The Reading Room

12:24 AM

Shakespeare and Game of Thrones by Jeffrey Wilson, published last year by Routledge. (Rather expensive at the moment in hardback.)

@bobble I doubt that flag reason's can be edited afterwards.

Shakespeare and "Game of Thrones": podcast + transcript about Wilson's book.

Tsundoku

12:55 AM

For the morbidly curious among you: Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts by Kathryn Harkup, published last year. See also Kathryn Harkup on "Death by Shakespeare".

Tsundoku

1:40 AM

@Bookworm This question went HNQ. Funny. No sarcasm intended :-P

bobble

if you stick your tongue out someone could poke it

Tsundoku

waits for someone to poke

bobble

pokes with a candy cane

Tsundoku

goes to brush his teeth again

Soyuz42

4:12 AM

@Tsundoku This is perfect 👌.

Librarian

4:26 AM

0

Q: What do we think about answers-in-comments for recommendation questions?

I've been mulling over this for a while myself, ever since I saw this comment, on a question asking for recommendations for poetry like "The Raven": A couple of ideas: "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" by Robert Browning, and "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti. link to comment This comment was pos...

bobble

4:51 AM

Does this question need work/author tags?

2 days ago, by bobble

Would this question be more cultural-context than historical-context?

well I'll away to bed. I expect some pings from y'all while I sleep, ya hear me?

verbose

5:09 AM

@Tsundoku I guess that explains the weird number of strange answers it's suddenly getting

@bobble yes, and I added them

verbose

5:59 AM

For the longest time (2013–2021) my top-voted question across the SE network was this one on Stack Overflow. Since February, I've had four questions that have garnered more votes. How odd. The question about how "No man is an island" came to be regarded as a poem is now tied for my top-voted one.

Rand al'Thor

6:58 AM

@verbose Huh, I did a bit of searching for that and didn't even notice that the question said it's non-fiction!

verbose

@Randal'Thor ah. So, what's your thinking on whether the question is on-topic? I am leaning "no"

Rand al'Thor

@Librarian @bobble Interesting question. My personal feeling is to be fine with them - it's OK to try to help people even if their question is off-topic here, and those closed questions will get deleted fast anyway so new users won't be able to see them as precedents - but that's very much without my mod hat, and I know lots of other mods would frown at me for saying so.

Relatedly, we often leave comments on recommendation questions inviting the OP to join chat, and in chat again the best they'd get would be recommendations with no quality control, no ability to vote them up or down, maybe no justification/explanation. So whether we allow such remarks in comments or restrict them to chat ... does it even matter?

@verbose "strange" is a very polite word for those answers. Are you British? :-P

@verbose Next challenge: get an answer on Lit to the same score as your top answer on SO.

@verbose Hmm, tricky one. There's an old meta discussion about non-fiction, according to which it may depend on what the book is like. Does it tell a story? Seems like yes. Does it entertain? Possibly. Is the nature of the question "literary"? Meh, as much as any other book ID question.

(Btw, Catija wasn't a CM at the time she wrote that meta answer, so don't take it as any more authoritative than any other highly-voted meta consensus on scope.)

Bookworm

7:40 AM

0

Q: As good as Brian Jacques or your money back?

Back in the mid-2000s, I read two books of Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels series, a set of two trilogies about anthropomorphised mustelids, one trilogy set in a version of medieval England and the other set in a version of Victorian England (plus other parts of the world which the characters tra...

intertextuality redwall-series brian-jacques garry-kilworth welkin-weasels

Mithical

"A quicker, slicker read than Brian Jacques"

Rand al'Thor

@Bookworm @bobble here's another ping: you might be interested in this question.

That tagline also appears in a different light if Brian Jacques pronounced his name "jakes" rather than "zhak" ...

bobble

1:48 PM

@Randal'Thor This is fair; I was harsher on the answer-comments than my own opinion. I'm fully expecting someone to say they're fine.

@verbose do you think it would also benefit from inspiration?

Rand al'Thor

2:21 PM

@bobble I think name-significance is enough. We don't know a priori if it was inspired by something or not.

Bookworm

4:05 PM

0

Q: "Into the Wild" surrogate family

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild: For each of these 3 people (Westerberg, Burres Couple, Franz), describe them, McCandless' relationship with them, their correspondence, and their opinion of McCandless. What insights do the person, relationship, correspondence (or lack thereof), and/or opinions offer?

character-analysis into-the-wild jon-krakauer

0

Q: Was Esther Summerson pleasantly surprised or otherwise at being presented the housekeeping keys of Bleak House?

