I taught the Iliad to Chinese teenagers (2021)
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I grew up in Greece and we were taught the Iliad and the Odyssey at school. I didn't find them daunting. I liked reading them both, despite being extremely annoyed at the translation into Demotic Greek - a made-up, wooden language that nobody has ever spoken, nor will. I also couldn't stand the way the epics were taught, by literary "analysis" that bored every child out of their head.
But I liked the Iliad because it was basically more of the epic battles in the songs and movies I liked at the time: I listented to a lot of epic Metal and Connan the Barbarian was my favourite movie (with a soundtrack by Basil Poledouris that could easily have been written for the Iliad). And I liked the Odyssey because it was like the fantasy books I read and the games I played: a big adventure, with many monsters encountered along the way where the hero lost companions, rather than Hit Points, I guess.
All this came natural to me. I needed no "help to get there". I probably very much didn't get to any place a literature professor would want me to get. I decided that Achilles is a bloodthirsty assshole and fuck him and his μήνις, whereas Odysseus was a smart guy, an engineer, but one with a heart who guided him home, one of my childhood heroes [1].
But I think the ancient bards [2] would have been happy. They would have found the literary analysis boring and preferred the spontaneous enjoyment of a young child to a thousand eloquent analyses about the cultural value of their epics. What cultural value does an epic have, with monsters and warriors, if it can't get a teenager to be interested in it?
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[1] Together with Socrates and, er, Alexander. The Great - great butcher. What was I thinking?
[2] Yeah, I mean the people we collectively call "Homer".
For example, in parts of Iliad bronze is given as a valuable gift. In other parts, it’s thrown away on the heads of spears and arrows. So was it composed before or after the fall of the Bronze Age?
Likewise, some wedding have dowries, others have bride-prices. You can’t have both! But Homer has no problem going back and forth.
It’s almost like Homers trying to confuse future historians.
There’s actually a thesis that the Iliad was intended to be heard by clubs of war veterans on public holidays. The veterans would get the inside jokes, but the civilians would miss them.
The bride-price is a sort of contract of exclusivity payment from the groom's parents to the bride's parents, and the dowry is from the bride's parents to the groom/couple in order for the bride to have a certain level of life. They serve entirely different purposes.
There are actually three distinct concepts that can all occur within the same culture:
- the dowry is paid by the bride's family and can either go to the groom or the groom's family
- the bride price is paid by the groom's family and can either go to the bride or the bride's family
- the dower is paid by the groom or the groom's family to the bride
The dower specifically functions to protect the bride against poverty in the event the husband dies or becomes unfaithful or neglectful. The bride price or dowry can either function as payment for securing the bride/groom into wedlock or to fund the couple's new family.
The terms "bride price" and "dowry" seem to be only defined by who pays it and either can refer to something paid to the other side's family or to the newly wed couple. That distinction seems to be entirely down to the cultural attitudes.
IIRC there are even cultures where a bride price or dowry paid to the other side's family (as a form of "reimbursement" or "exclusivity payment" as you say) depends more on the relative status of each family, so a higher status family would be paid either way even if the amounts might differ due to the way inheritances are handled (e.g. if only the sons get to inherit their parents property, a son might be more valuable than a daughter). Keep in mind that marriages often also served to unite the two families/tribes/dynasties as a form of diplomacy.
Agamemnon is the leader of the Greeks, but he is of slightly lower social standing than Achilles.
He is the leader because he agreed to sacrifice his daughter to the gods to guarantee success victory in war, but this victory will only happen if Achilles joins him.
Agamemnon has tons of daughters and no sons. He is extremely willing to expend his daughters. This may or may not be because he doesn’t want to pay their dowries.
In return, Achilles must recognize Agamemnons kingship, and agree to follow orders.
Achilles knows from divine prophecy if he accepts Agamemnons offer he will die very soon, so he doesn’t really care. The marriage isn’t happening regardless.
But Achilles wants to join the battle, and die, for personal reasons (vengeance) unrelated to Agamemnon.
So the offer of “marriage with no bride price and full dowry” is just a sad pathetic joke.
It’s a way for Agamemnon to seem like he’s in control, and to remind the Greeks why he’s king - because he’s a narcissistic psychopath who will do necessary, but horrible things nobody else will do.
The distinction between bride price and dowry only serves to show Agamemnon is making up the rules and the whole thing is a farce.
I'm confused by what paradox do you see there - the most useful metal you can get always gets put on spears and arrows, it's not "throwing things away", it's the most important usage for high quality metal, and it is a valuable gift exactly because it allows you to make more or better spearheads and arrowheads. What would they be saving for otherwise? Shovels are important, but your spear is literally a matter of life and death and does get priority.
Also, it's not generally destroyed or discarded, all the valuable stuff does get picked up from battlefield afterwards.
And although of course the amounts of precious metals in modern hardware are minute compared to that in luxury jewelry, we still send that hardware scrap over to underdeveloped countries where the precious metals are extracted with great harm to health and lives. If anything, picking up the arrows, spears and swords off a battlefield is a much easier, safer and more rewarding process, making the use of precious bronze for those wares much less wasteful and frivolous.
Gold today is considered a valuable gift.
It is also consumed at 70 tonnes per quarter in the global consumer electronics sector, much of which is later discarded.
https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gol...
Both valued and wasted can be true for bronze as it is for gold.
Currently thats less than 20% of the electronic waste generated.
Annual e-waste generation:
The world generated 53.6 Mt of e-waste in 2019. That's an average of 7.3 kg per capita.
The amount of e-waste generated is expected to grow at about 3.5% per year and will reach 74.7 Mt by 2030.
E-waste recycling rate: In 2019 only 17.4% of the e-waste was collected and recycled.
* many HN comments strongly suggest that China is the sleeping enemy of the USofA (not my position, but it's a commonly held stance here).
* a great deal of US electronics is sourced from Chinese companies.
Is China gifting a country that considers China an enemy gold debris?
That also ignores that historically most battles weren't fought to the bloody end because there was no point to do so once it was clear who would come out victorious. More likely, at some point the nobles would retreat or surrender and the common folk would be routed and flee to avoid being massacred.
Even as late as WW1 soldiers would often be hesitant to kill their enemies because as it turns out killing other humans actually goes against our nature. Even in WW2 German soldiers and reserve police officers tasked with carrying out massacres had to rely on peer pressure and self-deception (i.e. trying to rationalize their actions as morally good[0]). It took us decades to refine the process of dehumanization that now allows modern soldiers to calmly wipe out dozens or hundreds of targets at the push of a button.
Also with trained professional soldiers in ancient times the cost of a single soldier would easily rival or even outclass the cost of their equipment. And on the occasion that common folk would have military-grade gear available to them it would more likely be a prized artifact passed down across generations.
[0]: There's one account of a German reserve police officer who participated in the massacres in Poland and specifically asked his comrades that he would kill the children but only after they would first kill their mothers because then he would be doing the children a favor because they could not go on living after seeing their mothers killed. Yes, it's twisted logic and ethically despicable but it served him to rationalize his cruel actions as a moral good and remain the hero of his own story. In fact, after the war many of them would be appalled at being considered war criminals rather that victims of injustice for having "had to" commit the massacres despite there being no formal or legal consequences to not participating. Those refusing to participate would be considered "traitors" by their comrades for "not sharing the burden" but not face any form of punishment.
