The Reading Room

1:09 AM

@Gallifreyan You around? Lab finished early and I have a little time now. I'm going to begin writing the Sandman question now. (If it helps, I think I'm only going to ask about the ruby)

I don't know if I'll finish it tonight, but I'll definitely start :)

Rand al'Thor

@Standback Why, thank you sir! I was actually too timid to turn that info into an answer for a long time, because all the author/editor stuff, while interesting, doesn't really answer the question. But eventually I went ahead and posted my answer, with the second half put in in an attempt to make it address the question better, but still expecting downvotes. Guess it paid off :-)

@Shokhet His profile says GMT+3, which would be 4am right now.

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Oh, yes! I meant to congratulate you on that answer. I remember that you originally didn't want to post it, but I think it turned out pretty well :)

@Randal'Thor Fair enough. I did tell him that I'd ping him when I wrote it.

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet Thanks :-) I guess the second half redeemed it?

(Also, disclaimer: I knew literally nothing about The Great Gatsby before starting to research that question.)

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor I already told you I thought the first half was good! It was much better than I thought it would be, actually, because you quoted and sourced individual pieces of correspondence to great effect

I saw the answer when the second half was a wall of text; it looks much easier to read now, but I can't comment on quality until I've taken a better look at it

Rand al'Thor

As you can imagine, it took me a long time and a lot of tabs to get all those quotes dated and sourced!

Shokhet

1:15 AM

I can certainly imagine.

You got a silver badge for that answer, right? (Enlightened)

Rand al'Thor

One of my links is to a long article - more like a whole book - which is basically a biography of Fitzgerald. I think that was my starting point, and by Googling the snippets of letters quoted there, I found the entire text of most of those letters, dates and all.

@Shokhet Yep, Nice Answer and Enlightened.

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Cool.

@Randal'Thor Yes, it certainly was a Nice Answer :)

Shokhet

1:50 AM

Looks like I actually won't finish the question tonight. I've got other, more pressing things to take care of.

And I didn't realize how much work it would be transcribing comic panels to satisfy literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/489/481 (totally worth it, though!)

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet More pressing things to take care of? Well, I guess that ironing won't do itself.

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Heh. :)

BESW

3:07 AM

> The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

Librarian

3:40 AM

0

Q: What's the difference between these two questions asking for lists of devices?

What is the meaning of "To Autumn"? (open, score of +3) What I'm looking for is quite simply examples of commentary on devices in the poem "To Autumn", which would help me further develop my own interpretations. Within commentary, I would look for the identification of devices and the discus...

Napoleon Wilson

@Librarian About 3 paragraphs of text? ;-)

Bookworm

5:02 AM

0

Q: Write Autobiography as Anonymous

If someone wants to write his autobiography as anonymous, what can be best strategy for it? Writing a novel, or introducing protagonist as some friend or what?

autobiography

Gallifreyan

5:58 AM

@Randal'Thor +1 for observational skills and arithmetics :) It was 4:09 for me

@Shokhet I started to read through the books again :) I already know I'm not going to prepare for the lab today....

Rand al'Thor

1:59 PM

I would avoid quoting the article in this case and instead summarize it in your words (and then linking to the article). You're still quoting a lot of the article, and there's no need to quote in this case: the exact wording isn't important. — Hamlet ♦ 10 hours ago

@Hamlet Why? As far as I understand, quoting from an external source with attribution and with a summary in one's own words is fine.

Sure, the exact wording isn't important, but it's still essentially that person's ideas and not mine. Not having read the book, I don't want to go too far in analysing it in my own words, in case I muck something up.

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor Legally, yes. But maybe he's more talking about aesthetics.

To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of answers that are just a huge wall of quote without any summary at all (not saying yours is, I'm talking generally). Those aren't really that much better than link-only answers, even if more "valid".

That being said, that specific answer doesn't look entirely yellow at least, and even has bold in the quotes (which I suppose is your doing for emphasis).

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Yeah, I don't like answers like that either - which is why I left those comments on your SFF answer last night ;-)

If you look at the revision history of my answer, it was originally a giant quote block, before Hamlet quite rightly suggested I quote only the relevant parts.

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor And which is why I edited them to make them look better, although it now gives the impression that content originated on that site. But I might be able to live with that.

Rand al'Thor

So now I've summarised in my own words and quoted the relevant parts, with added emphasis on some of the most important sentences.

Napoleon Wilson

@Randal'Thor Yeah, I see. The new version is defnitely better.

Rand al'Thor

2:15 PM

Agreed. But I don't think I'd feel comfortable with removing the quotes entirely. The analysis in that answer is not mine - I'm not qualified to analyse that particular book - and I don't want anyone to think it might be.

Napoleon Wilson

Well, sure, it's a nice answer, I guess.

Bookworm

5:54 PM

1

Q: Why does Die Verwandlung have autobiographical aspects?

Why does Die Verwandlung have autobiographical aspects? What similarities are there between the life of Gregor Samsa and the life of Franz Kafka?

german-literature franz-kafka die-verwandlung

1

Q: 227 days in Life of Pi, coincidence or symbolical?

I'm wondering whether it is known whether the 227 days in Life of Pi symbolical is for pi or that the symbolism I see (as a mathematician :)) is pure coincidence. I think that it is symbolic for pi because pi ~ 22/7, which is quite well-known.

symbolism life-of-pi yann-martel

Rand al'Thor

6:27 PM

@Bookworm 5 views, 3 answers. Quick work!

Napoleon Wilson

@Bookworm I...wasn't impressed by that guy's self-answer about Trümmerliteratur and with this one I again cannot shake off the feeling that this seems like a Wikipedia regurgitation.

Self-answers in all honours, but...I don't know...

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson I upvoted the question, not the answer.

Do you know enough about this stuff to provide another answer?

Napoleon Wilson

Not at all. I haven't read anything from Kafka in school. I was more into English than German lessons. ;-)

That doesn't stop me from having an iffy feeling about those answers and their presentation, though. ;-)

(It might be entirely possible that we had to read Die Verwandlung and I just didn't, though. ;-))

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Sure. I was just hoping to see a better answer on that question (and to draw you into participating a bit more here) :-)

Napoleon Wilson

Appreciated. But well, I'm just not very well-read. I'm fine complaining from chat. ;-)

Napoleon Wilson

6:52 PM

A hexagonal tessellation also has the advantage (over a rectangular one) that there's no ambiguity about neighbourhood. You don't have neighbours that are connected via and edge and others that are connected via a vertex, you only have edge-based connectivity. Which is why they're quite well-fit, even if less intuitive, for tessellations of volumetric bodies, as it makes neighbourhood analyses less ambiguous. But I don't know if that has anything to do with the Library of Babel, I admit. ;-)

Bookworm

0

Q: What is the symbolism of the yo-yo in V.?

The yo-yo is mentioned often in Thomas Pynchon's V., including in a few chapter names. What does it symbolize?

symbolism thomas-pynchon

Librarian

7:05 PM

0

Q: Is [german-literature] about literature in German or from Germany?

Is german-literature about literature in German or from Germany? The tag american-literature seems to suggest that german-literature should be about literature from Germany. However, I think it is more useful to have tags for the language of the book.

discussion tags

Napoleon Wilson

Duplicate of the very same question about Mexico and Russia and pretty much all other countries?

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Yeah, it's a much more general question really.

And I've answered it as such.

Well, not Mexico, because the language in that case would be Spanish.

Napoleon Wilson

7:22 PM

Yeah, I think the Mexico controversy was a different one.

Rand al'Thor

7:45 PM