The Reading Room

1:44 AM

@Shokhet not really sure what the point of this twitter thread is. There's no debate over the fact that female science fiction authors exist.

@BESW I tried reading Who Fears Death and I'm not sure if I can get past her writing. There's all these little things that make the writing seem not that great. For example, she uses the phrase "delicious delicacy"; couldn't she just use "delicious" or "delicacy"?

BESW

....because a delicatessen is a shop that sells certain kinds of food, and not all delicatessens are notably delicious?

Hamlet

@BESW sorry, it was "delicious delicacy"

Just confirmed using Google Books: the phrase is on the first page of chapter two

BESW

Well, again, a delicacy is a sort of expensive, often foreign or exotic-seeming food. Not everyone thinks all delicacies are delicious. I do agree that's maybe not the best construction, but it's not redundant.

Hamlet

@BESW well, yeah, they aren't synonyms, but it's not the best construction.

BESW

(As I said a while back, I found Who Fears Death to be harder to read than Lagoon. In large part that's a matter of her style shift between the works.)

Hamlet

1:55 AM

@BESW maybe I should try Lagoon.

BESW

Lagoon was always weird, sometimes confusing, and often brutal, but I found it easy to read on a technical level.

Hamlet

I'm the kind of reader who really enjoys good writing with a unique style. So while I think the ideas/themes of Rudyard Kipling's Kim are incredibly banal and problematic, the writing is exquisite.

With Who Fears Death, I don't get the sense that the writing matters for the writing's sake, but that the writing is just a tool to construct a plot.

BESW

I like writing that gets out of its own way. Occasionally I'll find an author for whom reading their text is a technical pleasure (Margery Allingham, Brenda Ueland, Shoghi Effendi), but usually I have less patience for writing-as-spectacle than writing which steps on its own toes.

Hamlet

@BESW I'm not sure if I would describe it as "writing-as-spectacle". I have even less patience for when writers try too hard to come up with interesting ways to describe things.

I guess I like writing where it sounds good when you speak it out loud.

Like this beautiful passage in Their Eyes Were Watching God

>

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Or like The Canterbury Tales, which I'm working my way through and enjoying immensely.

BESW

Ah. Allingham can turn a phrase and evoke a mood or set a scene like no other, while making it seem effortless and conversational. Ueland has a distinctive voice, both friendly and opinionated, with a headlong inertia where idea falls into idea and commas are strictly a sometimes treat. Shoghi has mastered the clear, precise communication of extremely complex concepts in beautiful prose.

Hamlet

2:09 AM

@BESW now I want to read all three authors.

BESW

There's a joke that while many people master the five-sentence paragraph, Shoghi Effendi has mastered the five-paragraph sentence.

Hamlet

I suspect the reason why I can't stand (almost all) science fiction and fantasy is largely the writing.

BESW

Specfic writing I've enjoyed recently... Ursula Vernon, obviously. Folks complain that Ann Leckie's "Imperial Raadch" writing is gimmicky, but I found the style choices absolutely necessary to the underlying themes because they were very effective at re-wiring how I thought about what I was reading.

Hamlet

@BESW your RPG meta post about experience-based answers is a godsend BTW.

BESW

I want to like Valente's writing in Radiance but it feels a little strained.

@Hamlet Thank you! ...Which one?

Hamlet

2:19 AM

I got myself roped into the Interpersonal Skills private beta -- I took a look at the content, saw that no one was writing experience-based answers, and wrote three meta posts explaining what they are, all quoting your answer.

12

A: How should I provide examples of experience as support for my answer?

I like to refer to the advice about what good answers look like which can be found in (strangely enough) "What types of questions should I avoid asking?" It tells me to: explain “why” and “how” write long, not short, answers use a constructive, fair, and impartial tone share experiences over op...

BESW

Ah, yes. It's really surprising to people how much of this is right there in the manual, albeit tucked away in ridiculous corners.

Hamlet

@BESW well, the Stack Exchange platform puts a lot of emphasis on question quality, but not a lot on answer quality.