Just to be clear, I grew up reading Katharevousa because my family was right-leaning and my father considered Katharevousa to be a "correct" Greek, closer to the ancient Greek. Which of the ancient Greek dialects, I never asked, but that was also a fake, made-up, politically-motivated langauge that nobody spoke in everyday life, and never will.
There are plenty of very silly people in Greece that carry around unrealistic ideas about what "proper Greek" means, for example I've seen folks use the polytonic system in internet posts, which uses accents inherited from Koine Greek meant to teach barbarians proper Gerek pronounciation... that we no longer use.
It's all a bit like the French Academy's attempt to control how French is spoken: a futile, misguided and ill-thought out attempt, entirely politically motivated, that will never work. Ηuman language is an expression of the freedom of the human spirit and no idiot can control it, try as they might.
Btw, this is the translation of the Iliad I was taught at school:
https://www.alfavita.gr/sites/default/files/attachments/omir...
And here's a short excerpt (my transcription, and [sic]'s)):
Του Δία και της Λητώς τους έσπρωξεν [sic] ο γιος που με το ρήγα [sic]
χολιάζοντας [sic] κακιά εξεσήκωσεν [sic] αρρώστια και πέθαιναν [sic]
στρατός πολύς' τι [sic] δε σεβάστηκεν [sic] ο γιος [sic[ του Ατρεά το Χρύση,
του θεού το λειτουργό· στ' Αργίτικα γοργά καράβια είχε έρθει
με λύτρα αρίφνητα [sic], την κόρη του να ξαγοράσει πίσω [sic],
του μακροσαγιτάρη [sic] Απόλλωνα κρατώντας τα στεφάνια
πα [sic] στο χρυσό ραβδί, και πρόσπεφτε μπρος στους Αγίτες όλους,
ξεχωριστά στους δυο πολέμαρχους υγιους [sic] του Ατρέα γυρνώντας"
There was an older version by Iakovos Polylas, in katharevousa, or katharevousa-like demotic, not sure. I think the two books have been used interchangeably at differen times. Why? Why can't we have an ordinary, easy-to-read translation for school kids? Is it any wonder they prefer to watch One Piece and read Spider Μan than this incomprehensible nonsense?
I grew up in Texas and we covered the Illiad and Odyssey in High School.
There was a series of youth entertainment books that retold the stories, that were very widely read. Think Lord of the Rings, but kids would then talk of Achilles instead of Aragorn. Fallen out of favor I think, because the good/evil dichotomy, where it appeared, was almost as seeped in racist ideas as in LotR, just without being able to hide behind "yeah, this is middle earth, where wildly different hominid species just exist and look how good some of them can get along anyways"
In the French translation I have, the translator mentions that "wrath" is used once or so in the book, only to describe Zeus's behavior.
I believe the key is to interpret the text in a theistic setting: it's not "rage" in the human sense: Agamemnon is going against Apollo by disrespecting his priest, Achilles helps Agamemnon to solve the issue, and instead of being thankful, Agamemnon punishes Achilles.
Achilles would have slayed him, but he didn't because Athena told him not to.
That's a key difference between Agamemnon and Achilles: the latter is much more respectful of the Gods than the other. In theistic societies, you don't pick heretical heroes.
Agamemnon is motivated by this blind human rage when he punishes Achilles. Achilles isn't.
I believe we could make similar comments regarding the act of killing back then: in a setting where people firmly believe in immortality of the soul, the moral rules are probably way different that in today's essentially atheistic setting.
It's the very first word of the very first verse:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
[The rage] [sing] [goddess] [of Peleus' son] [Achilles]
It really is all about Achilles having a hissy fit, throwing a tantrum, stamping his little feet, chucking his toys out of the pram and holding his breath until he's blue in the face. The analysis of the translator in your book is over-engineered, I would say.
Let me rephrase this: the observation is the translator's; the analysis is mine.
Why would anyone chose to celebrate so highly such a childish behavior? That's preposterous. People weren't stupid. Teaching people to show respect to virtuous people, I barely see how over-engineered of an interpretation this is: it's basic common sense.
Many Greek myths and legends have similar themes: Icarus, Phaethon, Arachne, anyone who put on airs and defied the gods, or acted above their station.
I believe those myths, like the Bible's and others, were used in part to teach people a few basic things, so as to ensure some amount of social stability, hence allowing societies to persist.
"Controlling the masses via fear and tall tales" is unfortunately too common of a caricature: we're probably making a sizable mistake by discarding them, and replacing them with whatever's trending on TikTok, or whoever's agendas.
For example, the definition of "courage" exemplified by Herakles's behavior has nothing to do with the "courage" of a man showing off his breast implants on TV: using the same word to qualify both behaviors is ill-suited (regardless of any opinions, positive or negative, on the latter case; I'm merely pointing that distinct words would be more appropriate to qualify fundamentally distinct behaviors) (it's a real example, but I won't be able to source it).
You can get quite a few good bedtime stories out of it, if you tone down the gore so the kids don't get nightmares - Circe, Polyphemus, Aeolus, Scylla and Charybdis, the sirens, the Trojan horse ...
May I suggest this? https://garethhinds.com/wp/the-odyssey/
Excellent graphic novel adaptation. The gore is mostly a set of a dozen pages towards the end, when Odysseus kills the suitors, that can easily be skipped.
20 years later I’m in grad school and I meet some classicists. It seems basically every one of them had that book as a kid. Maybe I missed my calling
I grew up in India and we studied abridged versions of the Illiad and Odessy in high school. I have a hard time believing that people actually think these epics are boring.
The Iliad is particularly challenging when we project our current values back onto this ancient story. If we can suspend that, it contains timeless human questions, particularly on the role of fate and the forces that drive us. I feel that we lose the thread if we focus too much on whether the characters are likable.
Also, why are you so certain that the bards would have found the analysis boring? Truly great works can operate on multiple levels.
From this myth-busting movie review (sorry not in English I should probably make a translation) at 17:45
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_...
What about Sumerian or Chinese history makes the book "bullshit" according to you?
I think Jaynes' actually seems to argue for consciousness as a cultural construct. While this makes sense in a way, it largely conflicts with how consciousness is commonly understood, especially in the context of moral, ethical or religious arguments.
I'm also not sure to what degree the "bicameral mind" would have been a universal experience. While self-talk is extremely understudied we now at least know that some people have inner dialogues (which we usually consider a form of hallucination or schizophrenia), most have inner monologues and some have no active inner voice whatsoever (if we ignore subvocalizations and only focus on internal "thought"). In religious contexts we still often treat ancient stories of people "hearing the gods" at face value even if it is no longer culturally acceptable to claim the same today (i.e. you'd rightfully be considered to be suffering from hallucinations). I'm unconvinced the examples Jaynes gives are more than just artifacts of cultures that treated hallucinations as a meaningful part of the human experience the same way some cultures (including people as recent as Freud and Jung) treat dreams as meaningful parts of the human experience or religious practice.
Also externalization of intrusive thoughts or emotions is actually part of therapeutical approaches to disorders like depression. Even meditation and mindfulness often involves viewing the inner mind as a detached observer. I'm not convinced attributing these uncontrolled experiences to an internal "id" (with full acknowledgement of the caveats that come with referring to Freud in the context of modern psychology) is much more sophisticated than attributing them to external "gods" or demons. So in a way the "bicameral mind" still seems to exist, except that we have changed our cultural narrative around it to one that favors the fiction of individual responsibility over the fiction of supernatural forces outside our control.
