[HN Gopher] The cultural decline of literary fiction
___________________________________________________________________
The cultural decline of literary fiction
Author : libraryofbabel
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-06-22 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| TimorousBestie wrote:
| While I disagree that "the publishers went woke" is a salient
| reason (or even true in any real sense), I give the essay props
| for resisting the urge to reduce a very complicated problem down
| to a single causal factor.
| peacebeard wrote:
| Some better versions of this take might be "In the culture war
| many people are only willing to consume media that perfectly
| signals their virtues, so even innocuous content can seem
| antagonistic." or "Our culture changed and I don't like it
| anymore, get off my lawn."
| MangoToupe wrote:
| For the most part I think this culture war is a figment of
| the media's imagination/desire. I think people just don't
| want to read for the most part--even those who purchase the
| books.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I find the culture war to exist primarily in the minds of
| the terminally online.
| peacebeard wrote:
| Maybe if you include "terminally watching the news on
| TV". But either way, it's a lot of people.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| My issue with the wokeness is that it makes the stories very
| predictable. One race of characters is pretty much bad. The
| other race needs some saviorism. It's not the message of
| wokeness that is boring, but the repetitive and insistent
| manner in which it is delivered.
| nottorp wrote:
| Not the message, but the fact there's little else besides the
| message to keep you interested.
|
| As opposed, for example, to Richard Morgan's A Land Fit for
| Heroes. Where the main character is gay. He was persecuted
| for being gay. There are gay sex scenes.
|
| However this is not what the book is about. Stuff is
| happening in that series. He's the hero of a decent story.
|
| But then I'm talking about a fantasy series so it's not
| "literature" :)
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Was Tolkien woke? I wonder.
| brazzy wrote:
| It seems to me pretty clear that the article is arguing that
| "wokeness made fiction crap" is really just the most current
| result of "authors are optimizing for critics and editors, who
| are competing for status, and neither are interested in
| producing stuff readers like".
| fullshark wrote:
| Affording someone status for being someone with an opinion on
| cultural artifact X no longer exists. No one is impressed,
| there's too many people with thoughtful opinions on important
| books doing absolutely nothing valuable in society.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| How has that changed since the mid 20th Century?
| dmoy wrote:
| Self publishing your opinions in a way that is cheaply
| (freely) accessible to anyone became a thing. Previously if
| you wanted a book review you had to spend a chunk of time
| and/or money to even find a review, and when you did there
| was like a handful of reviews. If the thing was more
| esoteric, maybe zero reviews.
| vintermann wrote:
| So it isn't that we become stupid from browsing, it's that the
| internet has an unlimited supply of critics?
| pfdietz wrote:
| I've never been able to give myself a good justification for why
| I should be reading any of that stuff.
| Papazsazsa wrote:
| The reason you read literary fiction is because you're curious
| about the outer edges of human thought or experience.
| nottorp wrote:
| This is HN, they may be looking to put a monetary value on
| it.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Interesting. That's exactly why I read science fiction.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| But that's new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary
| fiction because it was high quality, much more than because
| it was unrelateable. O'Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not
| writing about the outer edges of human experience.
| esafak wrote:
| But does it have to be inaccessible to be so? It's easy to
| write something incomprehensible that says nothing. Is the
| writer writing about something that is inherently complex,
| and that's why it is inaccessible? Not typically in a novel.
| The prospective reader may then ask, why should I bother? I'm
| also curious what Pynchon has to say, but not enough to
| justify the investment.
| tekla wrote:
| It's not inaccessible. Its just that you don't have the
| reading skills from lack of use.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure it all our faults, not that of the product.
| tekla wrote:
| Yep, skills need to be practiced before you engage with
| harder material
| pfdietz wrote:
| Or, authors need to be subservient to the needs and
| desires of the customers.
| antasvara wrote:
| Around 54% of adults read at a 6th grade level or below:
| https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
|
| Based on this, you could reach both of these conclusions:
|
| 1. Most literary fiction is inaccessible to the average
| adult.
|
| 2. It's a big problem that even moderately complex novels
| are inaccessible to the average adult.
|
| The first statement (which I think is where you're coming
| from) is absolutely true. If you want to write a very
| popular book, it should be easily readable at a 6th grade
| level.
|
| The second statement is more a statement of values. Some
| people (such as myself) find it problematic that the
| average adult can't read/understand a book that is more
| complex than Harry Potter.
|
| You don't have to agree with the second statement. A lot
| of people don't. But I think understanding _why_ someone
| might find that problematic is important. Personally, I
| think there are a lot of things worth knowing that can 't
| be written at a 6th grade level.
| trinix912 wrote:
| If their goal is to write bestsellers, sure. That's where
| the EUR5 leisure novels come from. OTOH, if their goal is
| to push boundaries or be original, being subservient to
| the desires of the customers is counterproductive.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Don't be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly
| readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn't accessible
| is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I'm happy to
| debate ... but only using specific examples. Authors and
| titles.
|
| The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the
| discussion. It's an important example. Most people won't
| ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99%
| of us will literally listen to anything else, or to
| nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I'm
| simply not going to acquire that taste.
| antasvara wrote:
| >Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for
| normal humans. Lots of what isn't accessible is just not
| that enjoyable to anybody.
|
| The PIAAC surveys, while imperfect, indirectly address
| what percentage of adults can read and appreciate
| "literary fiction."
|
| The first part of the definition of level 3:
|
| >Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across
| larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in
| order to identify and formulate responses. They can
| identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of
| information, often employing varying levels of
| inferencing.
|
| The first part for Level 4:
|
| >At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts
| presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks
| that involve access, understanding, evaluation and
| reflection about the text(s) contents and sources across
| multiple processing cycles. Adults at this level can
| infer what the task is asking based on complex or
| implicit statements. Successful task completion often
| requires the production of knowledge-based inferences.
|
| The full definitions can be found here:
| https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp
|
| Based on the full definitions, understanding the use of
| metaphor in a longer text probably sits in Level 4. A
| simple metaphor might sit in Level 3.
|
| Based on the recent survey results, only half of US
| adults read at Level 3 or above. Around 15% read at Level
| 4 or above.
|
| I invite you to look at this PowerPoint of sample
| questions for each level: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t
| &source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjJ...
|
| Based on that, what level of literacy do you think
| indicates someone capable of reading and enjoying
| literary fiction? I think the hypothetical cutoff is
| somewhere between Level 3 and 4.
|
| Based on all of this, let's use Sally Rooney's book
| "Normal People" as an example. If we're being super
| charitable, at _most_ 50% of people would be able to read
| and comprehend that book. If we 're being less charitable
| with our definition of "comprehension," I think we're
| probably looking at closer to 30% of people really
| understanding it.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Is it inaccessible? Some books are, but there is a huge
| amount of literary fiction that follows traditional
| narrative and is comprehensible to anybody with a high
| school education. There are more than enough such books to
| fill a lifetime.
