Rime of the ancient mariner

What Hacker News says

1. yesenadamJan 2020
   The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes is a classic study on the literary influences in the writing of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan that tracks down the source of almost every word and phrase in the poems, from Coleridge's wide reading. Highly recommended!
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2. mindcrimeMay 2015
   It's funny, I never cared much for poetry until I started listening to Iron Maiden and found out that "The Trooper" is based on "The Charge of the Light Brigade", as well as "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" being based on a Samuel Taylor Coleridge work.

   Now I enjoy reading both Coleridge and Tennyson quite a lot (as well as a few other poets, although it will never be my primary interest).

   And people used to say that heavy metal was bad for kids... feh.

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3. paulorlandoFeb 2025
   A friend of mine has a thing about wanting to read new poems (ok, written within the last 30 years). Some are not bad. But I still go for the old stuff. Currently doing a lot of long drives and am almost half-way through memorizing Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
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4. bikenagaOct 2022
   It helps immensely to hear poetry read, particularly if it's read well. I didn't understand how important the sound is until I started listening - it changed the way I view poetry. If I can't find a recording of a poem, I'll even try reciting it myself.

   Years ago I started sticking a cassette (!) of Eliot reading "The Waste Land" in my Walkman (I did say "years ago") before walking to work. It was around 20 minutes each way. I could expect to hear "Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead ..." as I was walking in the front door of the math building. I'd get to the end of the poem around halfway on my way home. Eliot is (to my ears) a good reader, and after months of doing this I'd memorized large chunks of the poem. There are also recordings of him reading "Prufrock" and "Four Quartets" which are very good.

   One drawback to this is that I can't multitask while listening to poetry (though now, even music is a problem). So it has to wait till I'm doing something which doesn't require too much attention (which may not be a good thing).

   Other good readers of their own poetry - Yeats (though the recordings are very old), Dylan Thomas. Professional readers can sometimes do a good job - I have a recording of Michael Sheen doing "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" which is completely over the top. Best to listen to a sample before you buy.

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5. BoxOfRainOct 2021
   >We're supposed to buy that he's more free because he's just like, authentic man, similar to Orwell's obsession with chocolate and fountain pens in 1984.

   We're supposed to buy that he's more free because he's not been hypnotically conditioned from birth (ie without his consent) to love his role in society and his place in its rigid caste hierarchy. The "civilised" people in Brave New World aren't less free because simply because they're civilised as the trope usually goes, they're less free because their social superiors have deliberately prevented them from ever learning notions of freedom to begin with - to them consumption is the highest form of existence because it's all they've ever known. Yes it leans fairly heavily on the "noble savage" trope but I don't think he's as one-dimensional as you make him out to be.

   >The dumb worker peons always seemed silly because any sufficiently advanced control society would at the very least lift people up to be more useful

   Why would they bother lifting people up in the context of Brave New World? The leadership's whole thing is that the ratios of the various castes are strictly controlled and most of humanity are intentionally engineered to be simpletons who love their roles and little else. The book even addresses this idea of lifting everyone up to be more useful directly, it mentions an island where everyone was in the "alpha" caste and says it was a disaster as far as Brave New World's leadership was concerned. Their argument was pretty much "why make everyone intelligent ubermensch even though we can when we still need people to empty the bins and sweep the streets - jobs these people would be profoundly unhappy doing?".

   >It's also full of conservative moral panic, for example the sexual freedom and alternative experiences through synthetic drugs never get a serious treatment as potentially positive.

   Huxley wasn't a prohibitionist, in fact he wrote about his experiences taking mescaline at length and was seen as an important author by the psychedelic counterculture of the '1960s. He did think that psychedelic use ought to be limited in contrast to the likes of say Timothy Leary who wanted to see them used in a more widespread fashion but I don't think Brave New World is particularly based on a moral panic. You can criticise hedonism and what Huxley would have considered cheap and ultimately hollow attempts at happiness without necessarily being a moraliser in my opinion.

   I'll give you the "Lenina" thing though, I always thought that was a bit cheap.

   >Why not celebrate the fact that you can create children synthetically and women are freed from reproductive obligations? The book never goes beyond "oh no the family is dead, orgy porgy!"