I think the only reason the book has been so influential is that people misread the argument as an evolutionary one rather than a cultural one and conflate Jaynes' meaning of the word "consciousness" with the popular and religious concepts of it. I also think this mistake is particularly appealing to those already looking for reasons to justify treating "Europeans" (i.e. white people) as biologically superior to others as it neatly fits into the colonial era racist idea of the "industrious Asians" only being intellectually superior by having a "hive mind" mentality and being individually empty and lacking original thought (and likewise Black people being too primitive for complex thought and thus stronger and more violent). I'm not saying Jaynes would agree with any of these ideas, I'm just saying people looking to justify these ideas (whether or not they're willing to openly state them in public) will happily misinterpret Jaynes' work to do so.
Which of the warriors were not bloodthirsty? Ajax, for example, was not bloodthirsty, who stood strong with his shield and without the help of the gods, a defensive bullwark for the Acheans. Hector, was not bloodthristy, who was just trying to defend his city and his people from the calamity brought on by his idiot brother who couldn't keep it in his pants. Aeneas was not bloodthirsty, who escaped the burning Troy to found Rome. Patroklus was not bloodthirsty but was just trying to save his friend's honour (by killing people, no doubt, but in the middle of a war).
Achilles killed Hector and dragged his dead body behind his chariot to desecrate it. He refused to hand it over to Priam, Hector's father, the king of Troy, when he, an old man, came begging on his knees in grief asking for Achilles to do the right thing by the gods. Achilles was an asshole. It is a disgrace that an entire epic poem was written for his "rage". Screw his rage.
Edit: remember also that Achilles was the only one of the Achean lords that didn't have to fight, because he hadn't taken the oath at Menelaus' and Helen's wedding (he was living as a girl at the time). He accepted the invitation to go to the war for glory- the glory of killing men. What a glory. Unlike the rest, he did not leave behind wife and children, and loyal dogs and slaves, because he had none to leave (though he did have a wife, I think). Not to mention: he was invulnerable (mostly) so he could cover himself in guts and glory without fear. Yeah, what a great hero.
There's a lot of mythology around the Iliad and you're probably right and I just don't remember it.
All that being said, I think the larger concept is that one of the foundations of Western civ has found a way to be presented to Students and children of Eastern civ.
What about the other way around? I know that in university I had to specifically seek out Eastern civ courses qualified for my major. 20+ years later I find them perpetually a source of knowledge and inspiration when trying to understand modern geopolitics.
The Illiad, Beowolf, and other foundations of Western Civilization are no doubt important, but they are only part of the pantheon of modern global civilization for which classics like "Journey to the West" and the tales of the travels of Ibn Battuta are part of.
These stories have provided an important framework I have enjoyed when I'm trying to interpret what's happening in the world, and have helped me numerous times in building bridges with my fellow humans from across my planet.
Despite being a graduate of a world class Computer Science program, I am more proud that I know of the importance of Mansa Musa, Qin Shi Huang, Salah ad-Din, Shaka Zulu, and other global rulers were and the time spent considering the civilizations they came from.
I can only imagine being a Chinese teen, learning about the Iliad for the first time. It would be like learning who Hanuman and other legendary Eastern Asian heroes are. I wish that these legends were taught to Western students as mandatory. I had to learn "Foundations of Western Civ" in school, but I would have found "Foundations of Eastern Civ" just as enlightening.
In fact, I suspect that more people in the West have read the Tao Te Ching or The Art of War than the Iliad, by quite a margin (if only because of the difference in length). The former two are certainly much more common to see in bookstores than the latter.
Also, I'm not sure whether Beowulf should be counted among the "foundations of Western Civilization". It's very rarely read outside the Anglosphere, and even there its importance is primarily linguistic.
The peer of the Illiad from a different culture would be the Jewish sacred books. And both, together with Theogony, are derivative of traditions that stretch two more millennia to Enuma Anu Enlil and Gilgamesh.
So it’s around the same time as the art of war and Tao te Ching.
It would be interesting to find out. My East Asian POV is adopted from a Korean direction. My wife and all of her siblings studied Journey to the West, and a few Chinese classics, as well as the Greek epics and Beowulf in grade school.
My personal anecdote is that I had heard of the Confucian classics in history class, and seen the Art of War mentioned in mid-80s Western media as a "tips for business" fad. I had never heard of Journey to the West, or the Tao Te Ching or I Ching until I was well into adulthood in the late 90s.
> Also, I'm not sure whether Beowulf should be counted among the "foundations of Western Civilization". It's very rarely read outside the Anglosphere, and even there its importance is primarily linguistic.
I think many historians would disagree with you. It's cited as the first written work in an ancient English dialect and has been taught to billions of school children, and while in the dialect of the scribes who recorded it, it's well understood to represent northern Germanic people, places, and events, and captures a key historic period of the transitional period of Christianization of those people that predates many other records by hundreds of years, such as those produced by the court of Charlemagne.
Unless of course you don't think the Anglosphere or Germanic peoples have contributed anything to the formulation of Western Civilization and it's just a weird coincidence that it's assumed in most places in the world that when they see a Westerner, they assume they speak English on some level. Bah, no contribution of any kind.
Even Lazarillo from Tormes has a more caustic and Western shaping anti-epic than Beowulf, as it depicts a cynical and treacherous society where even the old literal blind outsmarts the rogue kid.
Agreed. Due to colonial history, the entirety of "Western Education" has a decidedly "European" slant. "Eastern Civilizations" are covered only as much as they are "Exotic". But in this current day and age History needs to taught in a truly "Global" manner.
Love the boldness and clarity here. Whenever a classic movie is showing in the theaters that my wife has not seen, I tell her "we gotta watch this." It's not that I even enjoy or think of these movies as my favorites. It's that there is something in the movie that might stick with her and change her (and me).
Wikis for those not familiar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Fear https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_Plane
This was written by someone who hasn't seriously engaged in reading novels lol
Novels have been doing this sort of thing on a pretty deep level since basically their inception, and in more modern contexts no movie could replicate something like Pale Fire or Gravity's Rainbow for example. Self-referentiality is also a pretty boring trick after awhile, self-awareness and referentiality are very juvenile creative traits that often (not always) are seeking some sort of pat on the back for the mere act of referentiality itself.
These things should be starting points, not the focus of an entire work unless there's a broader point to be made. Fredric Jameson has written a great deal about this sort of thing, it's basically the default position of culture in a lot of ways now, there's nothing inherently exciting about it.
This isn't to say one medium is superior to the other or anything, I just find it to be a very weird critique of "mere" novels when self-referentiality goes way deeper there, the only things I can really think of that come close are 8 1/2 or maybe some of Charlie Kaufman's work like Adaptation.
There are of course exceptions. Famously, Palahniuk has said the Fight Club film captured his intent better than his novel did. I also think film of The English Patient, which covers only a tiny section of what I consider a forgettable novel, is quite good, but even if you disagree I think almost anyone would say the film is better. And of course plenty of films aren't novel adaptations.
Regardless, if you're looking for a "story that could change my life" you're likely to get much more from the text than the adaptation. The strengths and weaknesses of the two media are just too different.
Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time (although I could do with less onscreen fighting). It was (to me) part of a cosmic trilogy of movies ending the millennium:
* Fight Club
* American Beauty
* The Matrix
It was a wild semester.
So, if "it's weird that I didn't remember it at all one day later" counts as something that sticks with me and changes me, then yeah, I guess so?
Willing to consider that maybe it's just old age and cognitive decline, but I feel something is just off about a lot of recent movies.
I fell asleep halfway through the movie and I tried my best to stay awake, even after my friends woke me up. The most interesting parts of the movie existed in the real-world plot but the movie kept running away from it. Even then, all universes (real-world included) had cringe-worthy levels of cliché metanarrative. It was a chore to make it to the end.
It's even worse that any criticism of the movie was actively shut down and nothing negative about it could be found online. If you did find a shred of criticism, viewers either accused you of ignorance, unappreciative of art, or racism.
I liked the actors playing the parents. I thought Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan were good in the real-life scenes.
Now don't get me wrong, it's a fun flick and I'm genuinely glad for the three actors that won an Oscar (bless 'em), but it seemed like fan service from a waning institution trying to generate goodwill more than cinematic mastery from anyone involved.
The film is slightly better than a super bowl Pepsi commercial. There was nothing in this film that was any better than recent Marvel films, and none of them deserve awards for basic stories, basic dialogue and a lot of flashing lights and "multiverse".
We all love googly eyes, but that's not enough to carry a film.
I find the same to be true regardless of topic, the cars or tools of decades past that have survived often have great reputations, because they were built to survive. Those that weren't, have been forgotten.
There's also less shared context. E.g. I firmly believe that a lot of our memories of a lot of the media we've consumed in the past is down to conversations about it reinforcing it as much as the initial memory.
But then you have e.g. Avatar where at best you remember "I see you" and... nothing else, besides high level things like blue aliens and jungles, because there's no memes. That was the weird thing about Avatar, one of the highest grossing films of all time, but nobody talks about it.
- mecha-zombie palpatine
- a daft-punk sniper lady
- a crazy sith-goth-senate
- lightsaber fight on some craggy rocks in the water
- a big bad spaceship (I think)
All you need to really appreciate the genius of the film is to day-drink 2/3 a bottle of single malt then nurse a double of black label during the movie to keep the buzz going.
> All you need to really appreciate the genius of the film is to day-drink 2/3 a bottle of single malt
It ends up becoming an example of The Emperor's New clothes, where it's been decided ahead of time that if a layman disagrees, it's merely a sign of ignorance.
But if I had to read it for school? I would have hated it.
If you really understand a piece of media, understand what the author is trying to accomplish, what choices are being made narratively and stylistically, what narrative tradition the author is consciously or unconsciously following, etc., then you should have a pretty good idea of who this work would appeal to and who it wouldn't appeal to.
If someone comes away from a classic with the mindset "everyone should like this if they're smart enough/presented with it in the right way", it suggests they have a very shallow understanding of the classic.
Shouldn't really expect that a movie (or a book, or a scroll) from 50 years ago or 5000 miles away is speaking to the modern local audience. The world is diverse and it changes.
> Does this not apply to any film?
Most films are bad, so "any film" definitely includes bad films.
Lapsed after AOTC, but, still, quite a fan. I definitely don’t hate Star Wars.
I’d rank The Last Jedi as the 3rd best Star Wars movie and my 4th favorite. I was very surprised at the Internet reaction to it—came out of the theater like “oh wow, that was kinda almost good, people will be so happy!” LOL.
Luke was an “older brother” to me; seeing him changed from the epitome of hope to a milk-drinking murderer was repugnant—a betrayal. Not just bad but insulting too. The “Yoda” impersonator insults the Jedi books. Hamill said as much before he was shut up.
I agreed with vito for the most part: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5ECwhB21Pnk
But now, 20 years later the movies are still very much in people's minds, they get memed, their actors make (re)appearances in contemporary Star Wars related productions etc. So they must've done something right?
The Last Jedi made perfect sense for what it was meant to be in the context of its trilogy. Yes, it had many faults but that is hardly a new thing for a Star Wars movie (except enough time has passed since the prequels that the kind of people complaining TLJ was "too woke" are more than likely to find reasons to argue that the prequels were actually great because they're comfortable handwaving their many weaknesses).
Most fans expected "another Star Wars adventure" following the common formula seen in so much Star Wars media: a chosen one finding their hidden power and overcoming obstacles to come out on top at the end with maybe a hint at a greater evil to be defeated the next time around. But that's not the story of a second movie in a Star Wars trilogy, that's the story of any episode in an episodic TV show. Trilogies have narrative arcs. And the second movie in a Star Wars trilogy is where The Empire Strikes Back, the mentor dies to give way to the underprepared hero, evil triumphs and all hope seems lost.
The movie did that. Luke Skywalker stalled the big bad long enough to give the unprepared Rey a chance to escape as he sacrificed himself the same way Obi Wan stalled Vader before allowing himself to be struck down. The rebels were decimated and forced to flee and regroup. All of this was very much beat-by-beat what The Empire Strikes Back did before.
But it was also a new movie in a new trilogy and it had to carry the universe forward rather than merely rehash what had been done before. The first trilogy had given many the idea that Jedi powers were entirely tied to bloodline, like a royal claim to the throne. The second had expanded on this with literal blood tests for Jedi powers, showing the Jedi to take kids with the right blood results out of their families to raise them under their watch and then demonstrating the futility and pointlessness of this approach as Anakin single-handedly murders all the younglings and wipes out most of the Jedis. It also showed the Jedi system as being contradictory and too obsessed with regulations while being not only incapable to defend its own but also mostly disinterested in preventing the rise of the Empire by eschewing politics.
The third trilogy allowed a fresh take on the Jedis: Luke's attempt to recreate the system that had allowed his father to become Darth Vader failed again by bringing forth Kylo Ren, his own fear of failure ruining any chance to save Kylo Ren from turning to the Dark Side. Meanwhile Rey, like Anakin a complete nobody with no noteworthy lineage, turned out to be uniquely talented with the force, punching above her weight even when confronted with the "classically trained" (but lacking serious guidance now completely undisciplined) Kylo Ren at least long enough to survive the outmatched encounter in the first movie.
The second movie of the new trilogy did what had to be done: Luke realizes the folly of trying to adhere strictly to the sacred texts and destroys them. Yes, this was not strictly necessary but the act was primarily symbolic as we hadn't directly seen much of them before: as Luke had to learn and Yoda tried to teach him before, being a Jedi was not about learning from books and only doing the right thing but about failure and confronting your fears and weaknesses not to simply defeat them but to learn from them. This is why Anakin fell for the dark side and why Luke failed to save Kylo Ren: rather than learn to acknowledge his fear and to see failure as an opportunity for growth, the fear had corrupted them. This is also why the ending scene with random kids using the force mattered: yes, it was very much on the nose but the point was that the force does not spring from the Jedi's sacred texts, the force comes from within and becoming a Jedi means growing as a person, not just getting better at using the force.
