The Reading Room

Hamlet

00:53

@Randal'Thor while I don't know anything about Scandinavia history, it's much more likely that an area the size of Scandinavia was more culturally diverse in the past than it is today.

with every valley having a different dialect, etc.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

01:20

BESW

Kids these days https://t.co/JxP2YpLCxq

Tweeted by sezzy_harris on April 19, 2017 at 12:16 AM

DVK-on-Ahch-To

And for Timothy Zahn fans:

user15026

02:04

@Randal'Thor I'd be more inclined to say they were different even more so previously.

user15026

Also, I don't see a problem with the narrower tags. But I come from gaming, where each game gets a tag, so....

user15026

but it's not like we're gonna run out :)

Bookworm

03:09

0

Q: Is the story of Tales in the Sand (or its form) faithful to traditional African stories?

In the prologue to The Doll's House (The Sandman #9 "Tales in the Sand"), Gaiman tells the story of Queen Nada. Neil Gaiman is not African, nor (as far as I could tell) were any of the people who worked with him. Therefore, I wonder if the story of Queen Nada has a parallel in traditional African...

0

Q: Looking for a short story about a small-town mob who goes after a man who had accidentally killed another man

folks! The story I'm looking for is one I read only once over a decade ago for class. The story is set in a small town in the U.S., sometime around the 1950s, 60s, akin to "Monsters are Due on Maple Street." In this story, the town is planning and then gathers as a mob to evict a man and his f...

short-stories

Shokhet

03:46

@Gallifreyan ...does the number 50 have to be precise? What if it's a round number?

@Gallifreyan I don't understand what the mistake is. The use of the word "magnet" instead of "vortex"?

Bookworm

0

Q: What word was used in the original for "anisotropic"?

In the beginning of Hard to Be a God, there is the matter of the skeleton chained to a machine gun. "An anisotropic road," Anton explained. Anka stood with her back to him. "Traffic can move only in one direction." This is also remembered by the characters later in the book: “Anka,” P...

russian-literature strugatsky-brothers translation hard-to-be-a-god

Gallifreyan

05:22

@Shokhet No, that's just an interpretation I had not considered. It says Rose acted as a magnet to dreams, and thus Morpheus was able to find all the runaways in her proximity (Brute and Glob, Corinthian, Fiddler's Green). The mistake I mentioned is different: the companion says that Dream is talking to his captor, Roderick Burgess, after he escapes. But Roderick has been dead for ~40 years, and Dream is talking to his son, Alex.

It's an important character-defining point that Dream takes his revenge on the son, rather than his immediate captor, meaning that he doesn't care about justice, but revenge.

Bookworm

05:52

-1

Q: Poem about a young man who dies

There was a poem I read years ago that I can't remember the name of. The setting is rural, possibly set in 19th or 20th century United States. A young man, possibly even a teenager, suddenly has some major medical problem. His sister calls for the doctor, who gives the young man some ether and tr...

poetry story-identification

Gallifreyan

06:07

@Shokhet It'd have to be rounded to 60 then - 57 rounds up.

@Shokhet Writing those two answers at once, I was like

humn

06:52

(from an appreciative lurker)

Dear @Rand al'Thor, thank you for the Thurber reminders! (selective quote:)

in The Sphinx's Lair, yesterday, by Rand al'Thor

@humn How's my Thurberism coming along?

On my favorite days, your polyphony rejoices (archaic sense, according to a dictionary) what my Comp Lit friend and I saw in each other.

She saw her inner systematist. I saw my inner perceptualist.

See?

Mithrandir

@humn ...What? O_O

humn

Rand will understand, I tried to type by during a quiet moment.

Nonetheless, @Mithrandir, you challenged me to ask a Roman-a-clef question here about Phantom Tollbooth, and I am working up to it.

I could swear that an article led me to that book in the first place.

So I read the book as if it were Alice's Adventures ....

And enjoyed it more, to be honest.

(now trying to show my inner literatteur as positively as possible:)

... much like Gulliver's Travels

But I haven't found any remnant online hint of specific targeting in Phantom Tollbooth.

Then again, how'd this be for a Q: "What Roman-a-clef cast calls have lasting significance long after the specified characters are forgotten?"

(specified = unstated)

(what = which ?)

Gallifreyan

07:34

@Shokhet Tweeted Neil Gaiman about that chronology issue regarding Unity. Hope he doesn't blacklist me or anything.

Gallifreyan

07:58

Gaiman seems to answer questions on Twitter, maybe I'll be lucky for a change.

