The Reading Room - 2020-04-24

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2:03 AM

0

Q: Where are the Rosicrucian Original Texts in Latin or German (online or offline)?

Looking here, there are 3 or 4 texts which I can only find English translations of online. Do the original German or Latin ones exist anywhere online or off? Fama Fraternitatis Confessio Fraternitatis The Chymical Wedding of C.R.C.

german-literature latin-literature

3 hours later…

4:58 AM

@Mithical Me too :-)

@Gallifreyan Well, with author tags we do have at least some clear usage guidance: use for questions about X or about any of their literary works. That's important to make clear, e.g. for people coming from other sites (like SFF) where author tags are only used for questions specifically about the author and not about their works. (cc @North if you're editing author tag wikis)

Agreed on tag wikis (as opposed to excerpts) seeming a bit pointless. At least it's somewhere to put a big pile of extra info if needed: like for story-identification we stuck checklists in there and we can link new askers to the tag info page.

I'd forgotten about Hamlet's meta post on meaning and symbolism. I think I promised to write up a detailed answer in support of keeping those tags, but never got round to it :-) Probably now Gareth can write a better one than I could.

Anyway, those are definitely useful tags IMO. Not for showing what a question is about (e.g. which book or story), but for showing what kind of question it is. Hundreds of our questions are either directly "what does this mean" (not just trivial dictionary things, but often requiring some deeper context and reading around to answer well) or "I know what this literally means, but what does it metaphorically represent".

That's what the meaning and symbolism tags are for. terminology is entirely different, not about analysing particular passages or works of literature but about the meaning and usage of literary terms.

5 hours later…

9:53 AM

Should the description of the symbolism tag be expanded to point out that its usage is not limited to the art movement known as Symbolism. That art movement did not distinguish itself from other movements simply because it used symbols.

10:05 AM

The current tag wiki and excerpt for symbolism aren't great. An expansion sounds good.

Written back in the early beta days by a non-expert user. Might have been part of the push to "just create tag wikis even if they're not good ones".

OK. I'll think about improvements. The tricky thing is that the definition of "symbol" appears to have changed over the ages.

I've just asked perhaps a bit harder Narayan question. One which relies more heavily on knowing his stories well than on knowing Indian culture in general.

0

Q: Who is R. K. Narayan's "Talkative Man"?

While reading online R. K. Narayan's 1943 collection of short stories Malgudi Days, I've noticed the character of "the Talkative Man" appear several times so far in apparently unrelated stories. In "The Tiger's Claw", there is a frame story in which he tells "us" (some unidentified plural first...

character-analysis r-k-narayan

Yes, that's a good one :-)

2 hours later…

12:32 PM

0

Q: Lady Macbeth i.5 ambiguity

In Macbeth Act I Scece 5, Lady Macbeth says the following: Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; In line 2, what does the pronou...

12:48 PM

@Bookworm This is a good illustration of the way that difficulty in making out meaning is a "tell" that there is something complex going in the original. The reader has difficulty here because Lady Macbeth has difficulty saying what she means.

Napoleon Wilson

1:44 PM

I still don't quite grasp the specific question. What does "what" refer to? It refers to what he's been promised. It seems the question might be asking what that promised thing is, but this concentration on the pronoun what seems weird, since the "what" doesn't stand for anything. It's the relative clause "what thou art promised" that gives the entire picture.

What appropriate noun should she be using instead of "what"? That doesn't really make sense. It would only make sense to reword the sentence in its very entirety and drop the entire relative clause in favour of something else, possibly the simple noun "king". But concentrating on this single word "what" makes it hard to understand what the asker is after here.

Answering with "she means the king's position he was promised in the prophecy" doesn't feel like an appropriate answer, since it's unclear if that's what the asker is really after.

If the OP were able to put the question as precisely as you would wish, they probably wouldn't need to put it at all

Napoleon Wilson

Possibly, yes.

You have to expect difficulty in making out the meaning to be correlated with difficulty in explaining what the problem is

Napoleon Wilson

Possibly, yes.

I suspect that the OP has failed to parse the sentence -- possibly they didn't spot the enjambment

Napoleon Wilson

1:53 PM

Oh, also possible.

I tried for an answer.

You might want to expand the bit about why Lady Macbeth uses periphrasis here -- I don't think it's just a matter of taste

Napoleon Wilson

I...don't either.

The "taste" thing is what comes before the elaboration of why it is more than that.

Though, there might be more angles to it, like her being coy about it and not daring to speak it out. But I hope the answer doesn't give the impression that it's just a matter of taste and poetic paraphrase, as it was supposed to explicitly deny that.

2:09 PM

I think coyness is key. What she's thinking about is something that mustn't be said clearly, but must only be hinted. There's quite a lot of euphemism in the early part of the play -- "If it were done when 'tis done", "To be thus is nothing" etc. and this indicates the characters' distaste for what they are about to do

Napoleon Wilson

That might make for a reasonable second answer.

Maybe later

Napoleon Wilson

I would have said that the viewpoint of the prophecy's supposed inevitability absolving them of actively working towards it is fatalistic. But on reconsideration it might also have been the fatalistic approach to not work actively towards it rather than awaiting it with the assurance that it will happen anyway.

