This is one of the longest answers I've written on LitSE, and it's all just to argue: (1) Randolph is wrong (2) The question, while interesting, is off-topic.
@b_jonas Well, I put the whole thing too strongly. I think we'd just be at cross purposes. SFF folks care about the internal coherence of texts, they put a lot of trust in authorial authority (ha), etc. My training in literary analysis is rather differently oriented.
@b_jonas It is? I don't think I've ever been called "completely normal" before :-)
@verbose Writing an answer that a question is based on an mistaken assumption or is off-topic is normal. And the explanation for that sometimes has to be long, though admittedly you write more long answers than most users. Arguing that another answer is wrong is also normal.
@verbose "they put a lot of trust in authorial authority" => only when it's not George Lucas, but yes, that does sometimes happen.
@b_jonas My sense of SFF (based on what I see and recognize in the HNQ) is that a large portion of it is "JK Rowling said this in a tweet, so that is the definitive answer."
also I may have indirectly encouraged one of the longest answers on Sci Fi SE scifi.stackexchange.com/a/218318/4918 , by supporting other similar multi-identification image questions.
@verbose Answering questions that you regard off topic is a bad practice. If it's off topic, you close vote it instead of answering it. (How open-ended is a list of "entry-level annotated editions" anyway? It's unavoidably a very small number.)
Should I post an answer to an off-topic question after flagging it?
I seem to find off-topic questions that I can give a good, useful and correct answer to. (The specific question tonight is this one, but it's happened several times this month now). Other users have clearly deemed the question ...
It annoys me when people post answers to obviously off-topic questions like this one, especially after those questions have already received several close votes. Migrations seem to happen rather infrequently these days, so there's probably no reputation to gain for questions that are likely to be...
One of the lead characters in No Country For Old Men is named Llewelyn Moss.
I find the surname striking. I wonder if McCarthy meant something by it. Moss, the plant, grows on trees. And so I wonder if McCarthy meant to imply that Llewelyn was not a transient character, that he was tethered.
A...
@b_jonas I'm not a huge fan of identification-request questions generally. On Lit SE, most of the time my (internal) response to them is, "I don't understand what makes the work worth the effort of identifying." I do admire people like Ayshe and Clara who are so good at fulfilling id requests, and I'm glad that many users get a nice nostalgia hit out of this site by getting the info they seek about childhood favorites, but for me personally story id is not an incentive.
I also find the sheer number of story id questions we get off-putting. In February so far, four out of 17 questions have that tag. That's pretty close to 25%, which seems high, no? (And since a different four of those 17 were from me, that feels more like four out of 13 questions to me ....)
A couple times the identification-request questions have led to my reading a poem that I'dn't've come across otherwise, but I have yet to find any of the identified short stories, fairy tales, comics, genre fiction, etc. that get asked about interesting enough to make me want to read them. YMMV.
@Tsundoku I did vote to close. I also pointed out when the question was first posted that it was off topic. A mod disagreed. I also think "it's unavoidably a very small number" is a wrong reason for keeping the question open. First, it's not small; do a search for "Le Morte D'Arthur" on any public library website. Second, "entry-level" is a weasel word. What's an entry-level annotated edition of Hamlet?
I'm re-reading Paradise Lost (for my sins) and have at hand two editions: the Oxford student edition by Orgel and Goldberg, and the Modern Library edition by Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon (the last was my dissertation advisor). I couldn't tell you which is "entry-level." They both have good scholarly apparatus, each modernizes the spelling (one to British, the other to American practice), each explains particularly thorny vocabulary or syntax in the notes.
I prefer the Modern Library for any number of reasons, but that's my opinion. If someone else says the Oxford is better, I can't argue. They're both good. Which one counts as an answer to "name a good entry-level annotated edition of PL"? How is that not asking for (a) recommendations—the Malory q specifically uses that word! (b) opinion (c) an open-ended list, all of which are closeworthy reasons?
@Mithical why d'you think I posted four questions on Everett's hilarious, heart-searing novel, my young friend. (Everett was also on the faculty at the same school and in roughly the same department Fallon was and still is. Everett taught American literature and mostly Creative Writing, so while we had a nodding acquaintance, I doubt he'll remember me. I'm still in touch with Fallon.)
@verbose I tend to agree - I don't think I've seen the specific question under discussion here before, but I don't think it's really answerable without at least defining what "entry-level" actually means.
@verbose Rand was not a moderator on Literature.SE at the time that those comments and answer were written, so you can consider that the first diamond action on the post.
One of the lead characters in No Country For Old Men is named Llewelyn Moss.
I find the surname striking. I wonder if McCarthy meant something by it. Moss, the plant, grows on trees. And so I wonder if McCarthy meant to imply that Llewelyn was not a transient character, that he was tethered.
A...
