5 ms·

Trying to read classic literature really makes this apparent. Hemingway's Sun Also Rises must have been a riveting adventure story when it was published in 1926

Trying to read classic literature really makes this apparent. Hemingway's Sun Also Rises must have been a riveting adventure story when it was published in 1926, but how can it compete with 10,000 hours of adventure travel on youtube, netflix etc.? Same with Moby Dick in 1850s... these were glimpses into exotic lives rarely heard of back then, but today you can find those stories or similar in vivid moving pictures and audio everywhere, in much more digestible forms. I really wish I could appreciate these great human achievements in the arts, but at least for books, I don't think my tech-atrophied brain has the ability.

esafak 3y ago
So don't read those ones. Read books about things that can't be replicated by video, like Joyce's wordplay. It's like how photography liberates painting from realism. And I fully empathize with your difficulty in appreciating such works of fiction. Maybe I ought to try reading one this summer myself...
izzydata 3y ago
I'd like to believe it is reversible. It's not a genetic problem so it is a problem of environment. If you tech detoxed for a whole year living in the woods or something then tried to read Moby Dick it would likely be very tolerable again. You could study some people who have gone to prison and have little opportunity for endless media consumption.
- Brusco_RF 3y ago
  I think the spirit of the above comment questions whether it's even worth reversing
- EatingWithForks 3y ago
  Moby Dick was never meant to be read how it is read now. It was originally a serial, so like a webcomic or a fanfic that's actively being worked on. Those are still very popular mediums of media.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - TonyStr 3y ago
    Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything, and Wikipedia seems to contradict what you say
- bamfly 3y ago
  Relatedly, I've found my life-long "sleep problems" go away very fast if I stop using electronics or electric lights after sundown. Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a button like you're living in a World's Fair crossed with Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired as early as you do if you don't do those things. Live like it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd have guessed? Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working adults who need to Get Shit Done at night and zero other people you know are living on that kind of schedule—plus, Winter nights are way too long—but it worked. Sun goes down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by—and you'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and fast, time to go to bed. Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with, while I was trying it. Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another perspective on ordinary modern life.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    Same! I can't stand bright light at night unless I'm doing something that warrant that (cleaning dishes, searching for something,...). I have a single desk lamp in my living room and just enough light to not bump to things in my bedroom. And my TV is not that bright (no HDR). I match the brightness of my devices to this amount of light, and sleep comes easily. Another thing I swear by is blackout curtains. When I turn off the lights to sleep, it should be dark. Anytime I turn on the main lights, it's like a shot of adrenaline as everything is just so bright.
  - dash2 3y ago
    Have you written up your lifestyle anywhere? I'd like to read about it.
    - 3y ago
- Fricken 3y ago
  I don't need to spend a year in the woods for my attention span to come back. A day or so is enough for me to get in the place where I'm able to get lost in a good book. A soon as I'm back within short reach of the internet my attention span goes to hell again.
allturtles 3y ago
I don't think you read Hemingway or Melville for riveting stories per se, but for their prose. The way they convey their stories in words that pique your curiosity or tickle your aesthetic sense. Words that express an idea or feeling you'd not encountered before, or express an idea or feeling you are familiar with in a totally fresh and unfamiliar way (btw their styles are very different, so you may very well find one engaging while the other leaves you flat, and of course some people will enjoy both or neither). For example, I have never read "The Sun Also Rises," but I looked at the sample on Amazon and came across this on the second page: "I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face..." After a few matter-of-fact paragraphs, the narrator suddenly slaps the reader with this frank and funny statement of his utter cynicism. That kind of thing pulls me in. I want to know more about this narrator and see what other shocking things he may have to say.
deadbeeves 3y ago
What you're mentioning has little to do with technology and nothing to do with attention span. Those books just don't give you anything you want. Well, why read them? I think microprocessors are great achievements, but I struggle to think how a work of fiction can be a great achievement. I don't think the world would be very different if neither of them had ever been written.
pessimizer 3y ago
Books don't have to be experienced as vicarious adventures. That's what YA lit is, mostly, but we can read books for their insight rather than fantasizing about being participants in a series of events that they're narrating. There's no reason to transform their thoughtfulness into the sort of disjointed juvenile power fantasies that modern movies are attempting to appeal to. Also, you don't have to read literature or novels. Read the narratives and nonfiction around what people experienced in times and places that will never be experienced again, and that youtube and netflix don't care about. Read about thoughts and reasoning that exceptional and forgotten people had in the 19th century that are ripe for rediscovery. The death of attention span is real, but the idea that the substance of "content" now is of better quality than the writing in 1890 is a slander. It's just the difference between a quick, tasty, and a bit vulgar value meal at McDonald's vs. an actual high quality meal. The laziness gets addictive.
bamfly 3y ago
Popular literature of years past looked more like those trashy-cover, cheaply-made, deteriorating, fits-in-a-suit-jacket-outer-pocket-without-wrecking-the-drape, thin genre novels you sometimes see carefully preserved in bookstores today, that never saw a hardcover printing (LOL, why? Pick one up, and 99% of the time they're clearly hastily-written formulaic crap), than Hemingway or Melville (the latter of whom, famously, had to be "re-discovered" in order for us to recognize his name today—he'd vanished from pop-consiousness very fast). Or "penny dreadfuls" (similar deal) before that.
bluefishinit 3y ago
Pick up some Dostoyevsky, it's still some of the greatest prose ever written and still feels very fresh.
- carabiner 3y ago
  I struggled with C&P and Brothers Karamazov. On a 9 hour flight without wifi, I only got 100 pages in to the latter.
notahacker 3y ago
The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.
- allturtles 3y ago
  Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was 75,000. [2]. "The Old Man and the Sea" was published in Life magazine, with a circulation of millions.[3] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication... [1]: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/sun-also-rises/76070.aspx#:~:text=An%20immediate%20success%2C%20The%20Sun,sold%20over%20one%20million%20copies https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/.... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Backgr... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Background_and_publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Backgr...
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Hemingway was probably the best-known of the ex-pat Paris crowd during his lifetime. I expect some the Algonquin Roundtable writers may have been at least as equally well-known though as many wrote for popular magazines. Dorothy Parker's first volume of poetry sold 47,000 copies. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
  - notahacker 3y ago
tomjen3 3y ago
I am listening to the unabridged audiobook for Les Miserables. Victor goes into tons of unnecessary detail about things - as an example they arrive at a monestary and he tells the entiry story of the place, including details and rules for who can wear what kind of color clothing. I recon that it is considered one of the great and famous books, but it could have drastically been improved if he had had an editor. A modern author would have had one and would have produced a better book. In fact, why shouldn't modern books be better? Nearly everything else is (compare central heating to a fireplace), and the rest disappear once you account for the price you pay for it.
- TonyStr 3y ago
  I am reading the same book right now, but with my eyes rather than ears. I don't actually mind the detail in retrospect, because it's used both to add flavour to the story and to reflect on ideas that are very unique, at least to me. I do agree that it's a bit terse at times though. The part about the monastery did make me bored
zhte415 3y ago
They're a different epistemology. Tools of storytelling - video vs. book in this case - are being conflated with their use. They are tools not exclusive to a single epistemology, many ways to explore many perspectives of 'what'. Contrast, for example that either of these books' narration allows a reader to fill in a lot of the blanks with experience, both real and imagined, constructing it for themselves even down to the temperature of the air, shade of light at dusk, smell of the air, exact tone and pitch of voice of a speaker. Vs. a video where the experience is fully narrated and scenes presented in 4k. Is the video 'more digestible' because it's a different thing being digested? Not that these tables can't and often aren't reversed. Some vloggers say little, sometimes 'scaffolding' only some understanding through a bit of backstory, or allow their audience to similarly construct experiences of the pieces of a journey. And some books are instruction manuals, or unintentionally read as so. A tool, be that video, text, audio, game, is only that. It's just a medium, a method that's surface to the deeper world view of the 'maker'.

