The Reading Room

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Rand al'Thor

06:36

Many congratulations to @GarethRees on achieving Lit SE's first silver tag badge!

Faded Giant

Announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature: youtu.be/j-6f1IPOm5c

5 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

11:23

Louise Glück, 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I'd like to propose her for a topic challenge, attract some eyeballs to Lit SE in the wake of the news, but she's an American English poet, which isn't quite in the spirit of our topic challenges.

Mithical

You can ask questions without them being part of the topic challenge...

Rand al'Thor

Of course, but a topic challenge would have an associated meta post to promote on Twitter etc.

Maybe we could try to make an announcement meta, like the RIP posts at SFF.

4 hours later…

North Læraðr

15:21

Eeeeeeeek! We've dropped to 2.8 questions per day! Ack

WARNING, WARNING, WARNING

Tsundoku

15:59

@Randal'Thor That sounds like a good idea.

@NorthLæraðr There's a black hole at the centre of the SE universe and it's sucking all our questions away.

2 hours later…

Spagirl

17:44

@Randal'Thor I really can’t tell, are you making a joke or do you think there is a worldwide ScotNat conspiracy to invent a geological history of GB?
It isn’t totally aligned with the border of course, but it’s essentially true.
“ On the west side of the Iapetus Ocean was the continent Laurentia (now North America) and on the east side was a land mass called Gondwana (South America, Africa, Asia and Australasia). Split between these land masses was ‘Britain’. The northern part of Britain including Scotland was on the continent of Laurentia, and the Southern part of ‘Britain’ was on the cont…

Eddie Kal

17:55

@Spagirl Very interesting. I didn't know that either.

I am looking at a Wiki page with a graph

Gareth Rees

The "Iapetus Suture" is the dividing line

Eddie Kal

Source: Iapetus Ocean

So Ireland used to belong to two continents as well?

Tsundoku

18:49

"It will also give us an opportunity to revisit this old meta discussion and decide whether Old English is sufficiently different from modern English to merit its own language tag." (Comment on meta). Would this then also justify for Classical Chinese (see e.g. laozi] and the Tale of Genji's Early Middle Japanese?

Rand al'Thor

19:36

in Twitter Control Room, 16 mins ago, by Rand al'Thor

Seeking a Reader's Companion or annotated edition of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Does anyone have a precise reference for such an edition? https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15309/17?stw=2 #VictorHugo #NotreDameDeParis #HunchbackOfNotreDame

I proposed a tweet about this question since it's been bountied, but on the other hand maybe it's only borderline on-topic and not the type of question we want to encourage/promote too much. Thus, I have not self-starred ^ that chat message, and leave the decision of actually tweeting it to someone else.

I'll be very interested if that's indeed true, but it *seems* (with the caveat that I don't know much about geology) wildly implausible. If the island of Great Britain used to be on two different continental masses, then
(a) how come those two chunks of land got separated from their continents *and* happened to drift together rather than being two islands?
(b) why isn't there a mountain chain between Scotland and England, a la the Himalayas resulting from the Indian subcontinent hitting Asia?
(c) why doesn't Britain have earthquakes or any of the other effects associated with sitting on a c…

Gareth Rees

@Randal'Thor Are you just trolling us now?

Rand al'Thor

20:06

No, just trying to learn something. It's interesting to discover that what I'd thought was just "trolling" by wherever-I-saw-that is actually a serious theory/fact.

Gareth Rees

But assuming you're serious, then
(a) The events happened in the other order — first the Laurentian plate (containing Scotland) collided with the Avalonian plate (c. 420 mya), forming the supercontinent of Laurasia, and much later this continent was split apart by the Atlantic Ocean (c. 60 mya), leaving Scotland behind
(b) There is a mountain chain (the Caledonian Orogeny)! But it was formed so long ago that much of it has eroded away, leaving small remnants like the Scottish Highlands and the Appalachians.

There is an entire science of geology that studies this stuff!

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku Done. Let's see how that post is received. (Also feel free to edit - I wanted to add something about "Glück has focused on illuminating aspects of trauma, desire, and nature [...] her poetry has become known for its frank expressions of sadness and isolation [...] construction of poetic personas and the relationship, in her poems, between autobiography and classical myth" but from a better source than Wikipedia.)

@GarethRees Thanks. Of course I could've done (and will do) a bit of reading to answer some of those questions myself, but hey, we're here for Q&A :-)

Eddie Kal

@GarethRees I've starred this because this is the kind of spirit that should reverberate in these here parts.

b_jonas

20:26

We've been talking elsewhere SE chat about which way the text is rotated on book spines and what determines this, from chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/55727985#55727985

There might be a good question in that, and now it's possible to post it on either Graphic Design SE or Lit SE.

1 hour later…

Librarian

21:46

Q: The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature: Louise Glück

This is not exactly a meta question, but an announcement that may be of interest to our community. Earlier today, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Louise Glück for the following reasons as stated by the Nobel committee: for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty ...

Bookworm

22:46

Q: In Tagore's "Along the Way", who is the entity that the "your touch" is referring to?

Rabindranath Tagore's "Along the Way" several times refers to "your touch", such as in this first stanza: As I walk along my way I receive your touch Now and then But I don’t know how and when. And again: Do I receive your touch all on a sudden When there is great sorrow Whose touch is the au...

poetry bengali-literature rabindranath-tagore

Bookworm

23:16

Q: Examples of Zeus's Immoral Nature

In The Odyssey, Zeus happily allows Poseidon to turn a ship into stone, killing everyone aboard. What are some other examples (from any text) of Zeus intentionally inflicting direct harm on humans for no justifiable reason?