| esafak wrote:
| I don't mean every work of literary fiction; only those
| commonly regarded as difficult, like Pynchon's.
| voidhorse wrote:
| This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature.
|
| This is like saying to a musician: I like the melody but
| you chose all the wrong instruments.
|
| Obviously, the entire _character_ of a song depends not
| only on the melody (idea) but also on the instruments
| chosen, the performance, etc. (material).
|
| For literary fiction, the words _are_ the material. What
| distinguishes literary works is not merely the "ideas"
| they present but the _way_ in which they are presented. The
| words are the author 's instruments, his paints. This is
| the difference between writing/reading _for information_
| and writing /reading as an aesthetic experience. Literary
| fiction of course imparts information and ideas, but it is
| predominantly about the latter experience insofar as the
| point is the evocative expression of those ideas.
|
| This is why just reading the cliff notes for a literary
| work is missing the point.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| "This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature"
|
| No it is not. It is a central and vital part of
| literature.
|
| Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us
| using quotations from any fiction writers we like?
| voidhorse wrote:
| Actually, I'd agree that "fundamental misunderstanding"
| is too strong. Obviously there is a certain threshold of
| comprehensibility one needs to achieve regardless of
| whether one is pursuing aesthetic ends or informative
| ones.
|
| That said, I would stand by the assertion that reading
| literature only for the information it imparts is missing
| much of the point. We esteem authors not solely for their
| plots and characters, but also for their stylistics--the
| difference between a great writer and a passing one is
| often little more than the well considered phrase. The
| arrangement, use, and rhythm of words are a major
| component in a literary work.
|
| My point is that asking a writer to "express it more
| simply or more accessibly" may in many cases amount to
| asking them to butcher the stylistics that they felt
| achieved the highest aesthetic quality for the kind of
| work they wanted to produce.
|
| If one is given a business briefing it is probably the
| apex of reason to ask a writer to simplify. Are there
| cases in which this or that phrase in a literary work
| would benefit from simplification? Yes, but to ask an
| author to simplify their _entire aesthetic approach_
| generally, really seems to me to fail to have appreciated
| a large part of what distinguishes literature from basic
| expository writing.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. You got specific works
| and authors? That would help a lot.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Sure, here are some of my favorites:
|
| Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, John Barth, Henry James,
| Herman Melville, Fleur Jaeggy, Dostoyevsky, Marguerite
| Duras, Poe, Hawthorne, Rosemarie Waldrop, Kraznahokai,
|
| These are just a couple that came to mind. Among them,
| probably Waldrop, Jaeggy, and Bernhard are the most
| experimental, but I would argue that none of them
| aesthetically speaking write books that are simple, and I
| don't think I could argue that any of them should have
| simplified their themes or style or general employment of
| language to be more accessible.
|
| Kraznahorkai and Bernhard are great examples. Are walls
| of text without paragraph breaks harder to read? Yes. But
| this is an important aesthetic choice. In both cases (all
| of bernard, melancholy of resistance for Kraz) it speaks
| to an overbearing oppressiveness that ties directly into
| their thematics. If you missed this I think you missed
| out an essential point of their aesthetic and what they
| were trying to say. We cannot sever form and content.
| This is why I think it's absurd to complain that
| someone's work is "not accessible" --its really silly to
| demand any sort of aesthetic capitulation on the part of
| any artist, literary or otherwise, in the first place.
|
| Edit: Faulkner is another good example that's less
| experimental. I'm sure some readers would have found _As
| I lay Dying_ or _The Sound and the Fury_ more accessible
| if a narrator mediated between the various first person
| voices he presents, but this would so drastically change
| the aesthetic character of these works that I doubt you
| 'd be able to claim they aren't essentially different and
| would not be equivalent pieces of art.
| awongh wrote:
| There's nothing more effective than a piece of fiction at
| transmitting the subtle complete world-view ideas of an author
| directly into your brain.
|
| I mean that in the sense that non-fiction is still very much
| fictionally presenting a world view of the author or the
| subject, but in a way that's bounded by real facts. Literary
| fiction doesn't have that constraint.
|
| Human history and society is actually made up of ideas and by
| taking 2-300 pages to digest a set of ideas you come away with
| a new perspective you can't get any other way.
| drakonka wrote:
| Fiction is alive and well. This article is specifically about
| the decline of literary fiction.
|
| I think people simply realize how boring and pretentious much
| of contemporary literary fiction is; many choose to go pick
| up a science fiction, or thriller, or even romance novel that
| can convery all the same ideas in more interesting and
| accessible ways.
| awongh wrote:
| I think it's pretentious too, but I also think it's a
| useful distinction in the sense that the category aspires
| to deeper and broader ideas than a lot of fiction- Harry
| Potter, Hyperion, Dennis Taylor, We Are Legion, Twilight.
|
| Not to say that the distinction itself, literary vs non-
| literary fiction, isn't extremely pretentious. But we all
| recognize that some book's ideas are more shallow than
| others.
| LordShredda wrote:
| It's fun
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| What is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff?
|
| Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying
| what you claim to support.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Books like Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Brothers
| Karamazov, etc still sell many thousands of copies every year,
| more than even big hits in contemporary literary fiction.
|
| I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The old
| books haven't gone away. Even if we assume there are good new
| books, they have to compete with the supply of existing books,
| which grows without bound - unlike the time and attention of
| consumers.
|
| Every form of media has this problem. A human lifetime can only
| consume so many books, so many films, so many hours of music. A
| new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more worth
| your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000? Decreasing.
|
| Books are no different. What are the odds that something new is
| going to displace something existing off the shortlist of greats
| that you already don't have time to read?
| Animats wrote:
| > I think the author skips past the real answer right here. The
| old books haven't gone away. Even if we assume there are good
| new books, they have to compete with the supply of existing
| books, which grows without bound - unlike the time and
| attention of consumers.
|
| That's a real phenomenon in music. New works have to compete
| with the entire body of existing work, some of which is pretty
| good.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| And movies and TV. Why try some random new stuff when any of
| the classic movies is both guaranteed to be good and probably
| available for free from the library's DVD collection?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Relevance!
|
| eg: What's it like to be a teenager alongside the rise of
| AI? It's a hell of a lot different than the old sci-fi
| imagines, and old sci-fi generally skipped to the 'end-
| phase-ubiquitous-AGI' instead of focusing on the
| transitionary 'awkward teenage' period of the technology.
| whstl wrote:
| True, but I'd say it's worse for books than for music.
|
| For music there's still plenty of network effects in favor of
| new music... things like live concerts, radio and DJs playing
| the latest stuff, playlists that make actual money being all
| about new stuff, younger people wanting to connect to their
| own generation, pop culture enthusiasts always chasing the
| "new thing".
|
| Sure there are oldies stations and DJs and listeners
| rediscovering vintage stuff, but network effects for books
| are rarer, there's not that many Dan Browns anymore.
