> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear,
  > when people will stop looking at anything
  > made by humans and only look at things made
  > by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?

Are you an artist? A woodworker? Metalsmith? ... start recording your work and post it to youtube. I guarantee people will be willing to pay extra for the thing you built (I certainly would).

(edit: formatting)

Without the ultimate postmodern truth that there is none, that deep skepticism of power especially and always of oneself, how do people decide what to embrace? Whatever is effectively sold to them, no questions asked. There isn't an instinctive worry about but an almost survival-level embrace of mass messaging - the way is to be safe in the crowd, not to doubt it or to worry about its power in society and its effect on you.

And without believing in the Enlightenment vision of the transformative power of our minds to make a better humanity, expressed especially in art as the pinnacle of human expression and acheivement, art is ruled out and actually threatens your worldview (and that reactionary messaging) of powerlessness and survival.

> This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.

There's nothing more to be said. This right here is what slop enthusiasts will never get, because they equate thought with a thought-shaped object.

> If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”

I don't agree with this statement. Being a snob and/or elitist means looking down upon others. If you appreciate these 'secret treasures' without being a dick about it, everybody wins.

It's mixed. It's both true and false.

There are a great many books out there, but there's also countless pointless turds.

Then something has to be said about your teacher forcing you to read a great book in a language that is not the author's native language. Some do translate well (Dostoevsky for example) but for many others it simply doesn't make any sense. A great book is not just a story: the writing itself is an art form and that cannot be translated.

Then many books are just bland, naive, with a ridiculously laughable "message" they try to pass.

The problem is a teacher shall force you to read either indistinctly. At least mine was.

I could be forced to read great literature just as I was forced to read the latest fart from whatever author was fancy in the city atm for his parents owned a bookstore.

Another way to see it is this: how many books (novel books) are there out there? Like, literally, how many? The number is gigantic. How many great novels are there?

If you were to pick one at random, which probability that you'd end up on a great one?

What's the probability your teacher will pick great ones?

In my case, the odds were basically as you'd expect: I remember very few of them because most didn't warrant being remembered.

First, as a point of style it makes no sense for the author to have chosen “thick” rather than the more common adjective “deep”. They describe the same thing, and “deep” even works much better for the cave analogy which is central to the author’s argument.

Deep also has ties to game theory, where increasing depth introduces exponential complexity. The deeper you calculate in chess for example, the more likely you are to find emergent ideas and refutations. Thick is simply an odd choice.

Now to the analogy of literature to caves. It’s highly flawed: unfalsifiable, and its actual supporting evidence is easily refuted by existence of tradition. If you haven’t found the treasure in the cave, you just have to keep looking. It’s definitely there, right?

Further, I am not persuaded by the actual examples the author gave of “thick” art. The nonsense music written on the butt of a subject of a painting is an Easter egg. Ok, the painter doesn’t like secular music, but is there any deeper consideration of why a chromatic scale is fundamentally more sacred than a 13 note scale or a 120 note scale? It’s an anachronistic detail.

The example with Hamlet and ears is even worse. The author says “thin art has no answers, thick art does” then in the very next paragraph concludes no one knows if the recurring theme of ears in Hamlet means something or it’s just something Shakespeare felt like adding.

And this was my entire problem with finding “themes” in books. This exercise was often an exercise in finding patterns where there are none:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Ok, Shakespeare had a thing with ears, so what? I’m sure you can find countless patterns, intentional and unintentional in all sorts of books. Who cares if they mean anything. Now please find three of these “themes” (the more obscure and irrelevant the better, because your teacher has probably already found the real ones) and sandwich them between an opening and a concluding paragraph for your five paragraph essay.

> This kind of quality can only be proven by longevity. Which answers another question I had when I was scowling in the back of English class: why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff? And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good. Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on. If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it. We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention.

The fact that the books on the library shelves this year are mostly the same as last year isn’t a statement about the quality of old books. It is a statement about library budgets. Same thing with museum inventories and English literature curriculums. Jane Eyre is going to feature prominently in AP Lit essays this year not because it is a good book (it was one of the worst things I have experienced) but because teachers know it, the library has it, and the curriculum is written already.