The Reading Room

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verbose

03:13

@CDR I lied when I said that a good book on Indian classical music was Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag. That book is on my to-read shelf. The book I was thinking of was his The Immortals (New York: Knopf, 2009). Here is the passage about the sound of the tanpura. The point of view is that of a singer and teacher named Shyam Lal:

> its sound shocked you every time you heard it—like a god humming to himself, its vibrations difficult to describe or report on, the solipsism of the heavens.

Here is one of Shyam Lal's students, Nirmalya, thinking about ragas. I think this description would make better sense to listeners/students of Hindustani / North Indian rather than Carnatic / South Indian music, though:

> The raga contained the land within it—its seasons, its time of day, its birdcall, its clouds and heat—it gave him an ideal, magical sense of the country; it was a fiction he fell in love with.

verbose

03:29

From such moments it's evident that Chaudhuri is a student of music. I've not read very many novels or short stories about Indian music that capture its ethos well, but Chaudhuri's novel does. Anita Desai's short story The Accompanist is good on the psychology but wrong about so many details of music and performance, it's embarrassing.

And the R K Narayan works we've talked about ("Selvi" and The Guide) are both written from the point of view of outsiders, not performers, so while they're good about the social conditions of performance, they're not really about the art itself.

Speaking of which, I came across this article by T M Krishna in Caravan that talks about Subbulakshmi and T Sadasivan. I found it interesting, though apparently it's quite controversial.

I wish I'd found it a few days earlier, when I was working on that answer about R K Narayan; it would have been a good reference to add.

1 hour later…

Feeds

04:41

verbose has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

verbose

@Feeds H'm how do I get the feed name to show up prettily and not as a URL?

Feeds

04:59

Q: Meaning of "teen" in Aeschylus's play "The Persians"

I came across the phrase "how shall I bear my teen?" in Aeschylus' play "The Persians". I also saw "the children of teen" in "Seven against Thebes". What does teen mean here?

Q: What does "the jeering claque of the State police" mean?

I found this phrase in John Le Carré's novel Smiley's People. The whole sentence is: The chattering customers in the café became the jeering claque of the State police; the slamming of the bagatelle tables, the crash of iron doors. The State police here refers to Russian police; this was in the...

meaning-in-context literature

Q: In H. P. Lovecraft's work - how is "The Prolonged of Life" understood when it comes to meaning?

I'm translating one of the stories into my mother tongue and I'm struggling with the name of one of the elder gods - "The Prolonged of Life". I do not really understand how this is meant to be interpreted - the one (or ones) that have prolonged life? That one that prolongs life? The adjective con...

meaning literature archaicisms

Q: What's the meaning of "sing'lar"?

And a mighty sing'lar and pretty place it is, as ever I saw in all the days of my life!" said Captain Jorgan, looking up at it. The term is mentioned in the first line of Charles Dickens's A Message from the Sea. I know that it's an archaic word but I can't find it in any dictionary.

meaning vocabulary semantics literature dictionaries

Q: Understanding the joke, "Make an 'ell, I say" (from The Crux)

Reading chapter 1 of The Crux, there is a joke that I don't understand about the three "Foote girls," who are in their 50s and visiting Mr. and Mrs. Lane. Here is the paragraph in question: Mrs. Lane received them amiably; the minister's new wife, Mrs. Williams, was proving a little difficult to...

literature humor twentieth-century-english

verbose

05:09

wait a sec, why are old questions showing up? I must have made some mistake in creating the feed ...

Mithical

05:22

@verbose When a new feed is added to a chatroom, it automatically posts the last five items in the feed into chat.

3 hours later…

Bookworm

08:33

Q: Why is the Hayters' way of living described as "...inferior, retired, and unpolished" in "Persuasion"?

When discussing the background of Mrs. Hayter and Mrs. Musgrove in Jane Austen's Persuasion, and the difference in the lifestyle of the two sisters, the novel says: Mrs. Musgrove and Mrs. Hayter were sisters. They had each had money, but their marriages had made a material difference in their de...

jane-austen persuasion

8 hours later…

Bookworm

16:08

Q: Short Story About A Newspaper Carrier Whose Newspapers Get Wet Due To Rain - Printed an Early 1970s 8th Grade English Literature Texbook

I am searching for the title of a short story that is about a newspaper carrier who is a male child that is approximately the age of 10 to 16. In the short story, the newspaper carrier is delivering newspapers to various people on his newspaper delivery route. Due to rain that is falling while th...

short-stories

2 hours later…

Bookworm

18:25

Q: Who coined the phrase, "the Stoic Mistake"?

Forty-odd years ago I read something to the effect that ‘the Stoic mistake was to believe that a man could always be capable of what he was capable of at his best’. (I am sure this is inexact) Does anyone have an idea of where it originated?

quote-source history-of-literature

2 hours later…

Bookworm

20:41

Q: Did Uyghur poets make a "strong" distinction between poetry and music?

The forward to Uyghur Poems (written by Aziz Isa Elkun) comments that In later centuries, Uyghurs continued to compose poems in order to spread news, record significant contemporary events or the tragedies of war, and to keep recent history alive in the collective memory. Public transmission of ...