Rand al'Thor

11:18

@Hamlet @Ash It's still true that every valley has a different dialect, and the language variants spoken by, say, northern Norwegians and northern Swedes from near the border are probably more similar to each other than either is to Oslo or Stockholm dialects. But we're not going to have tags for oslo-literature and trondheim-literature and bodo-literature and random-valley-in-the-middle-of-the-norwegian-tundra-literature.

The differences between the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish languages are almost negligible - the only reason they're considered separate languages and the in-country dialects aren't is basically politics.

I'm not sure how much separate literary traditions there are in the three countries - certainly Norway is proud of Alf Prøysen, and Sweden of Astrid Lindgren, but when you go back into the mists of time, there was probably less difference between "Norway" and "Sweden" and "Denmark" (if those countries even existed) than there was between one valley in Norway and another.

@humn I understand little and comprehend less. Polyphony, systematist, perceptualist - methinks you speak of deeper linguistic and philosophical concepts than my tiny mind has yet grasped.

humn

11:38

@Randal'Thor , your mind is not tiny enough to wrap tightly enough around my thoughts.

Gallifreyan

11:54

Someone is sabotaging this month's challenge:

Rand al'Thor

Wut?

grabs flags

Gallifreyan

What did I do to deserve this :'(

Rand al'Thor

Apr 12 at 13:30, by BESW

A single downvote can usually be treated as white noise that means the system's working.

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor curls in a ball and cries

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan Cheer up. I think I've just upvoted two of your answers, while going through the recently updated posts on the site.

Gallifreyan

12:04

@Randal'Thor Cheers! :) Maybe I'll finally be able to topple @Emrakul from top answerers of the-sandman

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan I assumed you were already top by far :-o

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor Not according to the tag page; but then, I think it only updates once a day or so.

user61230

12:21

@Gallifreyan Ha! In your drea--wait a second.

Bookworm

0

Q: How do the Silmarils Solve the puzzle of the Sampo?

It is well established that Tolkien used his fiction as a means of filling gaps and solving riddles in the extant studies of mythology and linguistics. Most of the time, he chose to do this by supplying a definitive answer to a problem. His work, as a whole, was supposed to represent the lost b...

j-r-r-tolkien myths the-silmarillion

Rand al'Thor

Ooh. That reminds me: I know there's supposed to be some sort of connection between CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength and Tolkien's legendarium, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. That would make a great intertextuality question, but I'd want to read That Hideous Strength first in case the answer is obvious :-/

Gallifreyan

14:00

Got a cool Sandman question: "Why is Dream so different from other Endless?". Reading the Wikipedia article, which claims that Dream is the only Endless to populate his realm with speaking characters (i.e. distribute responsibilities he could as well do himself). Gaiman also said Dream created them because he was lonely.

But why? Why aren't other Endless lonely?

Bookworm

0

Q: Meaning of this tanka

What is the meaning of the following tanka by Saigo Hoshi which I came to read today? Now indeed I know That when we said "remember" and we swore it so, it was in "we will forget" that our thoughts truly met.

poetry japanese-literature saigo-hoshi

Shokhet

14:13

@Gallifreyan Cool! Let me know if he answers

Do you have a link to the tweet?

Did you link to my question/your answer?

@Gallifreyan Right. That makes sense.

@Gallifreyan Well, maybe. It still might be justice -- Alex was a necessary part of the original team that captured Dream, and was planning on keeping him in that fishbowl forever and/or until he was able to get something out of it. Alex certainly slighted Dream (although perhaps not as much as his father did)

(Although I think the punishment was maybe somewhat overly harsh)

Gallifreyan

@Shokhet No characters were left :( Twitter sucks.

Shokhet

@Gallifreyan "Dream magnet" makes sense. I thought it was a little convenient for the plot that everyone ends up in the same place or two -- now there's a reason for it.

@Gallifreyan :/ ....reply to your own tweet, then?

Shokhet

14:31

@Gallifreyan I haven't yet read enough of the other Endless to attempt an answer, but I'll keep this question in mind as I move along. I've seen Desire, though -- it doesn't really seem to care about others all that much, except perhaps in a way that it can derive pleasure from them. So it seems natural that its realm is just a huge statue of itself, with Desire living alone in the statue's heart. (Or so it seems to me)

@Gallifreyan I'm within two points of being the top asker. Right now, you're at 22, and I'm at 20.

Shokhet

14:44

@Emrakul :)

Bookworm

15:43

0

Q: Why is "Ode on Melancholy" and Ode?

What features of Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" make it an ode? This is a question that seems to be important in our english class, yet I don't have a comprehensive answer...The most I can say is that he praises melancholy but there's definitely more than that if it's an important question...

poetry meaning john-keats

Gallifreyan

16:04

@Shokhet You've probably already passed me, but the stats haven't updated - just check it tomorrow.