esafak 3y ago

So don't read those ones. Read books about things that can't be replicated by video, like Joyce's wordplay. It's like how photography liberates painting from realism. And I fully empathize with your difficulty in appreciating such works of fiction. Maybe I ought to try reading one this summer myself...

izzydata 3y ago

I'd like to believe it is reversible. It's not a genetic problem so it is a problem of environment. If you tech detoxed for a whole year living in the woods or something then tried to read Moby Dick it would likely be very tolerable again. You could study some people who have gone to prison and have little opportunity for endless media consumption.

Brusco_RF 3y ago
I think the spirit of the above comment questions whether it's even worth reversing
EatingWithForks 3y ago
Moby Dick was never meant to be read how it is read now. It was originally a serial, so like a webcomic or a fanfic that's actively being worked on. Those are still very popular mediums of media.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- TonyStr 3y ago
  Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything, and Wikipedia seems to contradict what you say
bamfly 3y ago
Relatedly, I've found my life-long "sleep problems" go away very fast if I stop using electronics or electric lights after sundown. Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a button like you're living in a World's Fair crossed with Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired as early as you do if you don't do those things. Live like it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd have guessed? Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working adults who need to Get Shit Done at night and zero other people you know are living on that kind of schedule—plus, Winter nights are way too long—but it worked. Sun goes down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by—and you'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and fast, time to go to bed. Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with, while I was trying it. Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another perspective on ordinary modern life.
- skydhash 3y ago
  Same! I can't stand bright light at night unless I'm doing something that warrant that (cleaning dishes, searching for something,...). I have a single desk lamp in my living room and just enough light to not bump to things in my bedroom. And my TV is not that bright (no HDR). I match the brightness of my devices to this amount of light, and sleep comes easily. Another thing I swear by is blackout curtains. When I turn off the lights to sleep, it should be dark. Anytime I turn on the main lights, it's like a shot of adrenaline as everything is just so bright.
- dash2 3y ago
  Have you written up your lifestyle anywhere? I'd like to read about it.
  - 3y ago
Fricken 3y ago
I don't need to spend a year in the woods for my attention span to come back. A day or so is enough for me to get in the place where I'm able to get lost in a good book. A soon as I'm back within short reach of the internet my attention span goes to hell again.

