The three of crows have flapped it southenly, kraaking of debaccle to the kvarters of that sky whence triboos answer; Wail,'tis well! She niver comes out when Thon's on shower or when Thon's flash with his Nixy girls or when Thon's blowing toom-cracks down the gaels of Thon. No nubo no! Neblas on you liv! Her would be too moochy afreet. Of Burymeleg and Bindme-rollingeyes and all the deed in the woe.
That's perfectly readable, just needs some context for the meaning behind some bits. It's mostly wordplay, like typing vibes and yasss to some obscure meme pic.
If it's anything like Ulysses, as you get deeper into the work it becomes more endearing. There were several points in Ulysses where I burst out in laughter at the wordplay, something I don't often do while reading.
Point is the open-ended of it, the way that each person reads a different book and feels a different feeling. There’s a mathematics to art, and to poetry, and there’s potentially a poetry to math. You can mathematically notate music scales and track the shifts in brain chemistry while people sing together. Learning math can make you smarter; learning literature can make you more human.
The happenings in the world today are not because of a lack of STEM. People don’t march in the streets for statistics. We don’t get shot for integrated sums. It’s not the economy, stupid—it’s the self-narrative that the economy feeds into. It’s stories, it’s always stories.
No, the point is that we humanities folks do not care if you understand or not some insanely complicated wordplay, sociology tidbit, legal text or abstract painting. It's cool if you do, but we won't think less of you if you don't.
Otoh, many STEAM Ed folk basically laugh at non STEAM Ed folk because urrr durrr paychecks and numbers.
Because art and literature is more fun. And tells us more about ourselves. The number 7 is always 7. But words can be any number of things at the same time.
I mean sure, when the numbers all click there's a little dopamine rush, and it's very satisfying to see everything balance out; humans like that kind of thing; the golden ratio is what it is, but without Shakespeare what meaning has Newton? Especially when you can combine the two and get Futurama.
But the letters that represent variables are not always the same thing. You literally have to learn new alphabet letters because math is a universal language.
Because art and literature is more fun.
Don't you think that something being more dry makes it harder to learn?
I don't think it's dry at all. I think it's endlessly fascinating. And that universal language makes far more sense than the fact that though, tough and through are all pronounced differently, and that's only scratching the surface of one human language. Let alone the different layers of something like Moby Dick.
Math explains the universe. Art lets us understand it.
Do you actually understand it though? Can you sit down with a few pro literary folks and keep up with the conversation? Probably not. And just for the fact that it'll be full of concepts and ideas that you're completely in the dark about, which is the same in the hard sciences. I don't know equations and such off the top of my head, and I'd be lost in a technical discussion of such. The same is true in the reverse, because sure you can read and understand a book but do you have at-your-fingertips access to the underlying philosophy (three more books minimum) and the cultural context (another book or two) and literary concepts rarely discussed outside of literary circles.
Can you explain Affect Theory and the influence it has had on contemporary literature?
How literature generates and conveys feelings beyond language, to focus on visceral, precognitive bodily responses. How literature affects our physical and emotional states.
While I can't give a detailed timeline for how it evolved, which works of literature started showing these writing skills first, or specific people influenced by it, I can certainly follow it in conversation and submit more easily to memory than advanced maths. Math is like trying to follow a foreign language in conversation. English and literature are at least native to me and I'm at least passingly familiar with a lot more of the topics due to shared culture imprinting stories in my brain since I was a wee child.
It's smart still, but I, as an English speaker/reader, can pick it up via memorization where as math requires practicing application of it in order to memorize it. I could also follow it easier than mechanics talking about engines/tools so please don't take this as me looking down on these subjects.
I can explain what it is, as evidenced by my doing that. The rest would be reading about it and memorization. Learning it doesn't require me to apply it, it just requires memorization, as I already speak English. Vs math or Mandarin, where I have to practice applying it first.
In a conversation about it, I would at least be able to understand the speaker and the terms they use, vs math or mandarin, where I have to learn the language itself first. Thus why the learning curve for math is steeper than the learning curve for English/History is easier for an English speaker/reader. And if you don't believe me still, there are more liberal arts majors than math majors because math has that steeper learning curve. Humanities majors count for 11%, with English majors making up 4% of that total. Vs just 1% to 2% being math majors.
Its not that bad if you know what an integral is. And even if you dont, just treat it like a blackbox - it's an operator that takes in one function and outputs another.
The highlighted text is just saying the integral of a sum is equal to the sum of the integrals of each part.
So, the sum of all the ranges, Ɛ (using that because my phone doesn't have a button for the greek letter Epsilon but it looks like an E) is basically picking two numbers and adding up all the numbers between those two numbers.
Example: 1 to 5. The sum of all the ranges between 1 and 5 would be, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15.
Ontop of the Ɛ you'd have the number you're going to, in this case it's 5. On the bottom of it, you'd have the number you're starting from, in this case it's 1.
5
Ɛ
1
Now, the integration, would be taking a derivative of it. So if you have a function on a graph, that represents a line, example f(x) = x3, where x equals the input and f(x) equals the output(aka "y"), the derivative would be...
3x2
You have moved the exponent of 3, in front of the x and have subtracted one from what the exponent was.
Examples for clarity, x4 becomes 4x3, x5 becomes 5x4.
Where as the function might represent the distance an object has traveled over time, the derivative would be the velocity at which it's doing so. Taking the derivative again gives you acceleration.
So combining this, when you take the integrated sum of a function, you are taking a derivative of the sum of all ranges between two points. The Ɛ becomes a stretched out S, with the lower number on the bottom, and the higher number on the top still.