But that would have meant allowing Star Wars to evolve and that's not what many fans wanted, especially not when they were so deeply afraid of "politics" entering their allegory for a communist rebellion defeating the overwhelming American empire - err, sorry, I meant very serious apolitical sci-fi franchise. After all, they were already being forced into uncomfortable conversations about rooting for the genocidal ethnostate (not an ethnostate! they stopped using clones some time in the original trilogy but also it's woke identity politics that the storm trooper defector had to be played by a Black guy) wearing the sci-fi equivalent of Waffen-SS uniforms (there we go again calling everyone you don't like a nazi).
If you paid attention, the original trilogy was always more about the triumph of compassion over brute force and of friendship overcoming what a lone individual can not. Luke being potentially the most powerful force user would have meant nothing if he wouldn't have had Uncle Ben and Yoda helping him master his potential, his friends give him the emotional strength to continue and the rebels (and Ewoks) give him the opportunity to challenge Vader - and then Anakin's suffocated love for his own child winning against the Emperor's conditioning and allowing him to save Luke and defeat the Emperor.
And then Skywalker came out and threw all of that away in order to give us more slop and even bring back the Emperor so we could have a big fight scene with Kylo Ren randomly deciding to switch sides. Even if you disliked TLJ for the blue-haired girlboss blueballing our fighter hero or the Asian chick getting too much screentime or Luke being a pacifist or the gambling planet being a socialist soapbox or whatever complaint about politics you want to level at it, I challenge you to defend Rise of the Skywalker as a dignified Star Wars sequel rather than a hurriedly strewn together fan service shlock fest that completely flies in the face of both the trilogy and the larger narrative and thematic arcs altogether.
Sorry for ranting. I'll now step off my soap box again.
As a modern viewer you won't get much more from Romeo and Juliet than from the Titanic.
In that respect, randomly sampling movies is underrated and should be the go to if you're trying to change your life.
I’ve shown quite a few people citizen Kane and, aside from a musing discomfort at the parallels of post modern trump like media manipulation (FRAUD), it really doesn’t resonate with people nearly as much as, say, Parasite, despite them probably being culturally closer to Kane.
Tl;dr if you’re going to show someone a “life changing film” pick something new that is similarly ambitious. Classics require too much effort to enjoy. It often doesn’t work.
The day when the project would lose its luster was always coming - as anyone who knows the history of Hollywood westerns and action flicks and blaxploitation could tell you - and you may gloat now that it's arrived. However, for a shining moment, literally billions of people had something special to share, and no amount of elitist posturing can take away from it.
(Citizen Kane's cool, too, of course. Gave us that clap meme and a baller Simpson's episode.)
That's more of a parlor trick than art. "See how much simplistic comic book storytelling randomness I can fit in 30+ movies, and even live room for 70% of it be explosions and fight scenes".
>it was an unprecedented undertaking involving the hard work of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of talented artists and technicians across the globe
"Talented" is begging the question.
IMNSHO, not only is the writing, acting, and directing mediocre by-the-numbers blockbuster crap, but even what they supposedly do best (the special effects and fights and such) are shodilly made.
There are movies made from comics that are worth a damn cinematically (Logan, Sin City, Watchmen, Constantine) but 99% of MCU is not in that set.
The legacy of the films—technical achievements, continuity and coherence of narrative, ambition, etc.—are laudatory in some respects. Obviously, they made an enormous amount of money. But it's worth examining their "critical" success. Putting my personal opinions aside, do any of these films hold up to the standard bearers of early 90s and 00s blockbusters? I'm not convinced.
The MCU films are inherently derivative works with little dramatic tension; we already know the characters and that they will win. The narrative and dialogue is paint-by-numbers, and the action sequences are exhausting, low-stakes, and sterile.
That's fine for a theme park ride—get some thrills if that's your cup of tea—but it's not enough for a critically good blockbuster film. That's fine for teen boys and young adults, but it's not enough for a more diverse, discerning audience. Does anyone think any of these films, let alone their entirety, hold a candle to Jurassic Park, The Matrix, or The Pirates of the Caribbean? They're equally blockbusters, but they will be remembered long after the MCU films are forgotten.
Just imagine what those artists could have accomplished working in the service of an artistic vision instead of churning out corporate slop.
Live action super hero dramas started with Superman and reached maturity in Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies. Highlights are Robocop and Unbreakable (throw a Batman adaptation in there, probably The Dark Knight). By the time the MCU rolled around, the genre was well past middle age. Despite billions of dollars of life support, it will be remembered as the last tortured breaths of a somewhat embarrassing cultural episode.
It feels like it's getting harder to do something new.
And my answer is: not exactly, it applies best to movies that are not "mainstream blockbuster trash".
I'm pretty sure we can find some people for which some of the 200 movies in the Avengers franchize resonated with them and changed their life. Especially since billions saw them (and unprobable events will tend to happen as the sample size grows). After all, Hallmark movies also resonate with many people. And in the right conditions, say our dog just died, they can make even the more cynical of us cry.
But generally, better movies have that quality more. This is what makes the better in the first place: touching on some essential aspect of humanity in a non-trite way. Doesn't have to be classics as in "old movies favored by critics", just generally movies made with more vision, integrity, and core message than "look 2 hours of explosions and fancy effects mixed with reshased cookie cutter dialog", or "look at these two cute young people fall in love, have a falling out, and getting back again") will tend to resonate with people more deeply and in more nuanced ways.
The context of the Iliad, ancient Greece, is completely alien to the modern US, just as it is to modern China. A Chinese language translation would be just as valid. Modern Americans and Chinese have far more in common with each other, of course.
The only argument is that many modern English words have ancient Greek roots, but that just makes the Chinese translator's job harder.
I'm not sure about that. We do not still have the same emphasis on the classics as a century ago, but western societies still inherit a lot culturally from ancient Greece.
Here in Canada, I was taught Greek mythology in school. We examined a play by Sophocles in high school literature. Civics class inevitably brings up Athenian democracy. Philosophy began with Thales. Music began with Pythagoras.
Or to put it another way: the Simpsons once did a parody of the Odyssey. That only works if the audience knows the story of Odysseus. Which of course, they do. Most westerners know it, implicitly, in much the same way the average Chinese person knows Water Margin even if they've never read it.
Let's not conflate (and I failed to differentiate) Ancient Greece and 'Classical' Greece. The Odyssey and Iliad are older than Classical Greece, the term I'm using for the world of the philosophers, mathematicians, playwrights, etc. I understand that that the two works were core texts for the Classical Greeks, but my impression is that they were from prior 'civilization' (maybe not the perfect term), perhaps like Beowulf is to people in the modern anglo world.
The world of the Ancient Greeks is completely alien to ours, IMHO. Its culture, morality, behavior, customs, etc. are all so different that all we have in common with it as what any humans have in common. Read the Odyssey from a modern perspective - it's bizarre, inexplicable in modern context. For example, Odysseus is a complete failure as a person, a leader, a spouse - he only survives and accomplishes anything because Athena bails him out. The only way to understand it is to try to grasp the Ancient Greek context, where it does make sense. That makes it very interesting and valuable, but it's alien.
Still, I overstated my point in the GP. Alien or not, it is part of our culture, even if mostly indirectly - generations have read it, have been influenced by it, and what it influenced was passed down to us, and we pass it to the next generation. There's no question of that.
> We examined a play by Sophocles in high school literature. Civics class inevitably brings up Athenian democracy. Philosophy began with Thales. Music began with Pythagoras.
