The Reading Room

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Tsundoku

00:20

This old question about comics by Hamlet was deleted by the roomba but was not considered off topic, so I have reworded it a bit and undeleted it.

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku +5/-5. I see.

+1 from me.

Tsundoku

The original wording did not ask how scholars looked at it and might have been seen as an opinion-based question.

Eddie Kal

But I have been here long enough to know that questions asking for analysis-based answers are usually not well received

Strictly scholarship-centered answers are highly susceptible to downvotes

It is clear that most people don't care so much for scholarship. And a certain clique has been consistently acting against scholarly answers

I agree. But I think there's something else we could do

Allow me to propose something on Meta, in a few days

Tsundoku

OK. You make me curious :-)

bobble

01:12

I'm almost done with my draft of the Ender answer - after that will be proofreading, then posting

Tsundoku

01:24

@EddieKal I have reworded and undeleted it to see if the OP comes back and reacts to the reworded version of the question.

@Randal'Thor That's great. I'm still hoping that Peter Shor will also post a question and not only a bounty.

Tsundoku

01:37

@bobble Great! I'm curious how long that answer will be ...

bobble

It looks to be clocking in around 3 pages of Google Doc, but I might cut that down during revisions

Eddie Kal

@Tsundoku I appreciate it! I think it is totally answerable. It does appear to be from homework but oh well occasionally they might need a hand with this stuff if they are new to it

Tsundoku

Usually we don't answer such questions fast enough to be really helpful with the homework aspect; they might read if after they've handed in their essay :-)

4 hours later…

Bookworm

05:34

Q: Did Isidore of Seville ever claim Roman god of wine, Bacchus, got his name from "baculus" (walking stick)?

On multiple places on-line, including Wikipedia, there is information that Saint Isidore of Seville claimed that the name of the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, got his name from "baculus" meaning "walking stick", as drunk people need a walking stick to walk. An idea of the quality of Isidore's etym...

4 hours later…

Gareth Rees

09:34

@EddieKal I'm surprised by this claim -- I have posted a lot of scholarly answers and haven't noticed any pattern of downvotes. Mostly I find that scholarly answers get ignored, which is to be expected -- the deeper you get into a subject the smaller your audience gets

Where I get downvotes it seems to be that people disagree with my opinions, not with my scholarship

2 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

11:45

@Bookworm Is this on-topic? It seems a bit speculative ("what would be ..."), and more about real-world science than literary context. I'm tempted to say it's a better fit for Worldbuilding.

4 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

16:00

@Bookworm HNQ.

bobble

My Pern question got more views than any of my puzzles over at PSE. I'm a bit surprised.

2 hours later…

Gareth Rees

17:37

@bobble That's the power of HNQ plus name recognition. There are probably a lot of Stack Overflow users who read some of the Pern books

bobble

I also think that having "profanity" in the title may have helped

Gareth Rees

Something not mentioned by any of the answers is that although later editions of Dragonflight have a list of oaths at the back, the first published editions do not, and the oaths do not appear in the text. I think the list of oaths first appeared in The White Dragon and subsequently added to the earlier books in the series when they were reprinted

The White Dragon is the first book in the series where anyone actually says "shards!" in the text

bobble

17:53

Interesting. I (or my dad, at least) have Dragonflight, Dragondrums, the two Menolly ones, and the Masterharper one. So that's what I'm working off here. I grabbed Dragonflight for the question because it was the closest at the time.

Eddie Kal

@GarethRees I, however, am not surprised by your objection. I expected this would be a good point of departure for a very important discussion. There have been a number of related things left undiscussed and drowned out in this room. This topic about scholarship is as good as any or perhaps the most suitable starting point for us to slowly thrash out some very crucial things in the understanding of literature.

Gareth Rees

The Internet archive has a 1974 printing and a 1984 printing — the latter adds no less than 17 pages of appendices!

Eddie Kal

It is important that people talk. So before we start for the last time I'd like to invite people who starred @GarethRees's comment to identify themselves and chime in.

I am not quite clear on the meaning of the stars this time around. Let's see. @Randal'Thor your star?

Gareth Rees

@EddieKal I have no objection, all I'm saying is that my experience is not one of being downvoted for scholarship. I've been downvoted for all sorts of random things, from accusing Macbeth of exaggeration, to judging Zeus by modern ethical standards, but not yet (as far as I know) for scholarship

I need to understand what you are talking about before I can agree or object to it!

Eddie Kal

We may be talking past each other, but I have observed and experienced interesting things that I think we should base our discussion on, a discussion about literary scholarship.

Gareth Rees

18:07

If there is a "certain clique" that "has been consistently acting against scholarly answers" then that would be a shame. All I'm saying is that I've seen no evidence of it on my own answers. (The system doesn't provide a way to easily query downvotes on other people's answers, so maybe it is happening to other people and not to me.)

Eddie Kal

The way I see it, we of course don't share the same experience because we have different opinions regarding literary scholarship and we have different goals. And it is crucial that no one's experience is invalidated by another's.

In fact it would extremely hard for me to imagine we'd have the same experience in this regard.

So why do people read literature? Why do people study literature?

bobble

This conversation is interesting to watch.

Gareth Rees

I'm just looking through your posts. Two of your questions got downvoted and closed (Sean Lock comedy question and AAVE dictionary question) — is this what you are asking about?

The issue does not seem to be one of scholarship but rather of the down- and close-voters having a rather narrow definition of literature.

Eddie Kal

@GarethRees Not really. I was a bit concerned about the AAVE question and how it was treated differently than my OED question, but that almost seemed trifling next to the more important things

@GarethRees The definition of literature is most definitely part of the issue, but let me be clear as can be, I'd like us NOT to focus on my posts because that'd easily derail the conversation and land on "Oh you are just whining about the downvotes".

I think we can come back to this discussion when the other interlocutors join us. Before I know what to say I need to understand everybody's ideas.

I assume there are at least two more parties to this conversation.

Gareth Rees

18:27

I think some examples would help — if my experiences are unrepresentative and your experiences are off-topic then what are we looking at?

Eddie Kal

Sorry I need to wait for our starry friends, starry-eyedly. Otherwise it's going to be a star-crossed discussion.

And no, I wouldn't say your experience is unrepresentative.

Hmm, let's see if I can come up with yet more star metaphors.

1 hour later…

bobble

19:52

Is this NAA? I'm not sure whether it is answer-worthy, so I'd thought I'd ask the regulars

Tsundoku

@bobble Possibly. I hope that person expands on it.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

21:40

Q: What edition of The Shrinking Man contains a foreword by Stephen King?

According to the Wikipedia article about Stephen King, one of the author's influences was Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend, Hell House and other works. The article claims, In a current edition of Matheson's The Shrinking Man, King is quoted as saying, "A horror story if there ever was one...