| layer8 wrote:
| On the other hand, music is arguably more timeless, in that
| the contents of lyrics is less crucial for the enjoyment of
| music.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| To note, books have a different networks: they can get
| movie/TV/game adaptions and get pushed to the news
| forefront, their author can also play the SNS game.
|
| There's still no Spotlight for books, and I'm with you how
| tougher than other media it is.
| golol wrote:
| I would say every genre of media has this problem. A form of
| media might exist for thousands of years, but genre and fashion
| always evolve in new directions, because what's the point of
| creating more of what exists already.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Video Games were immune for a while because technology was
| changing so fast, but in the last decade or so its become
| really clear players don't care nearly as much about graphics
| as they used to.
|
| People will quite happily pickup and play games from many
| years ago. Many of my teenage kids favourite games were made
| before they were born.
| taormina wrote:
| Well, graphics plateaued and then we started to remember
| that fun and highest fidelity graphics don't necessarily
| have anything to do with each other.
| eviks wrote:
| > A new movie comes out: what are the odds of it being more
| worth your while than one on the existing IMDb Top 1000?
| Decreasing
|
| Not really? This is a rather "mechanical" view missing the
| bigger social part - for example, a big part of that worth is
| the social conversation, and the chances of your friends to
| watch that new movie vs the top 1000 isn't decreasing.
|
| Also there is this factor of new films being able to
| incorporate "current" events which old films can't, and that's
| another factor of worth that's not decreasing with time
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >bigger social part
|
| Perhaps the "bigger" social part is what is missing. I've
| found I stop reading books or watching movies now days all
| the time. It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING
| their micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply
| presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
|
| Its not that the social parts are missing. Its that there are
| 1,000,000 competing social issues and everyone is trying to
| make theirs heard.
|
| I'm not sure if its the creator's or the publishing companies
| watering things down. Either way someone is doing it
| intentionally. No book where the prominent theme is is a
| micro politic will ever stand the test of time, or even gain
| a significant following.
| nottorp wrote:
| > It seems like no media/author can resists SHOVING their
| micro-politic issue down your throat rather than simply
| presenting it as part of a story that you digest.
|
| That may say something about the declining quality of
| writing.
|
| You have to be a real pro to write propaganda for any topic
| that is also good literature. But most people are not Jack
| London :)
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think it's due to a general decline into literalness.
|
| I'm not sure which came first: audiences that no longer
| understand symbolism, metaphor, allegory, or writers who
| no longer use it. In any case, all of these things are
| basically completely absent from any modern piece of
| mainstream media. Wherever there's an attempt, it's
| decidedly conspicuous. There's little nuance and
| subtlety.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >That may say something about the declining quality of
| writing.
|
| It might but I'm not sure its all of the story.
|
| I know how business and money works. I can say for sure
| there are forces out there saying. "Our focus group
| didn't understand this, make the message POP
| more,more,more" To writers/producers before they are
| willing to cut a check.
| nottorp wrote:
| Well if it works for the movie industry why wouldn't it
| work for "literature" too...
| pfdietz wrote:
| I've found I've stopped watching TV or movies or reading
| written fiction, but it's because fiction in general has
| ceased to do something for me. It's as if there's a willing
| suspension of disbelief needed that I can no longer muster.
| Fiction comes across to me as inherently false. This seems
| to transcend the particular political position taken, if
| any.
| pomian wrote:
| It could be that reality is more "exciting" than any
| fiction, and your mind can't handle any more.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be
| strictly ranked "best" to "worst." There are a million metrics
| by which we might try to measure it, but well... that's just
| not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental
| lack of understanding of what art is. Probably one of the most
| important metrics is "relevance to, and effect on, the state of
| the world as it is right now." And pretty much any arbitrary
| "1000 best" list is not going to take that into account.
|
| That's why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-
| instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks,
| instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the
| latter may be "superior" in nearly every measurable way. Part
| of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact... I might
| argue that that's all of art, with metrics about it being an
| entirely different, not-art thing.
|
| (I say all this as a classical musician and senior software
| engineer with a math background, myself.)
| citizenpaul wrote:
| The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty
| much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven
| takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve
| and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
| voidhorse wrote:
| This equates the value of art with technical difficulty,
| which is not how most people actually evaluate art.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I would not say that the value of art is strictly
| equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that
| there is a level of technical competence required for art
| to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g.
| that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not
| good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
| Avicebron wrote:
| The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it
| 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the
| cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's
| literally called Comedian.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This guy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Ducham
| p
|
| killed off the argument that "X isn't art" for all X.
| 65 wrote:
| I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but
| rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana,
| just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel
| something.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back
| and more recently tried to get him to play _Sugar
| Mountain_ by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and
| struggled with it because even though it is simple it has
| to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he
| discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough
| with _The Day I Tried to Live_ by Soundgarden and
| _Rooster_ by Alice in Chains.
|
| Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's
| gotten him into David Bowie songs from _The Rise and Fall
| of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars_. For a long
| time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically
| trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock
| because it had commercial potential, but he found many
| songs on that album to be great songs that were within
| his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like
| Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in
| 24 hours and he 's building instruments like a Guitar-
| harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of
| which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the
| physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two
| below a regular bass guitar.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| When trying to learn the guitar I fell in love with Santa
| Monica by Everclear, and Go With The Flow by Queens Of
| The Stone Age.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar
| tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
|
| I barely know anything about music, and probably less
| about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you
| can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might
| readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that
| essentially gives you another hand on that side of the
| guitar.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the
| fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele.
|
| As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables
| you can tweak are: * length *
| mass/length * tension
|
| There's some limit to how long you make the strings or
| you can't play it or otherwise you need something to
| extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The
| other two are inside a square root which is not in your
| favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really
| heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can
| get the tension.
|
| But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was
| in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment
| rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I
| had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the
| things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build
| those things now.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| There was once a company making a bass ukulele with inch-
| thick polymer strings. Playing them was kind of
| hilarious, and would be fun to see it scaled up to the
| size of an actual bass guitar... Probably someone has
| done it...
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Life is the ultimate test. We see ourselves reflected in
| the eyes of others. There may be nothing more humbling
| than being confronted with our own ignorance, except when
| we have an audience.
|
| I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can't
| vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be
| tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar
| or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used
| that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward
| in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position
| is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable
| string beyond the last point of contact with the strings,
| and that contact could be released to increase the string
| length?.
|
| You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two
| different string gauges. The top four could be heavier
| gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate
| gauges and silence the strings? I don't know much about
| playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to
| build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and
| style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and
| tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not
| be such a big deal if he's the only one playing it, but
| if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other
| guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
|
| It might also be possible to teach him how to build
| simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in
| post-processing once you know how the parts fit
| conceptually together.
|
| Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a
| good post for HN if you can find the time.
| pseudocomposer wrote:
| To be clear: I _have_ spent the years to memorize and be
| able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the
| years required to even get to that point). I can also play
| them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn 't do that in
| any paid/professional performance situation). I literally
| did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use
| my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my
| family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
|
| And _none of that_ makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell
| Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of
| "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or
| what art is.
|
| On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the
| name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M
| listeners per month, replying to a comment that did
| correctly spell her name, _is_ a pretty objective reason to
| not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps,
| much else, at least until you address whatever underlying
| issues /pathologies have you thinking this way).
|
| Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I
| did music for a living, I often _did_ think this way. I
| thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn 't
| offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical,
| or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor
| background, I believe it was more a survival instinct
| (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as
| "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me,
| though. It required me being dishonest with myself about
| what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a
| multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-
| adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the
| software world (as long as you stay out of
| Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat
| races).
