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I guess I would not have done much better. >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls de

I guess I would not have done much better. >Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. >Facilitator: >O.K. >Subject: >There’s just fog everywhere. What deep insight is there to say about this sentence and this sentence alone? Reading the paper it seems like they want you to comment on how the fog is not just literal fog but a metaphor for the dirt and confusion in the city, but reading it sentence to sentence like this, what much is there to say about it?

lelandfe 1y ago
Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
photonthug 1y ago
First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around. Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around. Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean. Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?
- andoando 1y ago
  This seems like something way beyond reading comprehension though. Personally, and this is not a knock on you, but I don't find any of that imagined perception to be interesting/valuable. All this sentence is saying to me is that the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city.
  - photonthug 1y ago
    Comprehension is a spectrum that starts somewhere superficial and merely "adequate" but also stretches into deeper literacy/fluency. On one end of the spectrum it is about reading between the lines, but that doesn't mean it's purely subjective nonsense. As for whether it's interesting or valuable, if you want to stay on the surface that's fine, but it's a narrow point of view to imagine that's all that is there. Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
    - cxr 1y ago
      You're dug in, but none of this is what the linked paper is about (perversely). It's about students who are literally unable to parse sentence structure and grasp what's being described in a scene—ones who think that Michaelmas Term is the name of a character and that the image of a hypothetical Megolasaurus walking up the street is an actual dinosaur in the scene. Try reading the paper linked here to see what the discussion is about, rather than (as the authors of the paper criticize) just guessing at what they should have meant.
  - jerf 1y ago
saint_fiasco 1y ago
I think in that sentence the fog isn't really that important, it's just an excuse to tell you about the surroundings. The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.

lelandfe 1y ago

Without reading the paper… There seems to be fog everywhere - but it’s the beautiful and natural fog of London intermingling with the stinking haze of pollution. The use of “great” is interesting because it seems like the city was about to be presented as “bad.” But there’s more to it.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

photonthug 1y ago

First layer: Literally yes, there's fog everywhere. It gets around. Second layer: Interesting contrast of something clean and natural meeting something industrial and dirty. Voices, who is speaking, where from, and with what perspective? Themes of liminality / phase-change / obscured visibility / motion. Those tiers of shipping mean that some other stuff besides fog gets around. Third layer: Generalizing a bit, if natural things enter into a blackened, dirty hub of artificial industrial and commercial activity, they can become unclean. Questions: Is man not also natural thing? Foreshadowing: What happens to the heart and soul of a man in an overcrowded, dirty, artificial setting? Can what was once clean and then dirty be made clean again? What does all the motion actually move towards? Where will the shipping go, and will the fog see the meadow again, and will man be able find his heart?

andoando 1y ago
This seems like something way beyond reading comprehension though. Personally, and this is not a knock on you, but I don't find any of that imagined perception to be interesting/valuable. All this sentence is saying to me is that the author is trying to portray a dark, grim, barely visible image of the city.
- photonthug 1y ago
  Comprehension is a spectrum that starts somewhere superficial and merely "adequate" but also stretches into deeper literacy/fluency. On one end of the spectrum it is about reading between the lines, but that doesn't mean it's purely subjective nonsense. As for whether it's interesting or valuable, if you want to stay on the surface that's fine, but it's a narrow point of view to imagine that's all that is there. Not sure if you've got an engineering/math brain with no taste for art, but I'll put it like this in case it helps. Who cares about the infinitude of primes, I mean it's just numbers and what could be interesting or valuable in that? If you're thinking squishy crap like literature and critical theory sort of sucks because you're craving something more hard and objective, maybe try to come at it from the point of view of semiotics[0], which is an adjacent topic, but also closely related to stuff like linguistics, formal semantics, cognitive science. Frege worked on this kind of stuff when he wasn't busy being a giant in mathematical logic [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
  - cxr 1y ago
    You're dug in, but none of this is what the linked paper is about (perversely). It's about students who are literally unable to parse sentence structure and grasp what's being described in a scene—ones who think that Michaelmas Term is the name of a character and that the image of a hypothetical Megolasaurus walking up the street is an actual dinosaur in the scene. Try reading the paper linked here to see what the discussion is about, rather than (as the authors of the paper criticize) just guessing at what they should have meant.
- jerf 1y ago

saint_fiasco 1y ago

I think in that sentence the fog isn't really that important, it's just an excuse to tell you about the surroundings. The speaker is probably standing near city limits. There is some sort of dock or shipyard down the river, there is some green nature stuff up the river. The river might come up later as a reference for other locations.