@BESW and I think you said something like this in chat once, but it's really weird how people who otherwise have a lot of experience with the Stack Exchange platform start a new private beta and forget everything they learned.

BESW

@Hamlet "Once." Hah. It's my refrain and chorus whenever I wind up anywhere near a private beta.

(With a Greek choir of "Why again? Why did he do it again? Why again?")

@Hamlet If anybody ever digs up a reliable copy of the original parenting version of Back It Up!, I will print it out on leaflets and rent a helicopter.

Hamlet

@BESW web.archive.org/web/20091009101403/http://moms4mom.com/…

BESW

> Opinion, by itself, is noise.

Hamlet

2:32 AM

@BESW I don't really know why I got sucked into it; probably some sort of misguided sense of Stack Exchange already has enough @#$!

There are sites that have graduated where the top voted answer to a question begins with "I'm not a <professional>, I'm just a programmer with an interest in <topic>, but here is my <huge wall of text without a single citation>"

BESW

Aye. RPG.SE has an ongoing problem with "Why don't you like my answer that's purely speculation based solely on my assumption that your system I know nothing about is identical to the only system I've ever played?"

But we do have a problem with it, thanks to active community education programs, and that's what keeps us tip-top.

My favorite is "I don't know anything about [freely available system that only takes ten minutes to read] but..."

Hamlet

@BESW and this is example number two on the moms4moms back it up page.

The one issue that I disagree with the moms4moms page on is "Sometimes people just want to poll the Moms4mom audience for ideas that might help solve a problem. People might respond with ideas even though they've never tried it themselves, nor did they read about it somewhere else. This is ok."

BESW

Yeah, that's definitely something which changed over time based on accumulated experiential learning.

When it's working at its best, the Stack follows the very productive, effective model of study/plan/act/reflect/repeat.

But it doesn't have actual structural support for that model, just a potential for the culture to adopt and enforce it.

By contrast, some of the IRL community-building programs I've been involved with will carve out times and spaces for each point on the cycle.

Hamlet

3:05 AM

@BESW well, I think it could be improved if there were a tool for removing answers that don't meet the back it up guideline.

Close reasons are baked into the software, and as a result questions that are too broad (for example) get closed.

But I don't think such a tool will ever be added, because at the moment the company is working on Stack Overflow. Which I understand. But at the same time there's all this wasted potential with sites about topics that would be great for expert Q&A but where the execution is (to put it politely) lacking.

BESW

6:48 AM

Us Stack 2.0+ers always been the pressure valve slash side experiment slash squatters on the edge of the highway.

The mechanical and social bedrock of the network isn't for us; our function is edge-case testing.

user15026

7:05 AM

I started reading Binti just now. Won't get too far into it because it's already after 3 am, but I suspect I am going to like it a lot.

BESW

Haven't picked that one up yet, but I hear good things.

Right now I'm reading the Rivers of London series, which is just one rung up from popcorn urban fantasy.

Prior to that I really enjoyed the Broken Earth series.

(Broken Earth has more deliberately-withholding-information-from-the-reader-which-the-viewpoint-charact‌ers-already-know than I usually like, but it was done well and served a good purpose.)

BESW

7:30 AM

Something that makes Rivers of London stand out is how it uses architecture and architectural history to describe the city and connect the reader with each location's ethos.

Since it's an urban fantasy in which extremely important landmarks (like rivers) have gods and goddesses associated with them, it's quite effective.

Rand al'Thor

7:51 AM

I went to the bookshop yesterday ^ (cc @Gallifreyan)

b_jonas

12:25 PM

The first book of Sapkowski's Witcher still has all copies borrowed from the library.

Gallifreyan

1:27 PM

@Randal'Thor Congrats :) Regarding Good Omens, the relevant Annotated Pratchett file may be useful when reading.

> Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.

The last part doesn't fit in any definition of "gay" I'm aware of.

> They drove back through the dawn, while the cassette player played J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, vocals by F. Mercury.

At first I thought the authors hated Queen, but it turned out to be the opposite.

Mithrandir

@Gallifreyan nitrous oxide is laughing gas, which makes you act happy (hence the name) along with other things.

Gallifreyan

I thought "gay" meant "great" or something like it.

