The Reading Room

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5:26 AM

Q: What was Fred Kinnan gaining from his racket?

In the discussion of Directive 10-289, Fred Kinnan said the following: His smile disappeared, and with a sudden, bitter look of weariness he added, "...I'm not going to say that I'm working for the welfare of my public, because I know I'm not. I know that I'm delivering the poor bastards into...

6 hours later…

BESW

11:24 AM

This groundbreaking anthology from @AnitaHeiss aims to enlighten, inspire and educate about the lives of Aboriginal people in Australia today -- http://bit.ly/2G943oy

Tweeted by book_world on March 11, 2018 at 12:55 AM

BESW

11:42 AM

I think we’ve had more than enough LOTR babies.

Tweeted by Nnedi on March 11, 2018 at 12:49 AM in reply to Nnedi

user15026

11:59 AM

@BESW amen

user15026

@BESW okay I might have to grab this

Rand al'Thor

12:30 PM

@Ash Starred <3

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

2:33 PM

Whew, I finally got it together to write up an answer to this one:

A: How many of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience come in pairs?

Let's start by listing the titles of all the Songs, and noting that you can read them in full here. I'll now discuss various possible pairings among these poems, but bear in mind that there's no definitive answer to this. Arguments could be made for many different ways of pairing up, and we're...

Bit too late for the Blake topic challenge, but no matter.

user15026

2:43 PM

@Randal'Thor aww yay

Bookworm

3:04 PM

Q: Helen's disposition

Q: In what way Helen's disposition help her to lead a successful life? Do you think her temperament was always a positive feature? Why or why not? This was a question in my English communicative exam in novel text part from "The story of my life" by Helen Keller. What are the instances I could...

epistolary-novel

Bookworm

3:56 PM

Q: What is the meaning of Flavie's final statement?

At the end of Nantas (1878) by Émile Zola, the last words of the short story is Flavie's final statement: ENGLISH: "I love you!", she cried to her neck, sobbing, tearing this confession from her pride, from all her being tamed, "I love you because you are strong!" FRENCH: « Je ...

meaning french-literature nantas emile-zola

Q: Where did the names Siegfried and Tristan Farnon come from?

The British vet and writer Alfred Wight is best known for his series of semi-autobiographical stories written under the pen name James Herriot, recounting details of his experience as a country vet in North Yorkshire. In these books, he himself appears as James/Jim Herriot, rather than his real n...

name-significance james-herriot

Bookworm

4:12 PM

Q: Why did Zola name his principal character "Nantas", whose inverted word is "Satan"?

Émile Zola named his short story and its principal character Nantas, but when the name is inverted, it becomes Satan. Why did he choose this?

short-stories french-literature name-significance emile-zola

3 hours later…

user15026

7:08 PM

@BESW I am starting Cold Comfort Farm

user15026

So far it is quite ridiculous and I am enjoying it greatly.

Rand al'Thor

7:45 PM

@Ash Yay!

Got a bunch of unanswered cold-comfort-farm questions waiting for you :-)

user31078

8:11 PM

Would this be an appropriate place to ask people where to find good literary journals for essays like A Hanging? I'm very new to not only this site, but professional writing. I imagine writing would be a good place to ask this question as well, but my question is less to do about actually writing than it is about the literary journals themselves.

Rand al'Thor

@user31078 Asking on the main Literature site would be off-topic as a recommendation question, but asking in this chatroom is totally fine :-) We have some very well-read and knowledgeable people in here - like Ash, @BESW, and @ChristopheStrobbe - who may be able to help you.

user31078

Cool, thanks! This site has me a bit intimidated as some people here have been quite harsh to me. Not in this site of course, but others.

Mithrandir

Unfortunately, Stack Exchange can be a bit harsh on new users :/. Welcome to Literature.SE chat, anyway!

user31078

I was reading A Hanging and I wondered "what newspaper on the planet would have accepted such a weird essay?" And I looked it up only to find that it was of course not in a newspaper, but instead a literary journal, which made much more sense. I've looked at some literary journals, but they don't seem to be offering that... weird, interesting, ambiguous essence that was Orwell's A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant.

So, I was hoping someone here might have the answers!

And thanks for the welcome. It does seem very harsh on new users.

1 hour later…

Christophe Strobbe

9:45 PM

@user31078 @Randal'Thor pinged me, but I have to admit I don't ready any literary magazines. For American literary magazines, Wikipedia has a long list: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_literary_magazines

@user31078 And British literary magazines: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:British_literary_magazines. Many are defunct now.

2 hours later…

Napoleon Wilson

11:42 PM

So there's author tags to be used together with work tags, and yet the work tags have the author's name included, too? Isn't that like the worst of both worlds?

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson The work tags have the author's name included only if they'd otherwise be ambiguous.

A: Expand scope of tag 'the-art-of-war'

I think that a single book tag should refer only to a single book. It will be confusing to use the same tag for questions about different unrelated works which happen to share a title. If tags should be a way of marking out a specific area of expertise, well, nobody's going to be an expert on "a...

A: The tag [the-dark-tower] is ambiguous

Per my answer here and the following discussion in comments, we should disambiguate the tag by adding the author's name to the tag name. I think that a single book tag should refer only to a single book. It will be confusing to use the same tag for questions about different unrelated works wh...

An author tag is still valuable because experts in (say) Thomas Hardy can use it to look for questions about any of his works, rather than searching for each title individually.

Napoleon Wilson

I see.

Rand al'Thor

And of course author tags are absolutely necessary for questions about short stories or poems which don't get their own tags.

Napoleon Wilson

Yeah, yeah, I know this site does author tags.

I was just confused about these book-lastname things that seemed to arise lately.

Rand al'Thor

I guess there's been unusually many of them lately, with both Antigone and Story of My Life.

So far we've had very few title tags which needed to be disambiguated.

Napoleon Wilson

11:49 PM

Someone else wrote something called "Antigone", too?

Rand al'Thor

Although love probably needs it too.

Napoleon Wilson

Unless it is a tag for questions about....love. ;-)

Rand al'Thor

@NapoleonWilson Check the tag wiki for antigone-sophocles (assuming Christophe's edit has gone through).

Napoleon Wilson

Oh, so you're doing that whenever some work with the same name exists and not necessarily just when there's questions about it?

In that case, you might want to consider doing that for every work.

Rand al'Thor

Seems so. Or at least when someone notices that another work with the same name exists.

Napoleon Wilson

11:52 PM

Oh.

Rand al'Thor

If only we could have tag hierarchies :-/

Q: A proposal for tag hierarchy on Stack Exchange sites

Executive summary Introduction of sparse hierarchy (partial inheritance relation) into the set of tags on Stack Exchange sites, in order to allow more efficient question organization/filtering/tagging (especially via "Interesting"/"Ignored" mechanism). The proposal is designed to achieve its go...