I am trying to remember the name of a short story by Roald Dahl about a man who systematically got drunk at home every Saturday night & his wife kills him I think by putting something in his drink
Stepping around bales
Of fencing wires and a clutter
Of machine parts on my way
To class
I stopped to watch two men
On top of the building next door to mine
Tossing rectangles
Of old or damaged asphalt
Sheets off the roof and
Into the bed
Of a red pickup parked
For floors below on the grass.
I st...
What genre are Franz Kafka's novels? Is Kafka too hard to fit into a specific genre? I am asking this because everyone I ask this question to says Kafkaesque.
I think the quarantine hair hat makes my avi look more like a gorilla than an orangutan. Gorillas are nice too, but I adore orangutans. Like, they've actually figured out how to use Tinder. I don't think gorillas have. (My avi is from one of the newspaper stories that ran when the orangutans-use-Tinder story first broke, but I can't find the specific story any more.)
I'm not actually too familiar with those tabloids or their Wikipedia presence. Is The Sun actually a more reliable publication? I didn't even know The Daily Mail was considered an unreliable source on Wikipedia.
When I first read the story it was in The Telegraph, I think, but it's paywalled now. I showed the story my husband (he died later in 2017) and his reaction was: "Oh my god, do they want the great apes to take over the world? Why are we giving them the tools to do so?" A little further discussion led us both to conclude that our cousins the orangutans would probably do a better job of running the world than humans do.
@verbose Neither of them should be taken very seriously. The Sun is more known for showing breasts on page 3 than for any actual news, and the Daily Mail ... well, Dan & Dan said it more stylishly than I could.
I suppose it says something about Britain that those are the two most popular UK newspapers :-/
Oh, apparently the Metro's overtaken them in the last few years.
> For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
In the Hitchhikers series, humans are the 3rd most intelligent species on Earth, after mice (who created the planet in the first place as a machine to find the Ultimate Question) and dolphins.
@Randal'Thor I don't think monkeys and/or sloths are smart enough to use iPads. (The orangutan is actually using the iPad, not just holding it. Of course my husband pointed out that they have an unfair advantage because they can grip the iPad with their prehensile hind paws and then drive it two-handed whereas we have to hold it in one hand and have only the other actually to manipulate the iPad.)
@Randal'Thor Actually I have read that quote. Thanks for reminding me. I did try reading H2G2 once but I think you have to read it as a teenager to really enjoy it and love it throughout your life. (I feel the same way about Jane Eyre and LOTR)
@verbose I hadn't even realised that's a real photo, let alone that it was actually using the device as designed.
It seems that humans aren't content with ruining their own and their children's brains with smart device addiction, they want to spread it to other primates too ;-)
well orangutans are endangered and the Danish? zoo was trying to get them to pair them up
The idea was that it's very expensive to move an orangutan from one zoo to another and then find that the two orangutans that are being set up don't like each other
so let the orangutans use Tinder to pick the mates they'd actually like
It was a successful program, as I understand
Of course the orangutan in that pic is too small to be dating (no adult orangutan would be entirely hidden by an iPad) so you may be right that it's just brain rot
The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory,
groaned as if it would deny what had happened. Bars of sunlight cast
through rents in the walls made motes of dust glitter where they yet
hung in the air. Scorch-marks marred the walls, the floors, the
ceilings. Broad black smea...
@Bookworm y'know I don't think an asker who doesn't understand "mind-twisting" is going to understand what the answer means by "it says on the tin" means either ... sigh.
The opening stanza of Maya Angelou's poem "Alone" goes like this:
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
I'm a bit con...
@Bookworm The Kafka question was closed for a reason that inclues "the 'genre' tag specifically says 'Note that questions asking for the genre of a work are off-topic.'". If that's the reason, it's better to edit out the tag than to closevote the question for it, @spagirl.
This looks like people closevoting just to get the Bouncer hat.
It was obviously not about genre but style, as the comments clarified. The appropriate response would have been to revise the question based on the comments.
If the intent is to chase new users away, keep doing this.
I don't know. The thing asked for genre and apparently that's off-topic. If he didn't actually want to ask for genre, fine. But you might be a bit harsh on the Spagirl.
I wrote "style" because that's the best term I could come up with based on what the OP wrote. I hope they come back to expand on what they have in mind. (Although my hopes aren't too high after the question got closed.)
@b_jonas Indeed, I couldn't figure out the connection between the labels and the wedges. Like, what is the blue wedge between "poisoned" and "stabbed and poisoned" at the bottom of the chart?
@PrinceNorthLæraðr I agree with the close votes here. I didn't cast one, as far as I recall (I didn't realize until just now that questions like "what genre is this" were off topic). But the question was clearly about genre—I don't think "fantasy, realism, and absurdist" are styles, they're genres. As are magic realism, historical romance, etc.
A specific question like "Can Kafka be considered magic realism?" is probably on topic, IMO. Even if the answer is simply "There are arguments to be made on both sides." But a broad "what genre is this?" is just too open-ended.
What genre are Franz Kafka's novels? Is Kafka too hard to fit into a specific genre? I am asking this because everyone I ask this question to says Kafkaesque.
The opening stanza of Maya Angelou's poem "Alone" goes like this:
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
I'm a bit con...