Feeds

2:57 PM

What are the major differences between #ToKillAMockingbird and #GoSetaWatchman by #HarperLee? (spoilers) https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1450/481

Tweeted by StackLiterature on July 13, 2017 at 2:40 PM

Bookworm

4:02 PM

0

Q: Is there a word for a literary technique that allows a short passage to be read aloud in more than one way?

I recently started reading Sam Logan's Sam and Fuzzy online, and am greatly enjoying it. In the fifth volume of the NMS Series (Sam and Fuzzy Missing Inaction, "Boundaries, Pt. 9") there's a cute scene where Sam references the Hokey Pokey, and two other characters finish the traditional verse. ...

Mithrandir

@Bookworm hmm. Do we actually want single-word-requests here or let ELU keep them?

I think last time we had a question like that it got sent over to ELU

Shokhet

@Bookworm @BESW This question is your fault. Started with that free book, continued reading online.

@Mithrandir Really? I've seen other questions like this around the site, even looked at them for tagging. Hold on...

Here's one.

Mithrandir

That may have been because it wasn't really about Literature - yours is more directly related, but it gets hard to see where the line is.

literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2569/…

Shokhet

That's odd. I thought there was more than one, but I can't find them right now, with various search terms. Hm.

@Mithrandir Not much harder than asking if any question is about literature, no?

Mithrandir

4:19 PM

Where do we draw the line between 'What's the term for when an author switches styles in the middle of a book' and 'I read that people are descended from animals in a book; what's that called'?

I might write a meta post after shul, if I remember.

Shokhet

@Mithrandir I...am not sure what you're asking here, but that's probably because I don't understand your second example question.

Mithrandir

@Shokhet the second example question is essentially 'this happens in a book: What's it called'

Shokhet

@Mithrandir Aha. Why do you assume it's off-topic, then? The particular example you cited might be "better" for SFF, but I could see that question here, if it's about understanding the work in question.

Okay, I guess that maybe it isn't about understanding a work, the way you phrased it. If it's only asking for a word describing a particular magic or scifi thing, it may not fit well here. Send those to SFF or ELU, sure.

Mithrandir

5:19 PM

@Shokhet yeah, this may be worth a meta

Bookworm

5:57 PM

0

Q: American children's folk tales

Could anyone quote children's tales originating from North America that are considered folktales? Old or "new", doesn't matter, however, -I am trying to look for tales that are not linked to any single author, -and that are NOT stories of the first peoples of America.

folk-tales

user15026

8:21 PM

PSA: If you have not read Binti by Nnedi Okorafor and you like short stories set in space with PoC mains that are just really really good, well, you should read it.

2

Mithrandir

PoC?

user15026

Person/People of Color

Gallifreyan

9:41 PM

@Shokhet Finished Understanding Comics. I liked the part about back-tracing from the surface to the idea.

BESW

10:24 PM

V cool Squamish language project https://www.kwiawtstelmexw.com/comeback/

Tweeted by beatonna on July 12, 2017 at 3:28 PM

Feeds

10:48 PM

What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land by #TSEliot? https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/922/481

Tweeted by StackLiterature on July 13, 2017 at 10:20 PM

Rand al'Thor

11:13 PM

@Mithrandir Pirates of Caribbean :-P

BESW

11:26 PM

Few writings survive in Old Saxon. One of the most important is now digitised #PolonskyPre1200 http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2017/07/the-heliand.html

Tweeted by BLMedieval on July 13, 2017 at 11:01 PM

Guys, the Heliand is a WILD RIDE and you should find a translation. https://twitter.com/blmedieval/status/885635207415472128

Tweeted by UrsulaV on July 13, 2017 at 11:23 PM

Bookworm

0

Q: What exactly happened at the end of The Dumb Waiter?

I've read a few critical explanations and exegeses on Harold Pinter's one-act play, The Dumb Waiter. I'm still confused by a few things that happen at the very end, before the curtain. I understand that Ben got the order to kill Gus, but what confuses me is how Gus went into the lavatory, through...

theater harold-pinter the-dumb-waiter

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