The Reading Room

« first day (2262 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2371 days later) »

12:41 AM

Q: Were the footnotes included in the original text of the 1002nd Tale of Scheherezade?

The short story "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade" by Edgar Allan Poe details a great many wonders of the more modern world being described by Scheherezade to her husband, in terms familiar to them, in such a way that they would have sounded preposterous to people of their time. In m...

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor If you post what you're trying to ask I can give you some feedback.

user61230

1:18 AM

Bookworm

2:53 AM

Q: What were the three clues mentioned at end of Agatha Christie's And There Were None?

In the end of the book it is said that the culprit believes, eventhough the crimes were is perfect and police will be unable to solve it, there are three clues left that can help identify the Killer. What are these three clues?

agatha-christie

Bookworm

3:21 AM

Q: Did Pilate had a vision of Woland/Satan?

In "Master and Margerita", after hearing from Berlioz that Jesus was a fictional character, Woland starts to describe the meeting between procurator Pilate and prisoner Yeshua Ha-Notsri, saying that "he was there, hiding". I always assumed that he indeed was somewhere in the background, but the...

russian-literature master-and-margarita

3 hours later…

user15026

5:55 AM

@BESW I love so many of his tweets.

Gallifreyan

8:22 AM

@Randal'Thor I like your American Gods answer very much. Good job there ;-)

2 hours later…

Hamlet

10:06 AM

Hey someone should ask some questions about Tony Harrison, because S.Bailey is really interested in that poet according to their profile, and we could definitely get some good answers from those questions.

Also Tony Harrison is apparently a really good poet but the little bit of research I've done, so it would probably be an enjoyable read

@Randal'Thor yeah its just that there needs to be a consistent way of defining those questions

cause otherwise you get the situation we have now where it's impossible to figure out when the meaning tag should be used, and it really isn't useful because it isn't used consistently.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet I can get behind the idea of renaming the tag; I just think we need to find a better name.

Mithrandir

the giant scrolling header on this is so annoying poetryfoundation.org/poets/tony-harrison

Rand al'Thor

If I have time one day, I might compile a list of all the meaning questions, and try to find a good succinct way of describing them.

Like BESW said, it's often helpful to have explicit example questions to discuss.

Maybe something like meaning-of-passage?

Or meaning-of-words ... ugh, no.

Mithrandir

oh, look, Dictionary.SE!

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor it's also important to have an explanation of what the tag is useful for

Rand al'Thor

10:21 AM

@Hamlet As far as I can tell (again, should look at real examples to confirm), it's useful for when you don't understand the meaning of some words/phrases/sentences/passages in a piece of literature.

Maybe we could take a leaf out of ELU's book and call it meaning-in-context?

Rand al'Thor

10:56 AM

@Hamlet Might be fun to have some questions about his poem "V" - see how the community handles questions about profanity.

(and racism apparently? I haven't read the whole poem yet)

Hamlet

based on past experience, questions about profanity do well, but questions about race/racism do poorly.

there's a reason why I haven't spammed the site with zora-neale-hurston questions, for example.

Rand al'Thor

I thought you got some interesting answers to your question about race in one of Lem's stories.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Rand al'Thor

(portrayal of race in sci-fi is such a massive topic ... maybe we should try more questions about that)

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor ehhhhhhhhhhhh

If you're willing to read Playing in the Dark before asking those questions

Rand al'Thor

11:02 AM

Not sure how I feel about being expected to read a whole book of literary criticism before asking questions about a topic.

Before answering questions, maybe - but you don't always have to be super-well-informed to ask a reasonable question.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor well...

Rand al'Thor

(dammit, I'm so going to get Tony Harrison and Toni Morrison mixed up)

Hamlet

Reading that particular work of literary criticism (which is very short, no more than three chapters, and reasonably accessible in terms of the language it uses) will actually lead to you asking better questions

And it certainly will help you decide what is a good answer and what isn't

And if you're answering a question about race, if you don't have (1) personal experience or (2) if you haven't read that book or a book similar to it, then you are going to do poorly.

Rand al'Thor

I'm not saying it's not a good book, or that it won't change the way I ask questions about race. But we can't expect everyone to have read that before asking their questions. Many questions are ill-informed; remedying that is one of the things answers are for.

If you've read it, maybe you could use what you learned from it to write good educational answers to such questions?

Hamlet

I mean, I wrote a few answers and an entire blog post (which is a horrible blog post that I need to revise, but also a good introduction despite its many flaws)

And there's also the fact that I don't really have the ability to write answers about race at the moment.

This is the kind of thing, where, like close reading, it requires more than one person to do the research and the thinking.

and then there's also this, which is probably something that people on this site should read as well

Sep 2 at 16:50, by BESW

You may find the 2003 article "Tropes, Facts, and Empiricism," by Daryn Lehoux, very interesting.

BESW

11:29 AM

I love that article. It's a ridiculously esoteric approach to a very universal concept, but the distance of its particular example from contemporary life is part of what makes it possible to understand the concept.

(Kinda like how scifi often uses futuristic metaphors to discuss contemporary problems, because the distance helps consider the subject with greater clarity.)

Does anyone else shout out dramatic lines as they're writing them?

Tweeted by casskhaw on October 19, 2017 at 4:32 AM

Hamlet

12:13 PM

@BESW haven't actually read it but I've read most of the stuff it cites, so I have a pretty good idea of what it's saying

6 hours later…

Bookworm

6:22 PM

Q: In what way was Dr. Robert Stadler based on Robert Oppenheimer?

Wikipedia describes Dr. Robert Stadler from Atlas Shrugged as follows: A former professor at Patrick Henry University, and along with colleague Hugh Akston, mentor to Francisco d'Anconia, John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjöld. He has since become a sell-out, one who had great promise but squandere...

character-analysis atlas-shrugged ayn-rand

Q: Did Ayn Rand interview Robert Oppenheimer, and if so, how did she use the material?

This is a follow-up question to this question. I thought that it was better to post this as a second, related question though to avoid the original question from being too broad. Wikipedia describes Dr. Robert Stadler from Atlas Shrugged as follows: A former professor at Patrick Henry Univer...

atlas-shrugged ayn-rand

1 hour later…

Bookworm

7:24 PM

Q: Why did Robert Stadler claim that John Galt was "probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere"?

When Dagney Taggert went to see Dr. Robert Stadler at the State Science Institute, in explanation for his mistrust of humans and human reason, he told the story of his three students: "These three men, these three who held all the hope which the gift of intelligence ever proffered, these thre...

character-analysis atlas-shrugged ayn-rand

3 hours later…

BESW

10:23 PM