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness
| in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
|
| You've been fooled by the rent seeking class.
| crq-yml wrote:
| Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite
| comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens
| of art towards technical and political measurements. When
| a work is _incomparable in the way in which it achieves
| verisimilitude_ it is escaping this system.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| You are basically talking about the part where the system
| is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is
| through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good
| automatically.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Agreed here. Every time my kids bring up tier list
| rankings I have to again explain this to them.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Is there an article (so you don't have to write an essay)
| that explains what you mean here? I don't think I'm
| familiar with the short hand point you're making here. I
| understand the terms rent seeking and familiar with the
| argument made in the quote fwiw.
| nine_k wrote:
| There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's
| the measure that matters most in your unique and finite
| life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your
| time on, objectivity be damned.
| whstl wrote:
| Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in
| Europe sometime.
|
| Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it
| but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the
| 10000 drunks in Waldbuhne will belt it.
|
| Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will
| get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical
| concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with
| Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and
| feather the conductor.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when
| walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the
| German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum
| Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two
| pieces suck?
|
| (I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc
| Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed
| choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom
| designed for drunken singalongs.)
|
| I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps
| reconsider your chosen metric.
|
| https://youtu.be/BNuT7-6zBds?si=fbyim815cp6tiD4R
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=R3vuU7XAaUM
| jl6 wrote:
| You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective
| ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on
| shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is _The
| Great Gatsby_ better than _The Catcher in the Rye_? It doesn
| 't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's
| stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works
| not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the
| world?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made
| comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare
| it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic
| I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today,
| stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
| technothrasher wrote:
| And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great
| Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have
| universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The
| classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem
| to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't
| blame the books, it's just what captures my particular
| interest. Given that, I have never really used "the
| classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading
| fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I
| may receive, whether they be old books or new.
| mathgeek wrote:
| > That's why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-
| instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks,
| instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the
| latter may be "superior" in nearly every measurable way.
|
| As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I
| absolutely start humming and making up words to classical
| music far more often than anything from this century.
| 65 wrote:
| Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music
| because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the
| other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make
| classical music worse? No.
|
| Just because something may have been popular in the past and
| is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical
| music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular
| now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
|
| If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and
| more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games
| but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and
| storytelling still blows me away.
| wbl wrote:
| Very little rhythm and emotion?
|
| First emotion https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFi-7H9TKs
|
| https://youtu.be/rVw6NRXSDhM?si=wchNK9I3RO_XJxeG
|
| Rythym: let's start with the most infamous percussion
| sequence of all time
| https://youtu.be/wZtWAqc3qyk?si=B47DQZ1auKx53OaD
|
| Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal,
| electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on
| the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and
| complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up
| to new music.
|
| I don't think there is any video game that comes close in
| depth to the Ring Cycle.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous
| col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow)
| at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow
| me to add that one to the list.
|
| https://youtu.be/cXOanvv4plU?si=WrIuBfmofTo6szRa
|
| And as for emotion, this version of the 1812 Overture
| always sends chills up my spine.
|
| https://youtu.be/uYnCCWsfx3c?si=OQEA5_JYpWn1kHFj
| 65 wrote:
| You didn't correctly read my comment.
|
| > Art has no objective measure.
|
| That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also
| missed this point:
|
| > compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
|
| Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of
| how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about
| complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not
| just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to
| your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most
| complex pieces of art ever made.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no
| emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from
| plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about
| the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without
| some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to
| Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical
| for different reasons
|
| But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then
| there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like
| a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled
| compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of
| counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a
| pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational
| principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western
| music.
|
| That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
| wbl wrote:
| Mozart can be really singable. The catalogue song, the Figaro
| aria, etc. it's not all hell's fire burns in my heart.
| yyyk wrote:
| >This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all
| be strictly ranked "best" to "worst."
|
| Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old
| media can still appeal to modern people, at which point
| quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem.
|
| Think about public libraries. They have limited space and
| budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll
| still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid
| goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be
| older books.
| bloomca wrote:
| There is also an issue that ranking is easily available now.
|
| Of course, recommendations existed in the past as well, and
| stuff like classic literature was ranked for centuries at this
| point, but still, I think we relied on word of mouth more.
|
| Nowadays you can easily get a list of "top ..." in any area and
| chances are high that it is all old stuff.
| watwut wrote:
| I kind of think a lot of these are bought as gifts, not really
| a thing people actually intend to read.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's a deep problem with music and video games. I mean, can a
| Mario game _really_ top Super Mario World? Not to say some
| later games aren 't fun, but _Persona 6_ could only really top
| _Persona 5_ by being something really different, and if it was
| different it wouldn 't be _Persona 6_.
| default-kramer wrote:
| Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that
| most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I
| remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well
| though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much
| better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design
| has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to
| go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a
| game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any
| 16-bit or earlier game.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That might be true about the time period from the SNES to
| the present but it's not clear to me that we're really
| getting better games post the PS3.
|
| I have _Persona 5 Royal_ on my mind because I am playing
| through it now maybe a decade after I played _Persona 4
| Golden_ on the PS Vita. I love the story, I love the art,
| but the music isn 't up there with P4G (how can you beat
| _Reach out_ or _Make history_?) and I think it 's a
| disappointment as a _game_.
|
| Hypothetically it matters if you develop relationships with
| the characters and raise your social stats but practically
| you're not required to make hard choices because you have
| enough time to do everything -- and since the game is so
| long you feel compelled to do it all in one playthrough
| which stretches out the game even longer.
|
| It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the
| industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs,
| debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for
| most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased
| to matter in _Fire Emblem_ games a long time ago.
|
| My son and I have been thinking a lot about a "visual novel
| + something else" game which is maybe 30 minutes - 6 hours
| per playthrough but requires multiple playthroughs. I'd be
| happy to have NG+, but he thinks that's cheap.
