Reading is selfish, elitist, and anti-social | Hacker News Reader

Reading is selfish, elitist, and anti-social

otherlife.co

40 pointsblueridge26 comments

The whole thing is an incoherent mess. Is there even an argument here?

> With a nearly photographic memory and a reading speed of 1,000 pages per hour (at his peak), Harold Bloom was the single most impressive literary critic of the late twentieth century.

16 pages per minute? Quarter of a page per second, like 5-6 sentences per second? The only thing you can "read" at this speed is perhaps low-end newspapers where you essentially skim through paragraphs.

Moreover the view of "reading" expressed in this article is quite unsophisticated. Higher-level reading is not about consumption at all, it is a creative process. The book is merely a trigger and guide to one's own thoughts. It is an input to think in a different way, to see the world with new eyes, and to transform one's life. To really understand what higher-order reading means, one can study the biographies of Newton. The man really knew what are books good for and how to use them. His is the finest example of scholarship aided thinking.

Another insightful view into the process of "reading" comes from Alan Kay [1].

[1]: https://docs.huihoo.com/smalltalk/The-Future-of-Reading-Depe...

> It is an input to think in a different way, to see the world with new eyes, and to transform one's life.

I.e. to do what most of the unwashed, non-reading masses aren't doing (elitism), absorb into onself (anti-social) and focus on self improvement (selfish).

The notion of speed reading kind of horrifies me. One of my favorite pleasures is slowing down to savor every phrase in a beautifully written chapter. To me, "speed reading" is right up there with "speed sex" on the list of skills I have zero desire to acquire.

I personally am not really into reading for savouring the prose, but even still speed reading seems dumb. I still need time to contemplate the ideas that the words are symbollically representing. Otherwise what is the point?

But, but, but how will you claim you read Moby Dick in under 55 minutes?

If one considers "reading" glancing at every 30th word for a blink of the eye, it seems a completely wasted effort if one doesn't stop to smell the roses and build a vision in their mind's eye by reading thoughtfully (no pun intended).

It's like the people who are always so busy yet have no time, and miss most details and skip enjoying the simple minutia that give sometimes authentic and believable depth to character, plot, and prose development. It's why most movies are bad: it's not the acting, but the script either lacks character development by not building the character as someone good to love or a dastardly villain, and real by specific foibles, idiosyncrasies and habits unrelated to the central plot. A spy movie where the main character flies a kite on the weekend without being on a stakeout, but then shares it with the kids and gives it to them as they're having so much fun.

Movies, books, and readers mission focused to skip to the end are as boring as people who make love like it's a race or a perfunctory ritual.

I wonder how that guy will manage an introductory calculus textbook, let alone subsequent topics like analysis. Talk about a difference in rigour.

Your first two sentences kinda describe the author i am afraid.

People who read to check item in their checklist probably care about reading speed. They are also missing the point tragically.

Do you per chance have some recommendations on where to start with Newton’s biography? The aspect you mentioned really interests me, but I may not be into reading through all his life.

There are more people than you think who can read close to that fast and it doesn’t mean you are skipping things. For some, reading creates a full immersion in an interior world that subsumes the words themselves. Also, in the mind, time scales can vary, like in a dream, and although you are reading quickly, your imagining does not feel that way. To focus solely on the holiness of the words themselves is often not the point or aim of a lot of great authors. They are a means to an end not the end itself.

I don't know why but I got stuck on the detail about his reading speed:

> With a nearly photographic memory and a reading speed of 1,000 pages per hour

The first couple sources I could find that had such estimates both listed ~250-300 as the estimate range for words-per-page in a novel.

That means he could read 250,000 words per hour on the low end, or ~4166 words per minute.

I had to convert to words per minute because that's the only metric I have reference for. From what I recall of a brief foray into speed-reading, most people rarely or never read over 300 wpm.

Did anyone ever test his reading speed? More broadly, is this actually possible? Are there other known individuals with 'photographic' (or closest equivalent) memory who can read that quickly?

Edit: Wikipedia[0], citing "The Manual.."[1] says that anything "faster than 900 wpm is not feasible given the limits set by the anatomy of the eye". But I'm still curious about whether there are exceptions.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Reading_and_c... (second from last paragraph of linked section)

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=cEFKjwEACAAJ&q=ultimate+st...