That's 'Classical' Greece.
Homer is a fairly core part of western culture and you see references to it everywhere. Somewhat famously in O Brother Where Art There, but there's a long list of movies and novels that have referenced it. And idioms from it like "a Trojan horse" and "achilles heel" are all over western culture. It's not a biblical-level cultural touch stone, but it's fairly important.
Greek culture is everywhere in the English speaking world, they are very much one of the primary influential ancestors of our culture in a way that it absolutely is not in the Chinese speaking world.
I was taught Greek mythology in grade school, read the Odyssey and Iliad in middle school English, Antigone and Oedipus Rex in high school, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was a recurring theme in some college courses but that's a bit specific. Our philosophy courses in highschool and college started with Plato.
And within larger culture, there was the animated film Hercules, the Percy Jackson novels, and a broadway musical based on Orpheus and Eurydice that swept the Tony awards in the last twenty years.
American culture is obsessed with ancient Greece and its stories.
Because it’s so damned cool. I’ll never understand how Abrahamic religions won the “war” over Greek/Roman gods. Plus a pantheon makes sense - trying to explain away babies born with cancer is pretty hard in Abrahamic religions. Not so much when you have various gods that don’t really care about you and just do their own thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(disambiguation)#United_S...
I also learned that some people can recite the entire book from memory which was my first realization of “100x” myth.
I don't know about memorising translations, but the Iliad was composed specifically so it could be memorised, and it was long repeated (even in competition form!) before it was ever written down. The Greek original follows a strict dactylic hexameter with rhymes and other tricks to make it easier to memorize.
It's crazy to think in a world of writing that back then people memorised entire books/songs/poems like the Iliad instead of simply reading a copy. It makes sense, in a way; copying such a long text would take ages, especially with writing implements at the time, but I'm still amazed by the dedication these ancient people had.
Don't expect the full version on Youtube, though; the 24 books seem to all take an hour of each, and I don't think anyone has cared to spend a full day reading ancient Greek into a microphone yet, let alone recite it for an audience.
Unfortunately, I can't really find an audiobook version of the English translation of the Iliad. Perhaps AI can be used for chores like this, as human speakers would probably lose the rhythm often, which I imagine must make accurate audiobook recordings in this style quite difficult.
Wasn’t he a Classics scholar at arguably the best university in the world? That’s exactly who’d I expect to be able to recite it!
Edit: “Johnson won a scholarship to study Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, a four-year course in Classics, ancient languages, literature, history, and philosophy” … also won an academic prize for Classics at Eton, which is notably academically rigorous
It certainly doesn't have much of the last syllable rhyme you would expect today.
But 500 years ago most people couldn't even read.
Consider also the degree of investment this requires from society as a whole. To learn to recite large works from memory like that pretty much requires a person who dedicates their life entirely to the craft (excluding other productive work), not just learning the techniques and the stories themselves, but also eventually teaching others to carry on. These are all extra mouths to feed by the rest, and yet some form of it was historically extremely widespread in pre-literate societies. It just goes to show how important stories and generational memory are to us as species.
Certainly it is true that the ancient Greeks had professional performers, but I’m not sure that’s necessary.
Thus not all cultures evolved such a distinct profession, but many did. Some particularly impressive examples include the Mongolian Epic of Gesar and the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas. The latter is notable for having over 500,000 lines of verse, and there are living performers capable of reciting the whole thing end to end (which takes several days).
Eh. That comes with a lot of caveats. There's an entire branch to library science (yes, that's a thing) dedicated to storing and analysing different "editions" of the same text because it helps trace how stories spread over time. Usually large parts of the text will be the same but there will be minor changes, often inconsequential, in one edition versus another.
> it requires a lot of rote learning, and learning of various associated memorization techniques
Sure, if you today want to memorize an entire work like that, you will need to do that. But this ignores the historical context. Nowadays you may hear dozens of sophisticated tales every day. You can't even watch the news without hearing narratives, often deliberately constructed to have heroes and villains and story arcs to make boring events sound interesting. Back then, especially in remote villages, your material was much more limited and there was much more work that allowed for telling or listening to stories and songs.
This also ignores the survivorship bias: the people who ended up reciting these stories were likely already interested in memorizing them and found it easier to do so. For example, certain forms of autism literally would have predisposed people to being able to commit such stories to memory and recite them word-for-word, given enough time and opportunities to do so. Telling them in an interesting way then would just have been a craft you'd hone through repetition.
It's also fallacious to think of this as a distinct profession inherently. Without the separation of labor the concept of a "profession" makes little sense even if different people might prefer doing different kinds of work and thus naturally divide some parts of labor without a formal distinction (e.g. in a gift economy it's perfectly plausible for the guy who is really good at making tools to spend more of his time on tools for others who'd in turn take over some of his other work to allow him to focus on that). Yes, at some point memorizing and reciting stories becomes so much work you don't have time for anything else and a culture might recognize that as a distinct profession the same way it might have shamans or holy people, but I'd argue that often oral cultures would strive perfectly fine, even when it comes to longer works.
Now, being able to create such an extensive work and spread it to other groups/tribes/towns is another matter and would indeed be more likely to happen in the presence of a distinct profession. But of course it's no accident that there are so many parallels between historical epics.
"That is the second key to reaching cynical teenagers: they must be treated like men and women whose decisions and opinions matter."
Our prejudice and contempt can prevent us from even getting through.
Of course, with IB/AP courses, there’s no time to teach well because there’s more material than can be taught within a year.
I wonder why this isn't standard. I guess the extra work involved.
Every essay I receive is graded with a terrible harshness. Almost no one gets an A on the first try. But all students are given a second try. I return their essays with dozens of comments in the margins, a graded rubric, and a paragraph of instructions on how they should improve their work.
> I return their essays with dozens of comments in the margins, a graded rubric, and a paragraph of instructions on how they should improve their work.
Has the word “bullying” lost all meaning?
Some excellent essays are probably getting marked down to achieve the shock-and-awe effect, and that’s not super fair.
But as powerful people like to say to the powerless: who said life was fair?
He's marking the first drafts down to emphasize the importance of paying close attention to his remarks. And "paying close attention" to the teacher's remarks on an essay really means rewriting it.
These students aren't being bullied; quite the opposite, they are receiving individual care and attention from a dedicated teacher. If only all teachers handled essays in this way.
The interesting thing to me about some of the pro- comments being made here is their bizarre stridency. Here's another from downthread:
> I agreed with everything I read and wished I'd had so much consideration, both as a student and as a teacher.
I have some definite opinions about pedagogy but the thought of educators all working precisely the same way sounds like something out of The Twilight Zone or Orwell or something.
> Every essay I receive is graded with a terrible harshness.
Is it good teaching? I have no idea. I know it’s not bullying though.
He is also explicitly giving them instruction on how to improve as well as comments. If they follow they follow the suggestions and then get an A. That seems fair.
I don't remember my teachers ever reviewing a first or second draft for me. Just turn in an essay and get a final immutable grade.
I do have a vivid memory of getting my first A in 8th grade art class just by asking what I could improve in my drawing a couple of times before the final turn in. Apparently I never thought to apply the same process the rest of school :/
He is not giving them As on purpose. He made grading system that ensures it.
