The Reading Room

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11:48 AM

Q: Wny did Raymond Williams always take the best ones?

In "Sever" from the Karate album Unsolved (2000), we can hear the following lines: Because in my life there was only asbestos And Raymond Williams, you always took the best ones Now, like failed pedestrian dreams That's how it seems to me Raymond Williams (1921 – 1988) was a Welsh M...

Mithical

@Tsundoku do you write your questions in a text editor and then paste them into the question box?

Tsundoku

12:11 PM

@Mithical Sometimes. Unfortunately, that leads to whacky linebreaks.

Napoleon Wilson

That's why I usually postprocess linebreaks after pasting something. Often necessary with quote blocks.

Napoleon Wilson

12:43 PM

It seems I also missed the anniversay of the Frankfurt Parliament by just under a month with my LEGO model of St. Paul's Church. Missed occasions over missed occasions. :'(

Bookworm

Q: Identify this book

It was a book from 1970s or 1980s about physics written in a popular informal way. It described relative motion by example of shooting an arrow from the back of a train, it described the Michelson-Morley experiment and it contained a quote from Lewis Carroll. But I was thinking of a plan ...

story-identification physical-books

Tsundoku

12:59 PM

@Bookworm wny is the active imperfective form of the Old Egyptian verb wn (to open). The rest of my question is in present-day English.

Mithical

Gonna use that in Bananagrams now, thanks.

Napoleon Wilson

You really took your commitment to the Gilgamesh epic serious, did you?

Tsundoku

1:16 PM

I still can't write in cuneiform, though. That writing system is atrocious, even compared with Chinese.

b_jonas

@Tsundoku Why is it worse than chinese? Isn't it just that we have too few information available about Akkadian and also too few readily available learning materials, compared to Chinese which a lot of people are actively learning from good sources?

Tsundoku

Chinese script has recognizable components: semantic components meaning water, fire, silk, dog, ice, wheat, meat, etc; and components that have a phonetic function. This helps you remember them (at least somewhat). This is less obvious in cuneiform (as far as I know), except perhaps in its earliest stages.

b_jonas

@Tsundoku Yes, so Akkadian cuneiform instead has much more phonetic components, and a lot of multi-syllable words represented by multiple signs, one corresponding to each syllable. It certainly helps you less now than it would have helped someone back when they wrote it and was somewhat familiar with the spoken language.

Tsundoku

The worst script I've ever seen is ʼPhags-pa script, though.

b_jonas

1:31 PM

Are you just saying that Akkadian is worse because how the semantic components were written aren't iconic enough?

@Tsundoku I don't know anything about that. (Not that I know much about Chinese or Akkadian.)

2 hours later…

Bookworm

3:44 PM

Q: What's meant here by "interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken cylinders"?

In "The Worst Crime in the World" by G. K. Chesterton, the author was saying in its beginning: FATHER BROWN was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression that suggested that he had not come there to look at the pictures. Indeed, he did not want to look at the pictures, though he...

meaning short-stories g-k-chesterton

Rand al'Thor

@Bookworm Modern art?

Bookworm

4:06 PM

Q: the words "latter" and "former" refer to which statements here?

the words "latter" and "former" refer to which statements here? It is to be remarked that the Davenports themselves, as contrasted with their friends and travelling companions, never claimed any preternatural origin for their results. The reason for this may have been that as an entertainment it...

arthur-conan-doyle the-history-of-spiritualism

4 hours later…

Bookworm

8:12 PM

Q: Quote like "Learn the call of birds and you will never be alone" source?

I read this quote a few years ago and cannot remember the source. I could be misremembering it or combining two quotes together? I just took up birding and this quote is so true: there are not many places (outdoors) that you can be alone from humans and not occasionally hear a bird. I don't thin...

quote-identification

Q: Dostoevsky's attitude towards Sonya Marmeladova

Note: The question concerns a somewhat touchy topic - prostitution. I am not a native English speaker, therefore, I cannot be sure which terms are suitable for a discussion. I am using words of the same root as the words in my native language (Russian) which are considered not to be derogatory an...

russian-literature fyodor-dostoyevsky the-bible crime-and-punishment

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

9:50 PM

@NapoleonWilson Congrats on 1k reputation! Now you can edit whatever you want.

Napoleon Wilson

Indeed.

Rand al'Thor

Took me a while to get through that answer, but it's indeed worth an upvote. Now you'll get another Revival too.

Napoleon Wilson

Heh, thank you.

I have another long one in stock and I finally finished the book. It really helps to know the questions before reading the book. Especially when you would otherwise have to scan 600 pages for quotes, provided you remember the story in the first place.

Rand al'Thor

You read a 600-page book just to answer some questions on Lit SE? ;-)

Napoleon Wilson

Well, I didn't actually read. Someone read it to me. ;-)

But that also wasn't the motivation. I just heard it's supposed to be kind of a big deal and set in the world of '20s/30s architecture, above all inspired by Wright's work. And I constantly struggle to find audiobooks I'm interested in anyway.

But I checked the site's questions early on, so I also had something to work on and look out for.

Bookworm

10:05 PM

Q: How can there be an Icnield Way in Hybras?

Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy includes some detailed worldbuilding of the island of Hybras (a.k.a. Atlantis), located off the Bay of Biscay and, at least at the time the story starts, divided into ten kingdoms (Lyonesse, Dahaut, Troicinet, Dascinet, North Ulfland, South Ulfland, Godelia, Pomperol...