Bookworm

16:29

0

Q: Does C. S. Lewis support annihilationism in The Last Battle?

C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle includes a scene of what amounts to the Last Judgment (I don't recall the exact chapter, but it's toward the end of the book): The creatures came rushing on, their eyes brighter and brighter as they drew nearer and nearer to the standing Stars. But as they came r...

c-s-lewis the-chronicles-of-narnia the-last-battle

Gallifreyan

@Shokhet How do you add nice oneboxed links to tweets?

Ah, figured it out, Just append ?stw=2 to the end of the short share link.

Gallifreyan

16:50

o_0 Sony will adapt Wheel of Time cc @Randal'Thor

Bookworm

17:28

-1

Q: looking for a book discussing post modern issues

I am looking for a book published in between 1950-2000 by an US or UK author. Some one who is trying to address urging issue(s) of our post modern era ... There must be list of resources from books trying to achieve the same. Thanks for any suggestions

american-literature

Gallifreyan

17:40

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG NEIL GAIMAN REPLIED OMG OMG YES I CAN DIE IN PEACE NOW

@Gallifr56789197 I think Morpheus is approximating. And probably should have rounded up, not down. But he was in a… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/855106252963061761

Tweeted by neilhimself on April 20, 2017 at 5:09 PM in reply to Gallifr56789197

2

@Shokhet ^^^

DForck42

18:08

@Gallifreyan nice!

Shokhet

@Gallifreyan Very nice! Thanks for the ping! :-)

Gallifreyan

18:34

0_o

Someone was removed

Mithrandir

O_O

Gallifreyan

What?

Mithrandir

It's all over

Lots of sites

Gallifreyan

Ah. By the way, you might want to unprotect this.

Hamlet

19:07

@Gallifreyan wow!

Also, I just noticed this, but Morpheus looks exactly like Neil Gaman. Coincidence?

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet Gaiman was one of the models for Morpheus. Can't find a precise citation now, but the resemblance is obvious.

Hamlet

@Gallifreyan is there a reason why that is the case?

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet Why not? :) Gaiman was readily available at the moment. But the face on some covers was also inspired by Peter Murphy, as per Gaiman's own request.

Shokhet

20:17

@Gallifreyan Yeah. I got a lot of those today. twitter.com/MTL613/status/855121029227839488

Gallifreyan

@Shokhet Wyrd stuff. Was it just one user, or several users? Was it a ring, or just one deviant? We will never know...

Shokhet

@Gallifreyan That is correct lol

It hit me in two waves, so maybe more than one? ...it doesn't feel like the numbers I would expect from serial voting, so I assume the user just quit

BESW

21:04

I'm sobbing. Twitter is an amazing place where you can talk to your heroes. 😭❤️ http://ift.tt/2oMSxIo https://t.co/hkgldhCqcs

Tweeted by BlairImani on April 20, 2017 at 2:07 AM

doppelgreener

@BESW I first read this as "Twitter is an amazing place where you can talk to your horses" and was very confused for a minute.

Mithrandir

O_o

BESW

@doppelgreener You're not wrong.

doppelgreener

@BESW there doesn't appear to be an Infinite Scream: Horse Neighing And Winnying And Clopping Edition .......

Rand al'Thor

21:38

@Gallifreyan I don't care who makes a WoT television series - I'll boycott it anyway.

@doppelgreener I hear we may be seeing your name in blue soon? :-)

doppelgreener

@Randal'Thor There's a chance of that! RPG.SE's got a moderator election going and there's several very upstanding citizens nominated including myself.

Rand al'Thor

@doppelgreener I saw! You're the only one I've actually met, but it looks like there are quite a few great candidates and may be tough competition. Good luck!

doppelgreener

@Randal'Thor Thank you! :D

I'd very much like to be the successful nominee, but I think whatever way it shakes out I'll be pretty happy with the outcome.

Bookworm

23:18

0

Q: When did the Rupert Bear stories start repeating themselves?

Some years ago I used to collect Rupert Bear annuals. I had a huge collection going all the way back to the 1940s, with some gaps which I slowly filled in over the years, and every time I got a new book, it meant reading several new Rupert stories. So I was rather disappointed when at some point ...

rupert-bear

Rand al'Thor

23:35

@Gall @DVK I'm in the middle of Chapter 5 of Hard to Be a God, and currently have zero idea what's going on. I think I'll give it at least till the end of the chapter before starting to post "what the heck is this all about?" questions.

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