|
| Dialogue has been a weak point in "interactive fiction"
| since the beginning, maybe LLMs will change that. Fictional
| VR games like _Sword Art Online_ and _Shangri-La Frontier_
| have NPCs you can just talk to, I 'd love to see that in
| real games. For now we get Meta's absurd model that you can
| make a storefront in _Horizon Worlds_ but you need to have
| a real person to staff it which makes sense to exactly one
| person.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I agree. I've often thought about this via a thought experiment
| : How much money would it take for you to agree not to consume
| any new instance of a particular media type? In other words,
| you're offered fifty thousand dollars (or some other non-
| trivial but not outrageous amount of money) and in agreement
| you won't read a book released after June 2025.
|
| Clearly this is going to vary from person to person but I might
| accept $50k to not read any new fiction title, but wouldn't
| accept the same deal for video games as it's likely new
| technology will result in some new classics in the coming years
| - the amount of money you'd need to offer would need to be much
| higher. Movies are somewhere in the middle.
|
| This effect is self-reinforcing since at least part of the
| value in watching a movie / reading a book / etc is the ability
| to discuss it with other people. Not seeing any new movies
| would reduce my ability to participate in discussions with
| people. As less people watch new things, this becomes less of
| an issue.
| ativzzz wrote:
| It goes beyond this. Reading is a form of entertainment. There
| has been an explosion of new and different forms of personal
| entertainment, so books now have to compete not just with old
| books, but movies, video games, social media, etc etc etc
| WalterBright wrote:
| My car magazines have all disappeared other than Hot Rod
| Magazine.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| To be fair, those were fun, but extremely information sparse.
| You'd have a main story or two, some mail inbox stuff, a
| listing of a selection of cars you probably could never afford,
| and 35 pages of advertisements.
|
| The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online
| tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss
| physical magazines though.
| jerhewet wrote:
| Wood-working magazines. I subscribed _because_ of the
| advertising.
|
| I can't afford Fesstools, but that doesn't mean I don't love
| seeing / reading their ads.
|
| I dropped my very long time subscription to Maximum Computing
| when they went digital. The end of an era...
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| That's the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can't
| really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read
| Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael
| Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are
| very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just
| inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud
| was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster ... I love
| what nonfiction writing I've seen, but the New York trilogy is so
| dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.
|
| Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really
| postmodern??
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| The unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool
| writers want to prove they are making something challenging by
| stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in
| narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings
| that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull
| and predictable, but they're better than watching the
| protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to
| suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at
| night too.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Right. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise
| music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a
| matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic
| interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly
| noise music doesn't support a lot of full-time jobs compared
| to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which
| was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what
| Stephen Foster did.
|
| We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing.
| But one may come at the expense of the other.
| tptacek wrote:
| The time frame for Pynchon fits and, of course, so does the
| style. He's postmodern.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| My own issue with modern literary fiction is the pretension. It's
| been shoved in my face from middle school through college.
| Everyone writing "genre fiction" is not a Real Author.
|
| Writing to be like one of the great writers of the past is
| completely missing the point. It's one thing to follow a
| tradition. It's another to think that tradition makes you great.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Science fiction, and related or subgenres like sci-fantasy and
| sci-horror is just much better these days than literary fiction.
| The literary snobs won't admit that One Hundred Years of Solitude
| (which I read years ago and liked) could have been a scifi novel
| placed not in historical south/central america but instead on a
| set of planets orbiting a star 100 light years from here. If it
| had, they wouldn't consider it 'real literature'.
|
| Science fiction is more fun to read, and often more creative -
| authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of 18th
| century South America, they can invent whatever systems they
| like, and then the question is whether their world-building
| skills are good enough to avoid obvious inconsistencies.
|
| Yes, people are still reading - but they're reading Adrian
| Tchaikovsky, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Susanna Clarke and
| host of others who aren't limited to scenes of 'historical
| realism' (which to be honest are often distorted pictures of
| history that were socially acceptable to the publishing houses of
| their day).
|
| You can still read the classics - Conrad is my favorite late
| 19th/early 20tth century author - but Lovecraft is just as worth
| reading.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Turning a personal preference (I like sci-fi) in to a universal
| statement (sci-fi is more fun to read) is so unbecoming.
| com2kid wrote:
| 99% of science fiction settings are historical fiction but now
| In Space(tm).
|
| I'm not saying that is a bad thing, and some fiction explores
| forms of government that haven't been tried on earth, and also
| explores systems of government and commerce that may need to
| happen on a post scarcity society. That is all good, and
| arguably those explorations need to happen, but still most sci-
| fi is just some portion of earth society thrown into space.
| (Banks explores alternatives, but arguably most Gibson doesn't,
| though I haven't read anything by him in a decade or more so
| they may have changed).
|
| This is frequently useful as it allows us to examine our
| existing biased from an outside view. I am definitely less
| racist/bigoted for having read science fiction.
|
| As a final point, it has been noted that a lot of sci-fi has an
| undertone of "wow isn't this benevolent monarchy great!" Which
| is rather disturbing if you think about the implications too
| much.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| 99% is far overstating it. SF is a wide genre with pretty
| much every other genre inside it. At this point it's
| infiltrated popular culture; just think how many movies and
| shows are not billed as SF but contain SF ideas or settings.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I hate when my Science Fiction doesn't have any Science.
| com2kid wrote:
| Eh, popular sci-fi is zero sci.
|
| Star Trek makes 0 effort to explore the impacts of its
| technology on people. Some good books have been writing
| exploring what post scarcity means, but ST in general
| does nothing with the premise except make tea.
|
| The novels that do explore a world like what ST posits
| end up going off the rails very quickly. Fun reads,
| people who live for eternity spend time terra forming
| planets (why not) cloning themselves into endless bodies
| and exploring the universe, or just becoming something
| not human at all.
|
| ST still has people dying, never mind that immortality
| would be trivial to accomplish with that science level.
| But that isn't the point of Star Trek.
| com2kid wrote:
| I'm of the belief that the TV and movie sci-fi are a
| completely different genre than book sci-fi. There are
| occasional faithful adaptations, but none of the far out
| stuff ever gets adapted.
|
| But even discarding cinema (Star Wars famously being a
| samurai movie set in space), most sci-fi books written
| after the golden age, are focused on societal changes and
| people. Stories are metaphors for our world.
|
| That is fine, fiction that cannot be related to rarely gets
| read.
|
| Bobiverse is a nerd's power trip fantasy. 90% of what
| Heinlein wrote is just "external observations on sociey".
|
| Even Greg Egan, who writes super hard sci-fi (his books
| have footnotes linked to actual science papers!) has his
| novels largely focus around societies and people (or aliens
| that are easily related to!)
|
| It has honestly been 80 or so years since science fiction
| was mostly "here are a few poorly fleshed out people, and
| some really damn good science!"
|
| I've read a lot of those stories, they are cool and I kind
| of miss them, but honestly almost every major plot point
| possible was already thought up by the boards of scientists
| turned sci-fi authors of the 1930s through 50s. An
| occasional new story of that type makes its way out now and
| then (some of the SCP stories are actually this in a very
| pure form), but IMHO that genre of pure science writing
| with minimal focus on people or society is 99.9% dead.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I think there is a LOT of sci-fi that doesn't try to
| sugarcoat monarchy. I'm looking at my book shelf and don't
| even see any that do.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Part of it, I think, is that genre fiction simply has more
| tools available. That lets an author do their thing a lot
| easier, and in the hands of a master, is how you get
| masterworks. (I decided to check _The Left Hand of Darkness_
| off my list last week. Its introduction hits intellectually
| heavier than the last three books I 've read put together. The
| _introduction_. And it 's about five pages long.)
|
| Of course, 90% of genre fiction is crap. (Bare minimum, I'll
| not argue with anyone who wants to argue for more.) But we know
| that. There's enough of it that I can find something
| interesting to read. I can't say the same for the last 20 years
| of literary, non-genre works. (I'll take pointers, though.)
| amacbride wrote:
| A well-known observation!
|
| "Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage
| stating 'ninety percent of everything is crap'."