By and large, they do not. (Where did you go to high school? I'd like to send my kid there, if that's true to your experience.) Argumentative essays seemed just as "artifical [and] weird" to the vast majority of the native English-speaking American college freshmen I taught as they did to the author's Chinese students. We can speculate about the reasons for that, if we like.
The cohort who (in my experience) were best-prepared for that style of writing / thinking were German ~16-year-old ESL students coming from their gymnasia system. Those kids were a delight, and really kept me on my toes.
Sounds like they could get an A if they did it well enough. He’s saying most don’t do it well enough.
Whatever it is, it’s not bullying.
> That is the second key to reaching cynical teenagers: they must be treated like men and women whose decisions and opinions matter. I was eager to learn from their observations and opinions. I genuinely believe I have as much to learn from my classes as they do from me. […] Students were eager to tell me of these conclusions because they believed (rightly) that I valued their insights and experiences. […] mostly to my attitude towards my students. Taking students seriously means setting high expectations for their work. This is the harder path: requiring more of students means investing more time and effort into their growth. […the part you quoted…] This process requires double the work on my part, but it makes the students better writers. Teach things that matter. Believe your students matter. Set high standards, but invest the time to ensure your students can meet the standards you set.
I wouldn't describe the approach as “terror and bullying built into it”.
While this is a dynamic that can happen, it is by no means how the process should play out. So if that's the perspective and if one can't see the setup as an instructor offering guidance, one better doesn't attend university at all. And if the bullying scenario happens, find another place!
I agreed with everything I read and wished I'd had so much consideration, both as a student and as a teacher.
1) The "Odyssey" is more interesting and far more often referenced in arts and culture.
2) It's not an English book so you are going to suffer from double the translation misfires (Greek -> English -> Chinese).
There are lots of choices for literature in English that are just as or even more important than the "Iliad".
Whenever I see "scholar" in a sitename I go on alert. The About page confirms it in this case.
Author spent roughly a year preparing the seminar.
The most extreme example was when I got a paper back with a 56% and the only comment was "Great Job! Almost an A paper"
As an American who's taught both native born American students and recent Chinese immigrants, I confirm this is true, much to the embarrassment of my national pride.
Still probably quite different, but maybe more similar than looking at Chinese emigrés vs typical "US average".
Immigrant parents (Asian, Latino, Eastern European, African) in America will push their kids harder because when you're an immigrant, a mistake like getting suspended in school or a DUI can destroy any chance at naturalization because you need to establish "Good Moral Character" [0] which is largely at the discretion of the presiding interviewer and a backlogged USCIS Immigration Judge
[0] - https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-d-chapter...
Yes... what a ridiculous rhetorical question, with all due respect.
There is a thread of democratic myth that has been abused into dust that holds that there is high virtue in being disobedient and non-compliant. But the heart of that myth is always centered in somehwat rare (in the context of today) totalitarianism or "dark age" mythological social ignorance.
When in reality the key to both learning and life success, translating to happiness, is obedience and compliance with things that are mostly good and mostly true. Whereas predators, of all kinds, often rely on peddling untruths to the reflexively disobedient.
There are exceptions, but the lesson is that they are far from the rule.
First, they are human institutions and will be corrupt to varying degrees (though that degree matters greatly); teenagers should learn and all adults should know that the feet of these monuments are clay, and that we can build better - especially the next generation, with a fresh perspective, less vested interest, and more energy.
Second, what almost defines today, this moment in history, is the rise of authoritarian oppression and the embrace of it (which I believe includes the comment above, though not necessarily the commenter), and the culture of abuse of authority and brazen embrace of it - in political leaders, business leaders, etc. These things, far from being obsolete concerns, are now a cult - rather than freedom and hope for all, people embrace hate, cruelty, corruption, and dictators.
Look at our world, look what we are building, look at the catastrophe the institutions have produced and the brazen disregard shown by a generation of adults.
Finally, our world was built by people who disrepected authority; authority is those who did so and succeeded. That's where almost every democracy and all our freedoms came from.
> ridiculous ... dust
Rather than disrespecting authority, your comment disrespects your peers and try to abuse them, through contempt and ridicule, into complying with the authority. The comment sounds to me like the person who, threatened with the power of a bully, goes along with them, tries to fit into their power structure, and ingratiates themselves by attacking peers who don't conform.
I am not sure when being "Rebellious/Undisciplined/Bad-behaviour" became equated with "Independent-minded" and thus ipso facto "better than" being "Obedient/Disciplined".
By definition, youngsters have a lot to learn which can only happen in a obedient and disciplined environment.
Letting teens run wild for whatever reason (because they will be more interesting adults? because they have a right to?) is a western idea. That’s exactly how I grew up and have a lot of tales to tell, but I also underutilized my capacity for learning during that time.
> because they will be more interesting adults? because they have a right to?
That's just belittling and avoiding the serious issues. Very teenager-like! :)
First, nobody said healthy teens can't study. But it's essential they question and push back against what they study. If they don't learn that, their education has failed on a basic level - that is where all that knowledge came from; that's what will prepare them to be adults who can utilize and produce knowledge themselves, rather than relying on others. What more is the source of SV - or the entire scientific and business enterprises - than those skills.
Also, there is far more to learn than schoolwork for growing into fully self-actualized, mature, free people in a free society. Most critically, the most important knowledge is self-knowledge, and that is not learned by studying authorites, but mostly by experimenting and studying yourself.
> I also underutilized my capacity for learning during that time
None of us know what would happen on the road not taken. You wouldn't be the same person. For one thing, it's not realistic to compare anyone to some image of perfection and then say they could have done better.
Not saying either of these options is wrong, and even hinting that the former may perform comparatively better in real life than their test scores suggest. After all, their ancestors survived.
As in, neither is accurate characterisation of stuff that happened in the past or culture of a place right now.
> a family history of 50 generations of tending to a rice field?
While yes, I am sure that there are many peasant people who have a "don't rock the boat" mindset, this is totally ignorant to the fact that China in the last two centuries alone was:
Invaded by Japan, invaded by every European colonial power, had a communist revolution, underwent massive industrialization, had the cultural revolution (that sort of kills the "docile student" narrative by itself), had multiple civil wars, fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars, fought against Russia, and recently in the last 40 years has opened up to international trade and market economies.
Compare the life stories of Donald Trump and Xi Xinping. Which of the two seems more adventurous? I'm not even trying to say one culture is better or worse, I am just trying to point out that your historical synopsis is not accurate and is really oversimplifying things.
Replace teaching with working on, and students with co-workers, and you have the basis for a functional, high-performance work culture.
I think this kind of framing often mistakes nurture for nature in ways that can lead to bad thinking: that they were attached to "the most competitive international school" means that these students likely already benefited heavily from support unavailable to other students in order to make it through the filters. The filters don't test for individual aptitude in a vaccuum, they test for the outcomes of prior circumstances. The Chinese education system isn't exactly known for being chill and relaxed to begin with.
In other words: I think by looking at this in terms of individual students rather than the systems which brought them forth, this reads like "at other schools the students aren't good enough to pass a course like this" rather than "at other schools the students have not been given the prerequisites to pass a course like this". By only looking at the school as better or worse than other schools it ignores what allowed those students to have those prerequisites and fails to identify what they are, which could have allowed for insights on what needs to be taught as a primer before such a class could be taught to other students.
It's about a multi-decade civil war almost 2 thousand years ago & is the oldest of their classic novels and the characters are all household names.