allturtles 3y ago

I don't think you read Hemingway or Melville for riveting stories per se, but for their prose. The way they convey their stories in words that pique your curiosity or tickle your aesthetic sense. Words that express an idea or feeling you'd not encountered before, or express an idea or feeling you are familiar with in a totally fresh and unfamiliar way (btw their styles are very different, so you may very well find one engaging while the other leaves you flat, and of course some people will enjoy both or neither). For example, I have never read "The Sun Also Rises," but I looked at the sample on Amazon and came across this on the second page: "I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face..." After a few matter-of-fact paragraphs, the narrator suddenly slaps the reader with this frank and funny statement of his utter cynicism. That kind of thing pulls me in. I want to know more about this narrator and see what other shocking things he may have to say.

deadbeeves 3y ago

What you're mentioning has little to do with technology and nothing to do with attention span. Those books just don't give you anything you want. Well, why read them? I think microprocessors are great achievements, but I struggle to think how a work of fiction can be a great achievement. I don't think the world would be very different if neither of them had ever been written.

pessimizer 3y ago

Books don't have to be experienced as vicarious adventures. That's what YA lit is, mostly, but we can read books for their insight rather than fantasizing about being participants in a series of events that they're narrating. There's no reason to transform their thoughtfulness into the sort of disjointed juvenile power fantasies that modern movies are attempting to appeal to. Also, you don't have to read literature or novels. Read the narratives and nonfiction around what people experienced in times and places that will never be experienced again, and that youtube and netflix don't care about. Read about thoughts and reasoning that exceptional and forgotten people had in the 19th century that are ripe for rediscovery. The death of attention span is real, but the idea that the substance of "content" now is of better quality than the writing in 1890 is a slander. It's just the difference between a quick, tasty, and a bit vulgar value meal at McDonald's vs. an actual high quality meal. The laziness gets addictive.

bamfly 3y ago

Popular literature of years past looked more like those trashy-cover, cheaply-made, deteriorating, fits-in-a-suit-jacket-outer-pocket-without-wrecking-the-drape, thin genre novels you sometimes see carefully preserved in bookstores today, that never saw a hardcover printing (LOL, why? Pick one up, and 99% of the time they're clearly hastily-written formulaic crap), than Hemingway or Melville (the latter of whom, famously, had to be "re-discovered" in order for us to recognize his name today—he'd vanished from pop-consiousness very fast). Or "penny dreadfuls" (similar deal) before that.

bluefishinit 3y ago

Pick up some Dostoyevsky, it's still some of the greatest prose ever written and still feels very fresh.

carabiner 3y ago
I struggled with C&P and Brothers Karamazov. On a 9 hour flight without wifi, I only got 100 pages in to the latter.

notahacker 3y ago

The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.

allturtles 3y ago
Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was 75,000. [2]. "The Old Man and the Sea" was published in Life magazine, with a circulation of millions.[3] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publication... [1]: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/sun-also-rises/76070.aspx#:~:text=An%20immediate%20success%2C%20The%20Sun,sold%20over%20one%20million%20copies https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-ernest/.... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Backgr... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Background_and_publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Backgr...
- ghaff 3y ago
  Hemingway was probably the best-known of the ex-pat Paris crowd during his lifetime. I expect some the Algonquin Roundtable writers may have been at least as equally well-known though as many wrote for popular magazines. Dorothy Parker's first volume of poetry sold 47,000 copies. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
- notahacker 3y ago

tomjen3 3y ago

I am listening to the unabridged audiobook for Les Miserables. Victor goes into tons of unnecessary detail about things - as an example they arrive at a monestary and he tells the entiry story of the place, including details and rules for who can wear what kind of color clothing. I recon that it is considered one of the great and famous books, but it could have drastically been improved if he had had an editor. A modern author would have had one and would have produced a better book. In fact, why shouldn't modern books be better? Nearly everything else is (compare central heating to a fireplace), and the rest disappear once you account for the price you pay for it.

TonyStr 3y ago
I am reading the same book right now, but with my eyes rather than ears. I don't actually mind the detail in retrospect, because it's used both to add flavour to the story and to reflect on ideas that are very unique, at least to me. I do agree that it's a bit terse at times though. The part about the monastery did make me bored

zhte415 3y ago

They're a different epistemology. Tools of storytelling - video vs. book in this case - are being conflated with their use. They are tools not exclusive to a single epistemology, many ways to explore many perspectives of 'what'. Contrast, for example that either of these books' narration allows a reader to fill in a lot of the blanks with experience, both real and imagined, constructing it for themselves even down to the temperature of the air, shade of light at dusk, smell of the air, exact tone and pitch of voice of a speaker. Vs. a video where the experience is fully narrated and scenes presented in 4k. Is the video 'more digestible' because it's a different thing being digested? Not that these tables can't and often aren't reversed. Some vloggers say little, sometimes 'scaffolding' only some understanding through a bit of backstory, or allow their audience to similarly construct experiences of the pieces of a journey. And some books are instruction manuals, or unintentionally read as so. A tool, be that video, text, audio, game, is only that. It's just a medium, a method that's surface to the deeper world view of the 'maker'.