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Oh boy, _Left Hand of Darkness_ is a good book. And I always
| tell people to not skip the introduction, because it is
| brilliant. "Prediction is the business of prophets,
| clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of
| novelists. A novelist 's business is lying."
|
| I get the feeling Ursula Le Guin could have been a pretty
| successful realist "literary" writer if she'd chosen to. I am
| grateful that she chose genre instead.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I love that first chapter where the main character meets a
| politician and says something like "I'd seen his type
| before, was confident I'd see it again, and would probably
| see it in hell". I must have reread that line 10x.
| nottorp wrote:
| One Hundred Years of Solitude is "magical realism" :)
|
| No, you can't say it has fantasy elements. Then it wouldn't be
| culture.
|
| Marquez is great btw. Blame the critics.
| vintermann wrote:
| Yeah, I can't for the life of me see why Regency/Victorian
| fiction or US civil war fiction wouldn't be "genre".
| troupo wrote:
| > authors aren't limited to the sociopolitical realities of
| 18th century South America, they can invent whatever systems
| they like, and then the question is whether their world-
| building skills are good enough to avoid obvious
| inconsistencies.
|
| To do that authors need to very well versed in the
| sociopolitical realities of 18th century South America, and
| ancient China, and moden Europe, and... Most modern authors
| couldn't be bothered to do even basic research. Or can't afford
| to, because the pay is shit, and the deadlines are tight, and
| you have to produce a trilogy a year just to survive.
|
| I've read _a lot_ of scifi over the past few years. Most books
| are bad rehashes of existing ideas written in an extremely poor
| language (nouns and verbs with complete lack of adjectives and
| adverbs, poor and nonexistent metaphors, middle-school-level
| sentence structure etc.)
|
| Fantasy books fare much better because they can easily borrow
| and steal "sociopolitical realities" and transfer them to pages
| wholesale.
| culturthrowaway wrote:
| Perhaps a generation+ of explicit institutional discrimination at
| every level of the pipeline very specifically targeted against
| the demographic that created 90% of all previously valued
| literary fiction, played some role in its decline.
|
| eg https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-vanishing-white-
| male-...
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Of course that's punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%.
| But I don't buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna
| Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?
| bccdee wrote:
| > explicit institutional discrimination
|
| Wild leap to a conclusion there. The article you linked makes
| some similarly strange leaps, based apparently on poor reading
| comprehension:
|
| > A baffling New York Times op-ed ("The Disappearance of
| Literary Men Should Worry Everyone") casually confessed to
| systemic gender discrimination in MFA admissions. "About 60
| percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts
| in our program are entirely female," lamented David Morris, a
| creative writing professor at UNLV[.]
|
| That's not discrimination? The fact that men are not applying
| as often as women does not imply that men are actively being
| kept out--in fact, quite the opposite. Men are not even asking
| to be let in. The rest of the NYT op-end goes on to point out
| the ways in which men being underrepresented in literary
| circles parallels their underrepresentation in the rest of
| academia:
|
| > In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally,
| emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-
| year public colleges, about half will graduate four years
| later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.
|
| If men are dropping out at higher rates and are less
| represented in liberal arts programs, it's absurd to leap to
| the question, "who is doing this to men." That's a very
| grievance-oriented mentality. The real question is simply, "why
| is this happening," and a cursory investigation will indicate
| that the most likely answer is, men simply choose to avoid
| pursuits they perceive as feminine. As the number of female
| participants in a college major rises, men stop wanting to take
| it.
|
| > "There was really only one variable where I found an effect,
| and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet
| med schools... So a young male student says he's going to visit
| a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he
| changes his choice of graduate school. That's what the findings
| indicate.... what's really driving feminization of the field is
| 'preemptive flight'--men not applying because of women's
| increasing enrollment." - Dr. Anne Lincoln
|
| > For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the
| student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying
| was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
|
| https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-col...
|
| As tempting as it may be to cry discrimination, there's really
| no evidence of that. The decline in popular male writers is
| most likely a product of the same cultural forces that caused a
| decline in male veterinarians. Women started doing it more
| often, and men decided they wanted to go somewhere with less
| female competition.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| TFA starts with the sentence "Recently, there has been a lot of
| talk about the "decline of the literary (straight) (white)
| male" and then goes on to explore that with much more nuance,
| as well as many other factors.
| ang_cire wrote:
| This is a really good analysis article. Thank you for posting it.
| I think the critic vs consumer decoupling rings true to me, and
| this is obviously the worst economy to exist in as a "struggling"
| anything.
|
| There are a lot of industries that are struggling right now to
| figure out how to re-monetize independent from large corporations
| (like magazines/ publishers/ movies/ etc) because those
| corporations are cutting out anyone not already hugely
| profitable.
|
| I feel like whatever solution we eventually land on to
| 'democratize' media funding will also be a good solution to our
| FOSS funding problem.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'll toss two theories into the pool:
|
| The rising tide of anti-intellectualism.
|
| The decline of humanities education in favor of stem education.
| This has both economic drivers and national security drivers.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I think these are factors to the extent that one sort of
| _needs_ formal training and schooling in the historical
| development of the form to appreciate experimental and more
| contemporary work. The same can generally be said about visual
| art.
|
| Because of that, yeah, hyper-specialization in schooling and a
| general movement toward stem means that a lot of people don't
| actually acquire the requisite background to engage with and
| appreciate modern work in a sufficient way--just like someone
| untrained in computing probably would not have an easy time
| understanding or appreciating significant breakthroughs in
| computer science.
| whstl wrote:
| This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two
| terms, Rockism and Popism.
|
| I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace
| different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the
| result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy,
| pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as
| deep just because it's popular or polished.
|
| Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music
| in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts
| for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening
| progressively, with critics increasively and progressively
| adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't
| conflate popularity with genius.
|
| For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I
| could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could
| understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was
| trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of
| Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological
| arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and
| when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not
| saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were
| blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become
| grating.
|
| Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture
| centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the
| personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the
| constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms,
| the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
| voidhorse wrote:
| This was a great read!