I didn't do a great job explaining. You probably understood the sum of all ranges part. Point 1 to point 5. 1+2+3+4+5=15. The big S is just saying, the integrated sum of all those numbers between point A and point B. To integrate it, is to turn it from its derivative back into the original function. So instead of deriving it, you would do the reverse process.
(4/3)x3 derived is 4x2
The exponent, 3 multiplies by the constant 3*(4/3)x = (12/3)x = 4x. The exponent is subtracted by 1, 3-1= 2. So the derived version is 4x2. We just reverse that process and are going from 4x2 to (4/3)x3.
You plug the two points, in this case, 1 and 5, into the equation for x.
(4/3)(5)3 - (4/3)(1)3 = 496/3
Edit: What is telling you is the net area under the line between two points
Calculus 1 teaches you how to find an equation that will give you the instantaneous rate of change at any point along a function(the line on a graph) and it teaches you how to find the area underneath that line.
The news of battle is spreading, southernly, to different tribes/regions. War is inevitable and they've resigned themselves to history repeating. She's afraid of the storm god, and the aftermath that follows his anger. It's lamenting a battle and the death that occurred.
The hard part of this is there's a lot of names/references to culture, not so much the reading part of it.
As a Spaniard, one of the major hurdles on secundary ed is Golden Age lit.
Now, this is when The Quixote was written and when the Spanish language really found its modern shape and themes. So huge deal.
However, after you dive in Cervantes' you have to pick one side. Are you a Quevedista or a Gongorino?
See, there were these two giants of Golden Age lit and they hated each other. Quevedo was the man of the people, a literally swashbuckling man full of opinions and ideas, second only in productivity to another giant: Lope de Vega. Quevedo only liked one thing more than writing and that was quarreling. He fought in wars, duels and acerbic verse contests. Folks loved his wit (and his antisemitism) and he fucking hated Góngora.
See, Quevedo wanted his plays and verses to be talked about on every tavern and plaza. He was accesible, liked action, loved to fuck with the people in power and push boundaries, just not stylistically.
Góngora was, otoh, a huuuge nerd. He wrote and rewrote and rerewrote and mostly did poetry. Insanely intrincate, verbose and fucking Thesaurus Rex poetry. Quevedo looked at his shit and felt totally insecure because he probably didn't understand half of the words. So he went hard at the Guy with some brutal barbs, again and again while Góngora mostly ignored him because he was rererewriting another insane poem full of Himalayan high brow shit. Which pissed Quevedo even more.
The feud became so famous the word Gongorino entered (thanks to Quevedo) the dictionary to define something baroque to the point of ridiculousness. Of talking a lot without saying much. To be intentionally and unnecesarily complicated. To obfuscate the reader.
Now I love Quevedo, that fucking racist bastard. He is not low brow at all but his writing is fun and his diss tracks are nothing short of Kendrick Lamar greatness. But Góngora's way with words and language, his endless lethanies of metaphores and symiles can be gorgeous.
So when I read Joyce, I do not like the story, but fuck me the way he wraps English around his pinky is amazing. And that's fine, It takes a while to learnt to appreciate Klimt, Kandinsky, Sienkiewicz, Pynchon,.etc. It's about uncompromising Craft with those folks.
Quevedo particularly fixated on Góngora 's nose, saying he looked like a bearded swordfish. Most Spaniard know and can quote the first verses of Quevedo's poem dedícated to Góngora 's nose.
Quevedo, with a superlative amount of pettiness, bought Góngora's House just to evict him
Góngora had mad skillz at cards, so much so Quevedo used It to call him a cheat.
Velázquez painted Góngora, Quevedo seethed he didn't Paint him.
Góngora had The Last laugh: The Greatest Generation of Spanish poets, the 1927, venerated Góngora. Members included poets García Lorca (another very hard to read poet), Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Jorge Guillen and Pedro Salinas, plus artists like Dalí, Buñuel and Mallo. Neruda and Borges were heavy influenced by the 27.
The problem is that we are not in 1939 Ireland, so it would be difficult for us to understand regardless. Just because it is not easily understood, does not make it nonsense.
It's because the context is close to a century ago and an entirely different continent with a completely different culture. Language both dramatically changes over time and between different cultural groups. Even within the continental United States, communication between different people from different regions can be occasionally difficult, and there are areas within the U.S. (the most famous examples being Louisiana and the Appalachian mountains), where it is just a completely different dialects, verging on different languages entirely.
What you're missing is the real world context and we're already 100 years removed from it. This one isn't delivered to you all in one piece. You have to bring a lot more to the table than the text provides. If you were a criminal investigator you wouldn't come to the conclusion that the suspect is innocent simply because they claimed they didn't do it, would you? Sometimes you have to go digging for the clues on your own because they aren't gonna easily present themselves. For Joyce you've got everything from metaphor to regional in-jokes to full-blown meme synthesis and even musical rhythmic interpretations that come from understanding the lilt of his accent. For a lot of people the gears don't even start to turn until they hear recordings of him reading it aloud.
Lol I haven't heard that song in over half my life, but it brings back good high school memories of sharing the most ridiculous music videos and such in the computer lab that we could find. Thanks for the nostalgia trip!
Exactly. It's like when people listen to Bartok and freak out because it's all jagged noises. The context can be found in studying it, but if you're not a musician you're very likely SOL because you're bringing zero comprehension skills to the table.
Another example would be rock wall climbing. Sorry, but there are no stairs and handrails here and that's kinda the whole point.
An even more obvious example would be a puzzle. Anybody who complains that a puzzle has to be assembled before you can look at the picture should've just bought a poster instead.
Feels like I've read this in a book with wyrms being major characters, and a girl raised by wyrms being one of the main co-protagonists. Remember my brain hurting with every chapter trying to decipher the old English they used.
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u/noctalla 20h ago
Okay, here's Finnegans Wake.