3:06 PM

Our QPD is now at 3.4, the highest I have seen for a very long time. Apparently, it was higher than five before 19 March 2017 (long before I joined the site).

3:25 PM

@Tsundoku That's because we had only gone into public beta on 6 February 2017, so it's still part of that initial push. the QPD has been declining ever since, as, I've been told, is the norm

data.stackexchange.com/literature/query/350054/…

2

That was also my experience on Language Learning Stack Exchange, where I joined while the initial push was still going on. We are now below 1 QPD there.

@Mithical I was just going to post the mod stats here :D

Thanks for the QPD stats link :-)

Don't thank me, thank @NapoleonWilson for writing it. ;)

Napoleon Wilson

3:49 PM

@GarethRees I hope the acceptance on another answer isn't going to detract you from writing up yours, since it would still add a great deal to the existing answers.

That acceptance was really quick - not unusual for users who aren't too familiar with SE.

Napoleon Wilson

Yes.

@GarethRees Yes, that was my reading too. The reading of entitlement rather than coyness was the thing that surprised me in Cahir/Napoleon's answer.

@Tsundoku Let's hope we can keep it up :-)

@Mithical Do you by any chance know the period over which the Area51 rolling average is taken?

No, but 4 seemed to be the closest

I have "two weeks" in my head, but not sure if that's accurate or if I'm thinking of something else.

4:04 PM

When you hover with the mouse over the QPD number, it says, "3.4 questions per day on average over the past two weeks".

Ah! More transparent than I'd thought :-)

And Loong floats in.

I float?

Word play on data types: long, float ... and the verb (which does not work well, I suppose).

Data Floatation Device

4:43 PM

I have written tag wiki excerpts for roughly two dozen tags today. Here are a few that are still empty: ~~harold-p-furth~~, ~~hulbert-footner~~, ~~illustrators~~, ~~kazuo-iwamura~~ (no Qs), ~~interactive-fiction~~, ~~j-d-vance~~, ~~johannes-v-jensen~~, ~~john-connolly~~ and ~~kahlil-gibran~~.

4:53 PM

Do we really need the lectures tag? @EJoshuaS-ReinstateMonica ?

Also empty: kay-chronister, ~~kevin-barry~~, ~~khaled-hosseini~~, ~~khamoshi-shayari~~, ~~lance-henson~~ (no Qs), ~~marcus-aurelius~~, ~~maurice-leblanc~~, ~~meditations~~ (cf. Marcus Aurelius), ~~metatext~~ (deleted) and ~~min-jin-lee~~.

1 hour later…

6:16 PM

0

Q: Bewilderment at "not the smallest atom stirs ..." quote from Moby Dick Chapter 70

In Chapter 70 (The Sphinx) of Moby Dick, Abe states: " O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." From prior research conducted I have gleaned the meaning of the firs...

meaning moby-dick herman-melville

0

Q: Language features Lady Macbeth presents in Macbeth Act I Scene V

In Macbeth Act I Scene 5, Lady Macbeth says the following: Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o'; the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; What kind of language features...

william-shakespeare macbeth

6:57 PM

@Randal'Thor Mhm

Wait actually I'm confused

So author tags are for... questions about the author and their works

On this site, yes. But that's useful usage guidance to put in the tag wiki excerpt, because people may be used to other sites where author tags are just for questions specifically about the author themselves.

Okay, good to know

@Tsundoku Oh I have a copy of Pachinko at home, I never got around to reading it

@NorthLæraðr Might be an idea for a reading challenge.

Maybe. I'll consider making one, though I have an English and chemistry assignment to finish

I have to crack the book open to answer this question

3

Q: What does "fail us" mean in the book "Pachinko"?

I just began reading the book "Pachinko," and it starts thus: History failed us, but no matter. At the turn of the century, an aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra money. Both were born and raised in the fishing village of Yeongdo--a five-mile-wide isle...

meaning min-jin-lee pachinko

ugh I gotta answer this question first

2

Q: What kind of language features appear in Lady Macbeth's line "too full o' the milk of human kindness"?

In Macbeth Act I Scene 5, Lady Macbeth says the following: Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; What kind of language features can be fo...

william-shakespeare literary-device macbeth

7:16 PM

Is that part of your assignment? ;-)

No, but I read Macbeth a couple months ago and I want to answer while it's fresh on my mind

I have to write a paragraph about gothic elements in Jane eyre and what it does to impact theme, characterization, or mood/atmosphere

I see. Don't get lost in the Castle of Otranto.

har har

I've had enough of Gateshead aLready, don't need more

Is telepathy a gothic element?

I guess you could argue that it falls under the "uncanny" aspect of Gothicism

7:35 PM

105 people have voted so far. New votes have become a slow trickle now.

3 hours later…

Napoleon Wilson

10:21 PM

@Tsundoku Interesting that you bring that up specifically, since to me it always marked a bridge between classic Shakespeare plays and gothic novels. When reading it it felt a lot more like the former than the latter to me, both in form as well as story and themes.

Though, today I don't remember too much about it anymore, I admit.

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Apr '2024

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