|
| I think the analysis of the declining pipeline is spot on. Up
| until around 2016 or so, I was on track to try my hand at the
| world of literary fiction--I had participated in several circles
| in college, sat on the review board of a lit mag, joined a group
| of writers post graduation, all just to eventually...set it
| aside.
|
| I always had a "day job" during this time, but other than that I
| was single and had few responsibilities. This made holding a
| typical nine to five and actually getting some writing done
| somewhat tenable.
|
| As my sphere of responsibility expanded (relationships, etc) this
| quickly became untenable. There's only so much time in a day,
| unfortunately, and as we continue along a career path, we're
| incentivized to invest ever increasing amounts of time into that,
| rather than a far-from-lucrative gamble on literary pursuits.
|
| When you're able to actually make money on your literary work, it
| establishes a virtuous circle. Writing more makes you a better
| writer and writing more gets you paid (allowing you to support
| those other aspects of your life). Contrast this with the modern
| experience of desperately trying to carve out whatever time you
| can to make at least a brief writing session happen, amidst being
| exhausted already by the other demands on your time (your non-
| writing job being a big one).
|
| From the critical side, I think the situation is pretty much
| analogous to that of contemporary art. The common person would
| meet most experimental literary works with a quizzical look, just
| as they meet most contemporary and conceptual art with the a
| quizzical look. Artists, however, have had better success with
| this because their objects are not generally mass produced. This
| has allowed the critical narrowing and distance from the common
| taste to be buoyed up economically by natural scarcity and the
| concomitant transformation of the object into a value-holding
| asset. That can never happen with literature, which is
| definitionally reproduced at scale.
| tolerance wrote:
| > What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of
| memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the
| characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world
| after. > > -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882341
|
| People don't turn to books for this sort of experience anymore.
| People are not "literary minded". For the average person,
| interpolating another person's experience against their own
| through the written word is counterintuitive if not impossible
| and detached.
|
| It takes a literary mind to _feel_ through text. Electronic media
| of all sorts, aside from long form text displayed electronically
| is just that; electrifying.
|
| I think that the quote I pulled from motohagiography applies to
| all writing and when we go further:
|
| > Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal,
| performative, and anti-intimate.
|
| The cultural decline of all writing becomes more obvious.
|
| Anyone who cares about this sort of stuff needs to understand
| that their brain is rewired but their spirit still craves the
| same old stuff that it sought out for when the mind could stomach
| total absorption in a dry block of pulp.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > it spoke the language of memory,
|
| We are living in the tower of Babel. No one speaks the same
| "language" anymore. I truly believe this was the true metaphor
| behind that story. Once a civilization reaches a certain level
| of standard wealth people hyper converge on their personal
| beliefs to the point where they can literally no longer speak
| about other forms of personal belief or preference that
| conflicts with their own. And they no longer are coerced into
| going along with another belief system (compromise) due to
| economic need from the majority. At that point the civilization
| unravels due to lack of coherent direction.
|
| Look at all the arguments about definitions of clearly defined
| words in modern politics.
| tolerance wrote:
| Even so, mass media today is better posed to present a shared
| language.
|
| I'd go as far as to think that there is a shared language in
| society today, but it's more like athletes jawing off amongst
| each other than something like what we expect the effects of
| culture and art to be.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Tech doesn't change human nature. We are still the same as
| 100,000 years ago without tech.
| tolerance wrote:
| In my original comment, I said that I believe that our
| brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same
| things as before.
|
| Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our
| nature is exercised, at the material level.
|
| Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial
| dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not
| register.
|
| I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm
| curious what made you make the claim that took us in this
| direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a
| logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.
|
| Thanks.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?
| tolerance wrote:
| He isn't, and I won't be convinced that he is until Supreme
| puts his face on one of their shirts.
| voidhorse wrote:
| I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that
| make arguments similar to the quoted post--that we are entering
| or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new
| language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram),
| immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand
| allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express
| a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher
| friends tell me that the typical student's reading
| comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
| tolerance wrote:
| Check these out:
|
| https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/hartford-grad-
| sues-s...
|
| https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/mass-literacy-isnt
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not just reading comprehension, it's the imagination
| that goes with it.
|
| Text is active. It triggers the imagination. Visual imagery -
| especially electronic imagery - is consumed passively. What
| you see is what you get.
|
| Especially with Gen Z, there's been a catastrophic collapse
| in the public's ability to imagine anything that hasn't been
| pre-digested by Hollywood movies, video games, D&D, and
| anime.
|
| It's the same stock imagery over and over and over.
|
| Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the
| standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
|
| It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures that
| can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined already.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > Older culture is "boring" because it doesn't follow the
| standard tropes, and that makes it incomprehensible.
|
| The older culture, where the tropes stem from, doesn't
| follow the tropes? What?
| tolerance wrote:
| I don't think that's what he means.
| tolerance wrote:
| I wonder if people are downvoting you in good faith because
| I think you're on to something. My assumption is that
| denigrating mass media and pop culture comes across as
| "elitist".
|
| Oh well. I mean, for the person who can look around and
| feel disdain toward these things, they deserve whatever
| shred of dignity the allegation subscribes them to.
|
| "Second Order Illiteracy" is precisely what cripples
| imagination, or the ability to perceive things beyond the
| immediate senses. Passively consuming electronic media does
| the heavy lifting that the literary mind achieves.
|
| > It's a bizarre kind of deja nostalgia - the only futures
| that can be imagined are the ones that have been imagined
| already.
|
| If we toss the word "capitalism" into the fray of what
| you're saying I think this is what Mark Fisher meant by the
| "Slow cancellation of the future".
| Izkata wrote:
| Possibly the idea is just too new / people who haven't
| seen it think it's just dunking on the young generation
| again. But for example there's an unexpected trend on
| social media just within the past month of a large amount
| of Gen Z not being able to read "third person omniscient"
| (a term I hadn't heard before but is pretty much just
| what it sounds like; from examples appears to be how all
| fiction I've read is written).
| jtwoodhouse wrote:
| "A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a
| caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which
| nurtured it. No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really
| smart person."
|
| -- Stephen King
| cubefox wrote:
| Sour grapes. I've read enough of Stephen King in my youth to
| know that he is a very skilled writer, but he only produced
| large amounts of popular genre literature. The literature
| equivalent of enjoyable but forgettable popcorn movies. He
| wasn't taken seriously by literature criticism because he
| didn't produce anything sophisticated.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if part of it is that culture is more fragmented. There
| is lot more of it and it is often in other mediums. Like say TV-
| series. So there is no need to read certain type of fiction to
| stay on top of the recent thing...
