@Bookworm Hundreds of millions of people have suffered without writing any literature, innovative or otherwise. Perhaps the question should be "In authors, is literary innovation more likely after experiencing suffering than in the absence of suffering?"
@Randal'Thor So we're looking for this? Likelihood of literary innovation when there has been suffering = ( ( likelihood of past suffering if there is literary innovation ) * likelihood of innovation ) / likelihood of suffering
@Randal'Thor My husband had at least 15 volumes. He told me that after L Frank Baum died, other writers (including his son?) continued writing (authorized) novels in that universe
I don't know how many L Frank Baum wrote himself, but you may be right it might be seven
@Mithical I don't see any problem with being locked in a library overnight
@Mithical oh okay, that makes it problematic, yes.
@Tsundoku cute!
@b_jonas ha, funny. I just voted to close that q on the grounds it's opinion based, then I saunter over here and see that you're quoting someone's opinion :-)
@Randal'Thor Maybe Barnes was worried depicting scary encounters with rats would make his novel too much like 1984?
@Tsundoku how different is Belgian French from metropolitan French? Also, how does Belgium survive without a functioning government for years on end when the US goes to hell after just four? (Though perhaps it's merely that no government at all is better than an actively evil and incompetent one. Or maybe Belgium is just full of libertarians with a point to prove.)
@Randal'Thor More than seven. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:L._Frank_Baum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books 13 sequel novels and a bunch of other works written by L. Frank Baum, and way more not written by him.
@verbose Well, that's just a fictional character's opinion.
There's probably an opinion about that by real writers too somewhere, but I don't know where right now.
On page 324 of David Hackett Fischer's book Washington's Crossing, there is an epigraph (quotation at the beginning of the chapter The Battle at Princeton) by Horace Walpole on George Washington's leadership at Princeton:
Washington the dictator has shown himself both a Fabius and Camillus. His ...
@verbose I think that depends on how you define "Belgian French". To the extent that there is a standard of Belgian French as used in the media and official institutions, there aren't too many differences, except for obvious ones such as the words for "breakfast", "70" and "90".
@verbose However, if you compare Walloon with metropolitan French, you should find many more differences.
@verbose There are many governments in Belgium: one for Flanders, one for the Brussels-Capital Region.one for the French-speaking community, one for Wallonia and one for the German-speaking community. So if you're ever short of a government, just call Belgium and they can lend you one.
@verbose dîner. 80 = quatre-vingts (I've never heard huitante, which is apparently used in Switzerland).
@verbose There was no federal governments, but we still had many other governments. So all we had at the federal level was a "government for ongoing affairs", which could not, for example, decide on the next budget, etc.
@Tsundoku That's too bad. It's the one good national paper left in the US. The Wall Street Journal is hideously right-wing; the New York Times is just a complete mess. They keep profiling Trump voters and ignoring Biden ones—even after the election—and both-sidesing every issue. I do pay for WaPo.
But I miss the Financial Times, which I used to get a paper copy of for years.
@verbose No, Mith/jonas are right, it's 14 by Baum himself. I think I only read the first three and the last one. I noticed the last one had a ton of characters that I hadn't seen before, apparently ten books' worth not just three. I just pulled 7 out of the egress hatch of my digestive system, so no surprise it wasn't correct :-)
@verbose Barnes? Either I'm missing another pun, or you Freudian-slipped on Adams. (Is it a pun because the rats were in a barn?)
@Tsundoku Damn, now I discover that I should've learned Belgian French.
Rogers & Stevens (eds.): Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy. "First collection of essays in English to focus on the overlaps between ancient Greek and Roman mythology and contemporary fantasy".
Rogers & Stevens (eds): Classical Traditions in Science Fiction. "The first comprehensive, book-length treatment of the classical tradition in science fiction."
In a story by A. Blackwood, I am unable to find out the correct meaning of "screen" in the following sentence:
Of the mutinous forces that lie so thinly screened behind life,
dropping from time to time their faint, wireless messages upon the
soul, Field-Martin hardly discerned the existence.
In...