I wouldn't get too caught up in the numbers if that hinders an appreciation for the mind and work of Harold Bloom. However it might be quantified, you can hear him quote extensively from his extremely wide reading in interviews and conversations, and recite long poems from memory, but what he talks about and the way he talks about it is much more than that.

My kid, under than 10, can read at a sustain level of 200-300wpm, I can imagine someone reading at double the speed, but higher, that would be really crazy without skimming/for a first read.

> To conduct, in all sincerity, a study of Shakespeare, today, merely for personal edification, is to take for oneself knowledge, which, it turns out, cannot and will not be taken or absorbed by most people. Even when that knowledge is freely available and the government spends great sums of money in the attempt to spread that knowledge. [emphasis added]

Will not, yes. Cannot, no. Very silly oversight. Shakespeare isn't actually that hard to read, if you've got a good annotated copy. The issue is that a lot of people just aren't interested in reading something which, though obviously great in many senses, was not written for a modern audience and in many ways is less compelling than something fresher and more contemporary which you won't need a glossary to enjoy. And higher education is more common than ever—it's just that Shakespeare isn't a necessary part of that.

In framing this as a question of "democracy versus elitism," the author shows his hand. The modern era of prestige TV dramas in popular culture was ushered in by Breaking Bad, a show which was very popular and is easily defensible through any "elite" lens as a great work of art. Huge amounts of scholarly work have been written on the differences between high and low art, but within this article, the point of distinguishing between them is just to puff yourself up as a True Art Understander rather than to actually learn anything about the current media ecosystem or how general audiences interact with art.

Much as I like to critique popular art, the point of art is simply to move the audience. It's ridiculous to presuppose that canonical classics are necessarily the best and that any deviation from this orthodoxy by the general public is an intellectual deficit which betrays the ultimate failure of democracy. I'm not opposed to a bit of snobbishness, but this is ridiculous.

> Had Bloom himself sought to organize an educational return to the canon, outside of, or in opposition to, mainstream educational institutions, to pearl-clutching onlookers it very well could have had the vague whiff of a beer hall in Munich.

Is the article trying to imply that back in the day enjoying shakesphere would be seen as nazi-ish?

Maybe im not elitist enough to understand the reference, but i cant figure out what else that could be implying.

I mean i think this is the weirdest example of godwin's law i have ever seen.

Anyways, the quotes from bloom himself sound interesting but the article itself feels incoherent.

I didn't undestand, the elitist word was thrown a lot but ai still don't understand the meaning in the context of that article.

ragebait

The key sentence:

> A return to serious reading today is an “elitist” venture not because serious reading is necessarily reactionary or elitist, but because the twentieth-century attempt at the democratization of knowledge failed.

I would add that if that's the case, I would ask what it implies for the eventual success of the Protestant Reformation.

This is just a thinly veiled ploy to get some people to read by making it look cool.

Thanks, I was trying to find the the tldr

> "A childhood largely spent watching television yields to an adolescence with a computer, and the university receives a student unlikely to welcome the suggestion that we must endure our going hence even as our going hither: ripeness is all. Reading falls apart, and much of the self scatters with - Harold Bloom

okay, adolescence with a computer is a new phenomenon and not something to trivially assume that TV will lead to a habit without books... (you can read things and learn on the internet, too)

I figured before reading the article that they were going to be like "people who read books (and not the news) are distant, stuck up pricks", which would also have been false because good moral people can arise whether their media diet is of any combination of fiction, nonfiction, paper news, college courses, TV, social media, etc - it's not a guarantee that a book reading 40 year old is a saint, nor that a 20 year old with a smartphone is a demon.

Is it though?

Of course, asserting that reading can fix the world's problems would be naive at best. But it could help make it a more empathetic place. And a growing body of research has found that people who read fiction tend to better understand and share in the feelings of others — even those who are different from themselves.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-reading-fiction-in...

Maybe I am weird but I feel reading puts me more "in the story" then for example movies (some story-driven video games do so as well) so I imagine what it would be like to be them, experience their trials and tribulations, etc.

I thought about reading this, but I didn't want anyone to call me selfish, elitist, or anti-social.

Is this some appeal to being exactly equalized and homogenous proletariat?

all who stick their head up too high will have it bitten off? Yeah. Elitism is a different think from exploration and edification.

The surest way to read slowly is to be the author - having to write each word before it can be read is a severe natural limiter!

> Reading is selfish, elitist, and anti-social

but it's got some downsides too!

well, I would’ve read this post but I don’t wanna be selfish, so I guess I won’t.

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