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I love how this article cuts right through a lot of bad trite
| explanations for literary fiction's decline that have been pushed
| by its adherents ("the internet made people stupid") to really
| try and analyze the supply side and demand side factors of why
| not many people buy contemporary literary fiction anymore.
|
| His point that people still read challenging literary fiction,
| just by dead people, also seems an important one (see HN's recent
| discussions of reading Ulysses) and rather damning for
| contemporary literary novelists. So is the point that many good
| writers who wanted to actually earn a living that way ended up
| writing for prestige TV in the 2000s instead.
|
| I do wish he'd discussed more why Sally Rooney seems to be the
| exception, in terms of commercial success. What is it about her
| books that's different? What did she do (or avoid doing) to
| appeal to a wide readership?
|
| Finally, he seems to draw a pretty hard boundary between literary
| and "genre" fiction that I'm not sure always exists. Ursula Le
| Guin is a good counterexample here.
| sitkack wrote:
| If someone likes Le Guin, they also like the writing of Toni
| Morrison. Morrison follows a more complex but similar abstract
| structure in her writing.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Iain M Banks is another example of "literary sci-fi" or
| whatever you want to call it.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Even the most challenging work of fiction wasn't challenging to
| an 18 year old contemporary reader of average intelligence. The
| fact that in order to appreciate these works in present day
| requires more intellectualism doesn't actually say anything
| about the works themselves.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Something hinted at in the essay is what I consider a funnel
| effect. If you have N people starting on some project, N/2 will
| get distracted after a while, some proportion of those who
| remain will just suck, some smaller proportion will be OK, and
| so on until you manage to find a few real geniuses. If you
| shrink the size of the funnel, you get less geniuses.
|
| An important part of having a large funnel is giving people a
| way to really spend their time doing the thing. For example,
| writing short stories for magazines was once a reasonable way
| to support yourself for a few years as a young writer, and led
| to a very large funnel. Take away that infrastructure for young
| writers, and you get a smaller funnel, and an attrition in
| quality of the best work.
|
| (Now, consider what happens 10-20 years after we stop hiring
| new grads for programming jobs...)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| People seem to forget that many of the books we find to be
| "literary" today were 1800s smut. These were commercial successes
| in their time, and weren't considered "highbrow," that was just
| what people read. Dismissing all of the books people read today
| as "genre" and not literary is the problem.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Interesting idea. Literary fiction never actually existed; it's
| an artificial construct.
|
| I'd really love some professors to analyze a furry solarpunk
| story I wrote and dig through the symbolism like Virginia Woolf
| wrote it.
|
| It would be interesting to see if a random internet dog's
| scribblings can provide just as much content for discussion.
| From what other people have told me, it does.
| api wrote:
| Literary is a genre. Like all genres it has its popular tropes,
| fandom, cliches, etc.
|
| A long time ago someone on a forum described a new lit fic book
| as a "TOBADNY" -- a "trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional
| New Yorkers." I LOLed and then realized this was totally the
| case and that this was a popular lit fic trope.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I don't know what could possibly make me read books. Reading is a
| chore, and not very efficient at the best of times. There's also
| the eye strain and the neck pain, and comfort in general. Best
| would be to read from bed, but bed is for sleepy time, a hard
| earned lesson.
|
| But that's just me. Here's why I think books are no longer being
| read in general.
|
| It's simply a format that time has moved on from. First came the
| radio, but radio wasn't gonna compete with books. Radio was
| succeeded by television though, and that sure could, but
| television is presently being succeeded by the internet, with TV
| companies desperate for any remaining attention, attention that
| they keep bleeding.
|
| All this time the format has failed to find a foothold, and carve
| out its stay. You may discover that this is not universally true
| across the world, such as in Japan, where light novels are
| decently popular. It has its own place, but in the Western world,
| the only reliable place books have is in the classroom. I
| stipulate that the reason you see a prominently female readership
| is for the same reason: girls are (were?) taught in school that
| they're the more artsy type, that humanities should interest them
| more, and so they proceed(ed) to take that on the chin. Fast
| forward a few decades, and there you go.
|
| The same applies for all other foregone forms of art. Theater?
| Opera? Ballet? Classical music performances? _You 'd have to pay
| or coerce me_ to attend these. Where I live, all the institutions
| hosting these are living off of government money, as they're
| simply unable to sustain themselves otherwise. People just don't
| care. The shows put on are basically live-action museum
| exhibitions. Although I guess even museums should be included in
| this list. Modern audiences are simply completely out of tune
| with these, they are an exercise in anachronism. And until the
| communities behind these continue to hammer in their formal
| position in art over their actual one, rather than try to connect
| with said modern audiences, this trend will continue. That is
| assuming such a connection is even possible still at this point.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Plenty of people still read and read a lot. I also have other
| hobbies, but I don't think it's going away. There are more
| books being published than ever before. There are also genres
| like science fiction and fantasy that are HUGE now and were
| once much smaller.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I mean happy for you, but that's a bit of a non sequitur,
| isn't it? The thread we're in is literally called "The
| cultural decline of literary fiction", and none of what you
| say is actually mutually exclusive with that.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| There are better ways to tell stories now; good story tellers are
| doing fine.
|
| The only ones left holding the bag are people who wanted
| specifically to be 'literary fiction writers' because they have
| some conception of what that is and why it's important to have a
| story physically printed on paper.
| unignorant wrote:
| I really enjoyed this article but the claim of no literary
| fiction making the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 lists since
| 2001 isn't really true:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...
|
| It is true that there isn't that _much_ literary stuff that
| breaks through, and the stuff that does is usually somewhat
| crossover (e.g., All the Light We Cannot See in 2015 or Song of
| Achilles in 2021) but it exists. These two books are shelved
| under literary codes (though also historical). Song of Achilles
| in particular is beautifully written and a personal favorite of
| mine, at least among books published in recent years.
|
| Then there are other works like Little Fires Everywhere and The
| Midnight Library that I might not consider super literary but
| nonetheless are also often considered so by book shops or
| libraries (e.g., https://lightsailed.com/catalog/book/the-
| midnight-library-a-... the lit fic code is FIC019000).
|
| I was really surprised that Ferrante's Neapolitan series, the
| best example (I would have thought) of recent work with both high
| literary acclaim and popular appeal, did not actually make the
| top 10 list for any year.
| cafard wrote:
| Is the author using Drury, Michener, and Morris West to beat up
| on 2023? I haven't read Colleen Hoover, but I have read the
| others, and they haven't made my must-reread list.
|
| Honestly, if one takes the best-seller lists of a few arbitrary
| years, one will find an awful lot of dross.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| I've been wanting to buy a copy of Flowers for Algernon. It's
| easy too, my local Barnes and Noble has it in stock. But it's $19
| (in paperback!) for a book published almost 60 years ago.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| To produce a good work of fiction its important to both 1) have a
| story to tell and 2) tell it masterfully.
|
| By the time people collect enough life experience to satisfy (1)
| they've aged out of the demographic that's willing to put in the
| work to learn (2). This is why great writers are and will always
| be rare. People who write slop in their 20s will either fail and
| give up or be a victim of their success and produce more slop to
| satisfy their audience.
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