The Reading Room

7:21 AM

Been a quiet couple of days on the main site.

Our QPD on Area 51 has gone back below 5 for the first time in a while.

1 hour later…

8:29 AM

@EddieKal Do you know what modernism means?

Q: Why is the short Vietnamese piece "Learning Late Letters" called a "poem"?

9:15 AM

More Vietnamese literature from Words Without Borders.

Bookworm

"Learning Late Letters", originally written in Vietnamese by Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên, was one of the winners of the 2020 Words Without Borders Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest. But, looking at the text of this short piece of literature, it doesn't fit with what I (having read mo...

1 hour later…

b_jonas

10:33 AM

@EddieKal We have Harry Potter answers, isn't that modern enough?

2 hours later…

12:39 PM

@b_jonas "Recent" is not the same thing as "modern", though.

Napoleon Wilson

> Schief ist Englisch und Englisch ist modern.

1 hour later…

2:05 PM

@Tsundoku Let's see how I'd like to respond to that and how many steps we need to take to tie everything together without namedropping. Do you know where my question came from?

@TheMaskedRebel Hello

Have you ever read finnegans wake?

I am certain several of us in this room have

Do you have a question about it?

How do I read the damned thing

Mithical

2:14 PM

One sentence at a time...

And you still can't make head or tail of the sentence @Mithical

2:39 PM

@EddieKal I don't see how the sociology/anthropology of science is relevant here, if that is what you were referring to.

@Tsundoku What is modernism?

@EddieKal My earlier comment referred to modernism in literature.

@Tsundoku I know. I am inviting you to give a definition

And we will start from there

I don't have a definition at hand.

I think it'd be conducive to a plain discussion if you could explain modernism in your own words. Because online/printed definitions don't necessarily agree with each other and also because it is a multi-faceted concept, as a lot of concepts are, our discussion should focus on what we see in modernism

2:53 PM

Why should it? What do we know better than scholars who have studied literature for years?

Like I said, they don't agree with each other and each person has their own focus

Also people should.

I read a book that was 20 years in the making and I should be able to tell people what the book is about

Tolstoy spent what, 6, 7 years writing War and Peace? Say I read it in a matter of weeks and I am nowhere near Tolstoy in terms of knowing everything there is to know about War and Peace

But I should be able to summarize what the book is about, from my perspective

@TheMaskedRebel If you're not enjoying Finnegans Wake then it's fine to put it down and read something else — you can always come back to it later!

@Tsundoku And I'd say that Penguin book doesn't seem to be a good point of departure for a conversation about modernism in general. It is partial. I haven't read it but the title appears to make it clear it is about European literature only

And possibly with a Western European skew

@TheMaskedRebel But if you are determined to get something out of it, then there are some online resources that annotate the text with observations and theories. I like to use FinnegansWiki

3:12 PM

@GarethRees I'm enjoying its musical like lyrics(and even actual music notation on a page), but I can't understand much of the meaning. All I know is that a guy called finnegan fell off a ladder, died. They had a wake for him, and tried to eat him, but he dissapeared. Then something about the history of Ireland. I recognised a reference to druid bonfires but not much else. Then more murky waters until I came to the jute and mutt conversation. I understood nothing except someone was deaf and mute.

After that, I recognised some references to the bible and interpereted that as a proclamation of the death of language, maybe. Apart from that, I understood nothing. TBH, the thing that bugs me the most is the conversation between mutt and jutt, wellingstones museum. I didn't understand anything about them

@TheMaskedRebel Mutt & Jute dialogue starts here in FinnegansWiki

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

4:26 PM

A little poem I've composed about a friend

It's the last golden autumn days in the Urals

@CowperKettle I am tempted to ask a question on Lit about this poem and cowperkettle

CowperKettle

@EddieKal You can ask, but I'm not sure that it's on-topic, because I'm not a famous poet )))

It has never been published in a book, I composed it several hours ago ))

Cowper is one of my favorite poets, hence the name ))

William Cowper

William Cowper ( KOO-pər; 26 November 1731 – 25 April 1800) was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th-century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet", whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak.After being institutionalised for insanity, Cowper found refuge in a fervent evangelical Christianity. He continued to suffer doubt and, after a...

4:44 PM

@CowperKettle Interesting! Never read him before.

Oh he was friends with John Newton.

CowperKettle

He wrote beautiful simple poems: Snail

And I memorized this one by heart: A tale. 1793

Q: How do the lyrics of "上を向いて歩こう" relate to its English title "Sukiyaki"?

5:08 PM

We only have one question tagged william-cowper so far — I suspect he's not much read. Though "I sing the sofa" is a great opening sentence

1 hour later…

Bookworm

6:27 PM

The English title of the Japanese song 上を向いて歩こう is a head scratcher. The lyrics: 上を向いて歩こう涙がこぼれないように思い出す春の日一人ぽっちの夜上を向いて歩こうにじんだ星をかぞえて思い出す夏の日一人ぽっちの夜幸せは雲の上に幸せは空の上に上を向いて歩こう涙がこぼれないように泣きながら歩く一人ぽっちの夜思い出す秋の日一人ぽっちの夜悲しみは星のかげに悲しみは月のかげに上を向いて歩こう涙がこぼれないように泣きながら歩く一人ぽっちの夜一人ぽっちの夜 Eng...

song-lyrics title

6:41 PM

@CowperKettle There's no need to be famous or even published to be on-topic here :-) In fact I even asked a question before about a short story written by an SE user for a writing challenge.

@EddieKal I hope you do! Then we can get an answer from "Word of God" as they'd say on SFF - from the author themselves - and perhaps see how critics' interpretations differ from that.

@Randal'Thor I was waiting for someone to jump in and say "Famous is not a criterion for topicality and we welcome questions about works by non famous authors"