I was listening to comedian Mike Birbiglia’s latest podcast in which he had his wife, ‘the poet J. Hope Stein’ (as he always refers to her) on as a guest. He mentions her often in his podcast and always talks about what a great poet she is. I have purposely not looked up any of her poetry, because I like Birbigs and I’m afraid if I found her poetry to be a cringe-fest I might think less of him.
Which got me to thinking: poetry, I believe, seems like it is either (rarely) very good, or (mostly, probably) embarrassingly bad. Of course it’s about as subjective as things get, but I feel like poetry doesn’t have a large middle ground of just ordinary mediocrity, like many artistic mediums do, such as music, TV, movies, food, etc.
I couldn’t really think of any other good examples of this though. Anybody got a good example of something else that fits the bill? Or conversely, feel free to dispute my central premise and tell me that there is plenty of so-so poetry out there.
I know this will become mostly about art and cultural stuff, and I almost put it in CS, but I thought there may be non-CS examples out there as well. Mods feel free to move it if necessary.
I suppose most of it is average, but “average” can be “excellent” if it fits a song. De gustibus, etc. But one really needs to be total amateur to ruin the song. YMMV.
Poetry has a pretty small market, so if something manages to get published, it tends to be astronomically good. Meanwhile, the stuff your friend writes at Starbucks, bad. Most of the stuff your friends write at Starbucks are bad, but their screenplays and mystery novels are only marginally bad compared to what gets produced commercially, because there is such a large market for what gets produced commercially.
The middle-ground poetry is to be found in graduate school creative writing programs. Hard to get to, in other words.
But your premise is not invalid in regard to what can be easily accessed.
I’m not sure if it exactly fits your premise, but there seem to me to be few mediocre cars, unless they are new to the market. Now, a car may be “meh” to you, but you don’t buy it. To its target market, it’s perfect. I once owned a Geo Metro. It had a barely usable back seat, but my backseat passenger was usually an 80lb dog. It got 40mpg, with a manual transmission. I made peanuts at the age of 26, and liked driving manual. I loved that car. It started every time, and the only expensive repair it needed was scheduled maintenance I saved for.
Personally, I can think only of cars I either love, or hate. The only cars I don’t have much of an opinion about are cars I just don’t know much about.
Calimari. Prepared right, it’s heavenly. Prepared wrong, it’s rubber. And no, I don’t know what makes the difference: Cooking too much? Not cooking enough? Some sort of pre-treatment? But I know it when I taste it. And I’ve never had any that was just OK.
There are a few reasons calamari can go wrong, but the cook time is the biggest and most common. There really is about a 5 second window between underdone and overdone, and most cooks are going to miss it.
He peppers a good amount of her work into his book “The New One”. It’s good. I’m by no means a literary critic, but I liked it for the reasons I really like Birbigs - it’s vulnerable and honest. But I won’t seek more of it out - poetry isn’t my thing.
My answer to your question is similar to some others - a high-end meal. Have you ever really wanted to splurge on a meal, and you’ve heard great things about such-and-such place? They have a prix fixe menu, and you get dressed up with a special someone? That meal is either a highlight of your year, or you go home pissed off - those are the only options.
I think fancy baking may fit the bill. Either it comes out perfect (or nearly perfect), or it falls flat in failure.
I also think elite sports are applicable, particularly Olympic-level individual sports. Very small margins divide the superstars from the never-heard-ofs.
That’s a good example, and I think the same principle applies to lots of expensive luxury things. “It was expensive, but so worth it, and I wish I could afford it more often.” Compared to, “it was fine, but at that price it should have been amazing, so ‘fine’ is a total failure, and I regret spending the money.”
Eggs. No matter how you’re cooking them, it only takes the slightest mistake in a matter of seconds to ruin the dish - an overeasy egg that isn’t runny, an overhard egg that IS runny, scrambled eggs that are too dry or don’t have the right curd, a hardboiled egg with a sulfur ring, an omelette that’s too brown or doesn’t fold properly, an egg that curdles when you’re trying to make a custard - and it’s almost impossible to fix those mistakes even if you realize you’re making them.
I’d say there’s a world of difference between a “good” bassist who keeps rhythm and holds the song together, and a great bassist who treats it as a lead instrument in its own right. Bass wizards like John Entwistle and Geddy Lee and Bootsy Collins are operating on a whole other plane than a bassist who is merely good.
Math and Science education
Very often, especially in elementary school, math is taught as a collection of rules that make no sense and focus is on rote memorization. In both math and science, no concepts are taught or developed to allow students to understand why things work the way they do. Thinking out of the box or questioning is not allowed (usually because the teacher doesn’t know the math and science enough to understand or evaluate a non-standard line of thinking) and I don’t know from the science end, but observing elementary math teachers they are a lot of instances when they are plain wrong about the math and in one case won’t even teach math at all (see note).
Many secondary teachers are no better. I’ve seen many math and science classes that are “STFU and listen to me lecture the entire time.” and “Memorize these facts/rules.” Exploration is not allowed and actively discouraged. Almost 100% of the work is worksheets; now don’t get me wrong, there is memorization needed and worksheet practice does have the occasional place in the classroom but if all you’re doing is lecturing, worksheets, tests & quizzes - your class sucks. In fact as a general rule, if you think it is necessary for students to memorize times tables rather than using a calculator so that they can focus on the meaning of the work then chances are really good your math class is really bad.
One the other hand, there are math & science classes that are top-notch. Students explore the concepts and theories. Questioning is encouraged so that students can learn for themselves the why of things. Technology is utilized so that students can practice applying the math and science they are learning - yes, they are working with real-life problems that students can contextualize and have relevance in their lives. Teachers actually know their subject (The one bright spot of No Child Left Behind) so students can go off the standard path and get quality guidance on if their thinking is correct. Some of the best math and science teaching I’ve seen is actually in elementary school. Teachers with a math or science background in 1-6 grades excel at making up games and activities that have the students doing math and learning through exploration.
In my experience, there is no middle ground.
Note: True story. An elementary teacher in our district told us that as a reward if the students did a good job reading that day, she would not teach the daily math since, “They don’t like it.”
At first I thought not-- a disappointing fancy meal, judged outside of the context of your expectation, is still probably pretty good. But it’s not the meal itself but how your expectations were met is the thing that’s either really good or really bad, so I get it now— this is a really good example.
Even though this paragraph is about egg mistakes, i feel like making eggs for breakfast now
