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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3305 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Just a fun thought. There’s a notion that “great” contemporary “literature” ought to be appreciated along the same lines as older literature. The idea is that they are both approximately the same quality, one just happens to be newer. Hidden within this sentiment is perhaps the assumption that any time period and culture can produce literature of the same quality, you just have to find it. Why would one time period produce better literature?

But actually, a culmination of different factors led to 19th century literature culture and its great works. The culture was far more word-driven, with writing rather than imagery and speech being the primary method of communication. If you wanted to experience something far away you would read about it, and professing love to a girl far away would be done by letter. The tradition of Protestant Bible study gave birth to a rigorous study of Greek and Latin among the upper classes and an emphasis on grammar and rhetoric. Morality de-prioritized entertainment as a good unto itself and was skeptical of newspaper culture. The novel quickly became the method of massed produced artistic creation. If a young writerly man wanted fame, a hot wife, glory, and even his pick of concubines and a great state, he had to pen a novel which was then proclaimed as good by a class of well-trained critics and filtered through a moral and slightly religious lens.

So there’s very good reason to believe that no century will compete with late 18th to 19th century in the novel format. The men had more training, more cognitive capacity for the written word, more incentive, and a better filter through which literature was judged.

and professing love to a girl far away would be done by letter.

Does McSweeney's accept random submissions? I have an idea for a 19th century style letter to a girl that is just 500 words vividly and unashamedly describing my cock.

Go for it.

I'm skeptical that old literature actually is better than new literature. Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me, but it's low status to criticize them. In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame. How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?

You've written a plausible sounding story for with the 18th and 19th century produced better literary iron than the 20th or 21st. These factors are a rounding error to the fact that great literature was written by a tiny subset of the Western leisure class that didn't go for parties, hunting, politics, business, science, or surrogate activities; and the circles that judged their output were a self-congratulation society.

Many classics seem boring, bloated, and not that deep to me

You definitely have to watch out for the novels that were originally published in a paid by the word format.

In any objectively measurable art or science, or even arts that are technically subjective but kinda not like photorealistic painting, 21st century skill puts our predecessors to shame.

Yeah! There is always time for good Ancients vs Moderns cage fight!

So, is there some ancient knowledge we, proud 21st century people, lack?

Not lost literature, poetry and philosophy, not lost history, not top tier craft skills made obsolete by machines, but practical knowledge we could use and we just do not have?

Yes, there is lots we can still learn from as basic thing as ancient agricultural technologies.

For example - ancient fish farming. Coasts of ancient Mediterrannean and Atlantic were thickly covered with fish farm installations, better built and superior to our modern cage contraptions.

As far as history was concerned, ancient fish farming was seen as sign of luxury and degeneracy of Roman elite,if noticed at all.

For more see works of Geoffrey Kron about ancient agriculture and economy. He is as bullish on them as Lucio Russo is bullish on ancient science and mathematics.

TL;DR: Ancient agriculture was scientifically sound and extremely productive, and was superseded only with modern introduction of powered machinery and chemical fertilizers. 18th century agricultural revolution was based on revival of ancient methods. White man invented nothing than hate and racism.

Yes, Professor Kron is also die hard antiracist social justice activist, seeing side by side his denunciations of modern white racist capitalism and his praise of Roman Empire as land of freedom, equality, unlimited opportunity and world's highest standard of living

might be jarring, unless you are woke and enlightened enough to understand that racism is the worst thing in the world, and slavery is fine as long as you enslave people of all races and colors equally.

Sauce:

Ancient Fishing and Fish Farming

The most striking evidence for the importance of seafood in Greco-Roman culture comes from the remarkable development of ancient fish farming. Extensively described in the ancient sources (Varro, Rust. 3.17. 2-3; 3.17. 6-7; Columella, Rust. 8.17.12-3; 15; Pliny, H.N. 37.2), fish farming reached a high stage of technical perfection, developing techniques for spawning and rapidly raising to maturity a wide range of maritime species, including the common eel, conger eel, moray eel, several species of grey mullet, sea bass, gilthead seabream, red mullet, dentex, saddled seabream, shi drum, the angler or monkfish and the rhombus, most likely either sole or turbot, many proven highly suitable for cultivation, but only rarely farmed, or in small quantities, today (Higginbotham 1997: 41-53; Kron 2008a: 179). Freshwater ponds were even more common, so ubiquitous as to engender widespread indifference (Varro, Rust. 3.17.2-4), and fish remains suggestthat salmon, trout, carp, common bream, perch, tench, roach, and even the tilapia (Kron 2005a) were widely eaten, and many of these species very likely farmed (Kron forthcoming).