   I have to disagree here, the point of the book isn't that these technologies are bad per se. The argument is that these technologies could potentially be used to create a dystopia that's very touchy-feely on the surface and supposedly concerned with making everyone happy but in reality creates an inauthentic happiness, a happiness where humanity is stripped of its very essence and turned into little more than livestock for the consumerist meat grinder.

   In Brave New World the leadership take the view that it's fine for authorities to manipulate and coerce people as long as they're subjectively happy about it, criticising this isn't particularly moralistic in my opinion. Brave New World isn't some sexual hangup-free utopia either - its leaders actively discourage people forming exclusive relationships because they see it as a threat to their highly controlled social order. It's the logical conclusion of what countries like the USSR were doing in the '30s, weakening family ties so that children would inform on their parents and so on. Huxley is presenting the destruction of the family as a tool of political control, not lecturing us on Christian virtues.

   >The book's plagued by the same provincial pastoralism you find in almost any British upper-class writer, be it Orwell, Tolkien, Huxley or C.S. Lewis.

   In my opinion Brave New World is critiquing the idea people should have the decision to be unhappy taken away from them, which is quite a paternalistic idea. At any rate I think you're making a bit of a sweeping statement there, dismissing literature because you don't like the culture it came from isn't a very strong argument in my opinion. It's a bit like someone dismissing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner simply because they happen to be an atheist and the Christian allusions aren't to their taste.

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6. kd5bjoJan 2021
   Edit: Though my examples below are all fiction, that's half or less of my current reading list. I also have philosophy, research papers, long-form academic books, popular science books, and the like.

   -----

   For reference, here's the next new card for one of the books I'm reading:

     Bleak House
     Charles Dickens
     CHAPTER III
     ---------------------------------------------------------------------
     coach gave me a terrible start.
     
     It said, "What the de-vil are you crying for?"
     
     I was so frightened that I lost my voice and could only answer in a
     whisper, "Me, sir?" For of course I knew it must have been the
     gentleman in the quantity of wrappings, though he was still looking
     out of his window.
     
     "Yes, you," he said, turning round.
     
     "I didn't know I was crying, sir," I faltered.
     
     "But you are!" said the gentleman. "Look here!" He came quite
     opposite to me from the other corner of the coach, brushed one of his
     [...] furry cuffs across my eyes (but without hurting me), and showed
     me that it was wet.
     
     "There! Now you know you are," he said. "Don't you?"
     
     "Yes, sir," I said.
     
     "And what are you crying for?" said the gentleman, "Don't you want to
     go there?"
   

   (The prior cards include the text up to and including the line starting "But you are!")

   My response, having never seen the passage before, was "coat's"; the correct word is "large". The substitution doesn't meaningfully alter the passage: The only thing we know about the gentleman at this point is that he's a stranger whom Esther has just met in the coach, wearing a large coat (cloak?). This is the first time he speaks in the book.

   I selected "again" because this is a new card; if this had been a review, I might have deemed it acceptable. The bar for similarity varies depending on the book the passage came from, my mood on any particular day, and how much I care about the contents of the passage. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, being poetry, doesn't get any latitude: I must remember the word exactly. Some of the tedious battle descriptions in Le Morte d'Arthur get a pass no matter how badly they go wrong.

   If a card is causing me trouble, there are a few corrective actions I can take: In some instances I'll edit the card to blank out a more meaningful word than the one randomly selected, which is an easier and more engaging review task. If I can't figure out the blanked word from context, I'll look it up in a dictionary; this happens most often with my second-language texts. And in extreme cases, I have enough coverage of each book that permanently dropping card or two won't cause problems.

   The idea for this came from the paper[1] that introduced the concept of Cloze deletions. They were originally envisioned as a readability score. Instead of calculating statistics about the words used, like traditional methods, Taylor proposed to blank out every Nth word and measure how many could be guessed correctly by a reader. Readability and comprehension are two sides of the same coin. They both rely on observing the relationship between text and reader. If used to evaluate the text, this is called readability; if to evaluate the reader, comprehension.

   [1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/writing/1953-taylor.pd...

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