is not for the faint of heart, or the lazy.
High school might be too soon to study some of these works, but what suggestions might be given as replacements?
@compunaut
I think a lot of kids that age are put off because they don’t understand either the customs of the era, and the delimma that result, or the relevance to the present. And they don’t understand what they’re supposed to be looking for while reading, or how a novel or story or character “works”.
If teachers would actually teach these books - explain the economic, legal, and social worlds of the era, in what ways these books were revolutionary for the times, and how they relate to “now” - and if teachers would show how to look at the structure of a novel or story, how language facilitates the writer’s goals, how symbolism helps deepen the story, how a story carries the reader along, how a character comes to live and breathe - that would help.
My teachers gave us some reading assignments. They asked if there were questions. They tested on factual details to see if you’d read it. Then they said “write a paper” without ever once giving any teaching about how educated readers or gifted writers approach a novel, or how a student might write a good paper.
You just turned in a bunch of on topic BS about the book - 3rd grade book report stuff - and if your sentences and paragraphs were good, you got an A.
So because no one could see the point, and the teachers never offered a point, most of my classmates resented doing the reading.
@f00l I don’t know what it was about that book. I tried to read it. It just annoyed me to no end that I wasn’t comprehending what I was reading. Rereading the same paragraphs over and over because I’m so bored out of my skull, that I can’t understand it, made me super stabby. I think I got about a third of the way through and said, fuck it. I don’t really like anything from that time period. I couldn’t even watch the movie to try and fake it through the test.
/image stabby
@compunaut When I was in middle school, maybe 6th grade, I remember doing this reading project where books were assigned certain point values. If you read enough to meet certain points, you got some kind of prize. I don’t remember what it was. I looked through the list at some of the harder books to see if anything caught my eye, and it was Dracula. So I read what felt like an insanely long book, but I actually enjoyed it.
There was several other times where I got to choose which books I had to read and write essays on, or other projects. There was one time we had to tell a story about our book, wearing a t-shirt we had made, and some kind of other item. I had chosen some fairly unknown book about werewolves so I drew a scene of a werewolf on a plate and made a t-shirt with the name of the book that looked all bloody. I actually enjoyed that.
In high school I did have to read a lot of other obligatory books. 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, etc. I actually enjoyed the first two. I didn’t understand that Animal Farm was political, I just thought it was a bunch of terrible animals. Lord of the Flies made me annoyed at how awful all the children were.
I wished that if reading was obligated in school, that maybe they could have a few different choices so at least if you hate the book, that’s on you.
I don’t read a lot of classic books. I’m not going to waste my time reading stuff just because it’s “important literature.” If I’m going to take the time to read, I’m going to read something I enjoy.
@RiotDemon @f00l I don’t read classic books, either, today. But there is a time & place for ‘obligatory books’, even if you’re allowed to choose from a list. 'Cuz otherwise nobody would ever read them. Imagine if nobody ever read Huckleberry Finn, or Catcher in the Rye, or The Great Gatsby? Or 1984, or To Kill a Mockingbird, or Fahrenheit 451? These are not shit; they’re just not easy to make sense of (especially for teenagers). Like calculus, or statistics
@compunaut would the world collapse if no one read them?
@compunaut
I have read or listened to many names on that list - voluntarily - in the past 2 years. Found it a quite valuable way to spend time.
Who would read them? I hope many of us will come to the day that’s right for those books.
I go thru reading phases. Lots of mysteries, then non-fiction, then something else. “Classics” get a turn. I value them now more than ever.
Huck Finn is worth anyone’s time. It’s also a lot funnier - and more profound - that I realized when reading it on assignment.
@RiotDemon No, the world would not collapse if no one experienced the great works of art. Civilization would continue if consuming a diet of nothing but reality TV, bubblegum books & music, and fake news. However, it would not be better off. I’d rather a world of striving & thriving, than barely surviving. Why bother to think while we read, or listen…
Just read a quote, I think it was Werner Herzog (?):
"Man will endure, but will he prevail?"
Not at the rate we’re going today…
@compunaut
I don’t know about total pessimism just yet, in spite of NY real estate moguls and Kardashians and rich housewives I would be prefer never to have heard of and to have to no reason to know of.
From Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech:
I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner, at the Nobel ceremony in 1950
Perhaps Auden’s “deserts of the heart” are not quite beyond saving.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Being a child of the fifties, I rocked to Led Zep for many a pot smoke filled evening, chugging some brews with the bros. These playlists have opened my eyes to some more modern music that I am only beginning to enjoy, thx!!
Here’s a classic for you fans of Greek mythology.
Or perhaps some English poetry?