And many similar character types ... Diaochan <> Hellen, Lu Bu <> Achilles, Zhuge Liang <> Odysseus etc.
There is some surviving poetry from the Zhou Dynasty, which is contemporary with classical Greece, but I don't think any of it is epics.
[1] I simply watched an avid Three Kingdoms fan playing the campaign on YouTube a few years ago as some background noise.
Nah, it was written in 14th century. It's one of the earlist novels in "vernacular Mandarin" though.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdom... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nzg2uzV03s
"Toriyama loosely modeled the plot and characters of Dragon Ball on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West,[16][15] with Goku being Sun Wukong ("Son Goku" in Japanese), Bulma as Tang Sanzang, Oolong as Zhu Bajie, and Yamcha being Sha Wujing" [1]
It's very dense though and there's like a billion names to keep track of, I only made it through the first ~1/3 of the first volume (out of 4) before I had to give up. I want to revisit one day but I would need some sort of reading guide to follow along with that lets me look up all the character names and who is on which side etc.
The same happens when reading a book with Chinese names.
An ebook that coloured the names according to their side might help.
I'd say Shiji feels more similar to an epic, at least a couple stories in it has an air of exaggeration :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Rites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_and_Autumn_Annals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuo_Zhuan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_the_Grand_Historian
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54229792-understanding-t...
(sorry for low quality link, but the book is a good summary )
A great question, and I would love to take a class - even online - from a top Chinese professor on leading Chinese texts.
I imagine part of the answer is that the reputations of and demand for American universities have been far beyond Chinese universities, though recently that's changing some. (That's not a criticism of people in China - it takes awhile to build those institutions and they are already moving pretty fast.)
But I presume, when you said you wanted to take a class from a top Chinese professor on leading Chinese texts, that you would want English instruction, and that you'd prefer the material be translated from Classical Chinese to English? (Just knowing Mandarin isn't quite enough)
But then, it's really hard to translate Classical Chinese to English. Even the longer important texts haven't been fully translated, eg. 史記 ("Records of the Grand Historian", which has kind of a similar standing as the Iliad in the West) is only partially translated AFAICT.
Written Chinese is admittedly quite hard to learn given that you have to recognize the characters etc. Classical Chinese is even harder since there's nobody you can converse with.
But if you know Mandarin, there's probably a huge amount of high quality stuff you can find online that satisfies what you want.
I'm probably too old to learn languages of many of the cultures that interest me, much to my disadvantage.
So what we get, as the sibling comment said, is an interpreted and outdated account through "liberal arts".
I think people overestimate the effect of age on learning. Children spend years becoming fluent in their native language, and with little focus or study of it. I could learn a language faster. (Not an apples-apples comparison, obviously, because children's brains and behavior are so much different.)
haha, thanks for the encouragement. Project for my 6th decade Russian or Chinese,, still not sure :)
They have a visiting professor from Guizhou University, but his interest is politics: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/news/soas-china-institute-welco...
Their reader in modern Chinese culture and language is from China: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/xiaoning-lu
https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/institutes-and-regional-centres...
We learned Confucius, Mencius, Daosim, legalism, the dynasties, bits of the Chinese language etc. I still remember all the dynasties in order.
Of course that didn’t really pay the bills so I redid a bachelors in STEM. But its pretty common in many liberal arts curriculums. Taught right alongside the classics.
My point was to the asymmetry of authentic visiting pedagogy. In other words, for the past 20 or 30 years Chinese universities have been enthusiastic and open to first hand accounts of western culture, ancient and modern. They've been keen to take the best of what we have and learn from it. On our side we have a cannon prepared for the most-part before 1900 and taught by aging white professors.
McFarlane seems unusual, albeit that he is indeed the archetypal western Oxford don.
It would be nice to avoid the implication of a "successful and scientific" Western cannon versus "failed" and primitive alternatives that don't pay bills. FWIW, I like to assume, in all discussions of interest, that the bills have been paid. Bill paying is, after all rather dull.
On the other hand I casually wondered on Friday, amidst all the fireworks and what with it being a dragon new year, what we're missing about a problem that we seem to be struggling with - namely how a society, despite huge technological change and diversity, remains relatively stable for thousands of years.
I would love to watch a YouTube video lecture series on something like that, from the horse's mouth as it were, but I suspect all the authentic professors who would have taught us were rounded up or starved in some Great Leap Backwards.
Most people in the west wouldn't want to hear the solution: value the collective over the individual, install benevolent authority figures empowered to make the final decision so that minor disputes don't get out of control (i.e. "authoritarianism"), ensure everyone is incentivized to perform their roles, and discourage troublemakers.
> suspect all the authentic professors who would have taught us were rounded up or starved in some Great Leap Backwards
The sad thing is that the Chinese tradition didn't just get wrecked during the Mao era. It started much earlier, though Mao probably handed them the nail in the coffin. In the early 20th century when the Qing dynasty collapsed, the prevailing theory among Chinese intellectuals was that China was weak because the Chinese cultural/intellectual tradition was inferior to that of the West, so to make the nation strong, everyone should just adopt Western thought instead. Within a decade or two the old system of learning was abandoned, and then there were decades of war and strife in China. This is one of the various reasons communism took a hold in China -- back then in the early 20th century, communism seemed like a progressive(?) "western" idea, and it sounded like a great way to run a nation.
By the time of the "Great Leap" and the "Cultural Revolution", there wasn't that much left of traditional Chinese thought to destroy. Some prominent academics went to Taiwan or Hong Kong, but if you ask me, they were faint echos of what the classical Chinese thought had to offer.
If you actually wanted to "hear from the horse's mouth", you might have to go back a couple hundred years.
China had always been a large empire, so the rulers did not rule directly. To the rulers at the very top, their interests aligned with the peasants in that both wanted stability, and given that China was such a vast empire, stability was more important to the rulers than squeezing every drop of excess productivity from the peasants.
So at least for the rulers at the very top, especially those who became emperor due to being the son of the previous one, their concerns were how to ensure the middle tier officials, who actually ran the day to day affairs, administered their lands fairly without corruption.
So basically they invented a system of "scholar-officials" where education consisted of brainwashing aspiring officials about the virtues of "filial piety" and applying concepts of parenthood in governance. "Love the peasants as if they were your children", and "be loyal to the ruler as you would to your parents". This might sound hypocritical to the cynics in modern society, but back then it was not just rhetoric, they were absolutely expected to fully believe in it, because it was intentional brainwashing of the "scholar-official" class by the top-tier ruling elite.
So basically that's where the "benevolence" comes from. It's not that the rulers at the top are benevolent per se, but that their interests generally don't come from squeezing the last drop of productivity from peasants for short term gain, but rather their main risk is corrupted middle/lower tier officials abusing their power, so they install systems to ensure the administrators are "benevolent" as far as possible.
I'm not saying it's a great system, and I don't think it can or should be replicated outside of China, I'm just trying to describe, as a historical fact, how the Chinese empires were run (ideologically speaking).
Also likely because it might have been one of few books accepted for a standard qualification.
I can't find it at the moment but IIRC Odysseus and his men put in at a port at a village, put all the men there to the sword and taje the women for slaves, sex and bounty. You get the picture. Scratch the surface and it gets ugly.
(Fascinating read nonetheless)