The techniques described and physical infrastructure uncovered by archaeologists are consistent with a level of technical sophistication and potential production not seen in modern Europe until the mid-1980s, with the rise of large scale sea-cage aquaculture of the grey mullet, sea bass and gilthead seabream, three of the most important ancient (and modern) farmed fish breeds. One cannot help being impressed by the number and size of the many massive hydraulic concrete fish tanks excavated along the Tyrrhenian coast (Kron 2008a: Figure 8.4), from Faleria in the North to Briatico in the South, as well as other fish-farming facilities discovered along the Adriatic, in Croatia, the French Riviera, Greece, Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Israel, and as far North as France's Atlantic coast, Germany, the Low Countries and England (Schmiedt 1972; Giacopini et al. 1994; Higginbotham 1997; Lafon 2001; Kron forthcoming). The fish tanks known to us along the Tyrrhenian coast alone represent a capacity for intensive fish farming production comparable to that of the Italian industry at the end of the 20th century.

Roman aquaculture: the techniques and agronomic importance of fish-farming in the light of modern research and practice

European aquaculture is only now beginning to farm a number of species long cultivated by the Romans, the result, one suspects, of low demand, rooted in a less adventurousness taste for sea food. Although the number of finfish species cultivated in Europe today has increased from 18 in 1981 to 40 in 2001, only 11 of these spe cies yield more than 1,000 metric tons (the product of a handful of small intensive farms) and only 5 (carp; tilapia; gilthead seabream;sea bass; trout) yield more than 10,000 tons.(34)

Even a superb foodfish like the turbot, farmed in Columella’s day, has only recently begun to be cultivated, and still yields only 4,338 metric tons per year (35). The moray eel, one of the most important of Roman farmed fish, (36) is not farmed at all today, despite its high quality and the limited supply available from capture fisheries (37). The Romans’ choices for farmed fish are all very good, and likely reflect considerable effort in testing suitable species. The sole, turbot, Gilthead seabream, striped red mullet, red mullet, European seabass, meager, anglerfish, and European eel are all ranked as excellent for taste by modern authorities (38) - and most are now beginning to be farmed (39) or have been highlighted as attractive prospects(40).

How coincidental is it that the only field where the old masters outclass us is one where the judgement is purely subjective?

Surely not coincidental, but there's a simple possible causative path: objective judgement lets us identify what characteristics of previous work were worth keeping, which lets us keep them while discarding others, which almost forces new work to be an improvement. Is it really surprising that the fields where we're making less improvement are also the ones where we're half-blindly groping?

I think the need for originality is also a constraint on new art. If you tweak the ideas behind "Light-Emitting Diode" to retain the functionality with a shorter-wavelength output, you can earn a Nobel Prize. But if you could tweak the ideas behind "War and Peace" to retain the impact with a shorter text, would you even bother? Perhaps your masterwork could be published as a Readers Digest Condensed Book under a pseudonym. This isn't because War and Peace was at some perfect local optimum of concision upon which no incremental improvement can be made, it's because the very idea of incremental improvement isn't necessarily considered an improvement in the world of literature; it's considered somewhere between "derivative" and "plagiarism" depending on how small the increment is and on how close to "the canon" the inspiration is.

The disparagement of derivative literature and incremental improvements on classic stories seems to me to be a quite modern development linked with the strengthening of copyright protections in the west. Early epics like the Odyssey were probably composed iteratively over many centuries and you can trace characters in Shakespeare's plays all the way back to Ovid. Our modern equivalents would be comic book and movie characters like Batman and the Joker, whose stories continue to be retold in (sometimes) new and exciting ways. Of course, it's still the case that the things that make one iteration of these stories better than another are less objective and more culture-dependent than something like mechanical engineering.

I imagine median people would consider the greatest achievements in architecture and painting to be from the past. With music too, many would place Mozart, Bach, Wagner, and Chopin above modern composers in their ability to express inexpressible things.

There is no objectively measurable art, apart from what people find truly beautiful and great and enriching. “Photorealistic painting”, the point of painting is not and has never been to obtain photorealism.

Yes a moral leisure class is probably necessary to create good novels but their works were consumed by much of the leisure class

Nope wasn’t self congratulatory, were many authors they did not like and whose works failed

There is no objectively measurable art

You're only thinking of aesthetic considerations. The craft of modern architects, designers, engineers, educators, bureaucratics, welders etc etc blow their premodern equivalents out of the water by any objectively measurable metric. Like, say, how much weight a bridge can support. How far an athlete can train themselves to throw a javelin. Only in totally subjective considerations is there even an argument to be had -- which I attribute to people's predisposition to ancestor worship and IAmVerySmart-signaling status games.

While I would say your point holds true for materials science, physics, and chemistry (though we didn't figure out how to make Roman concrete until earlier this year), I'm not sure what the objective measures are for architecture, design, and bureaucracy. Premodern homes built with a knowledge of the surrounding climate often require much less energy to heat in winter or cool in summer than modern homes, design seems by its nature concerned with aesthetics, and the recent growth in the number of administrators in just about every organization imaginable seems to have had no apparent benefits.

Yet, technological know-how is almost a separate domain of knowledge from ought-to. Artists don’t just show their technical skill, but they arrange things in a beautiful order.

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