In Chapter VI of Bleak House, Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone are just arrived at Bleak House and introduced to John Jarndyce. A conversation touching on the Jellybys, the east wind, and Mr. Skimpole is all that time allows before Esther is presented with the housekeeping keys: ...

character-analysis charles-dickens bleak-house

bobble

5:30 PM

Well, there you go. Talking animals. Long ears. Watership Down. — Michael Harvey 4 mins ago

sigh

I was tempted to comment "Did you read the damn question?" but I know that would be against the CoC

> It can't just be the talking animals

^ quote from question

Tsundoku

Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture, in The Guardian today.

bobble

Mith opined in RPG.SE chat that we don't need dungeons-and-dragons

I see our fair Tsundoku agrees

Tsundoku

5:49 PM

I have sent that tag to the deepest dungeon I could think of.

Or it was burninated by a dragon.

Bookworm

7:52 PM

0

Q: Meaning of "to conduct the ordinary business of their lives"

This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen garner How strange it is that in a city the size of Melbourne it is possible for two people who have lived almost as sister and brother for five years as students to move away from each other without even saying goodbye, to conduct the ordinary b...

meaning the-childrens-bach helen-garner

Rand al'Thor

8:11 PM

@bobble Why? I don't know much about it, but isn't it a universe that's had works of literature written in it, as well as an interactive game?

~~As evidenced by the fact that, well, there were on-topic questions about it here.~~ Actually no, it seems the questions here were just about the influence of D&D on literature.

verbose

9:47 PM

@Randal'Thor I'm sometimes told (by Americans) that I speak with a British accent. I don't—I have the neutral Indian accent that's class- rather than region-specific. But it sounds more British than Indian to those who assume all Indian accents are like the one sported by Apu in The Simpsons. My vocabulary is definitely more British than most Americans encounter, which leads to misunderstandings sometimes; have I told y'all my "quite" story?

@Randal'Thor h'm that's unlikely to happen. If I'm searching correctly, rn the top-voted answer of all time on Lit SE has only 152 upvotes and my top-voted answer across all of SE has more than twice that.

Also, the top voted question on Lit SE has only 101 votes. On StackOverflow, it's not uncommon for questions and/or answers to get thousands of upvotes. The most-upvoted question on SO has over 25,000 upvotes. The most-upvoted answer, to that same question, has over 32k.

I guess it's a question of site traffic (we get a respectable amount, but nowhere near those of busier sites on the network) and question topic. Quite apart from the inherent improbability of our ever getting a question on a topic that would garner at least several hundred votes, I think that such a question would probably not be one I could answer. It would be on something like Peanuts or LotR or some other hugely popular work that I most likely will not know well, if at all.

@Randal'Thor Catija's answer does not strike me as a reasonable one. "Something that tells a story" is not a good definition of literature. What story does Pound's "In a Station at the Metro" tell? If you're unfamiliar, it's a brief poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.

That's definitely literature and it doesn't tell a story.

By Catija's definition, any biography would count as literature. I think literature should be considered imaginative writing, as opposed to factual or technical.

Now certain works that start off as, say, history (Herodotus, Gibbon) or science (Darwin) might, by virtue of their no longer being current as history or science, or of their being subject to the kind of reading involved in literary analysis, might end up being in scope, but that, I think, is because of the sort of answer Gareth or BESW provided to that meta question.

H'm maybe I should write an answer that meta question.

Tsundoku

10:48 PM

Shakespeare Comic Books.

Sep 11 '20 at 16:09, by Tsundoku

@NorthLæraðr That's a really poor definition.

I have been wondering whether I should downvote that answer just because it presents such a ludicrously inadequate definition of literature.

Rand al'Thor

11:12 PM

@verbose Yeah, I was joking about the top answer thing :-)

@verbose I'm familiar with it, but I'd say some reasonable definitions of "literature" might not count that (or "This is Just to Say") as literature, even if they're generally recognised by critics as such.

At least it's better than calling a shark in a box "art" ;-)

@verbose The problem with posting a late answer to a meta question from the early beta days is you're never going to get enough votes to float to the top. Gareth tried, and his answer's still languishing in 3rd place there.

Tsundoku

11:29 PM

@Randal'Thor "Reasonable definitions of literature"?

verbose

@Randal'Thor I know, but I decided to throw you off-balance by taking the question entirely seriously.

@Randal'Thor I would dispute whether any definition of literature that excludes those two poems could be considered "reasonable" :P

Tsundoku

@verbose And that doesn't even require a :P.

verbose

@Randal'Thor Well, Duchamp signed a urinal "R. Mutt" and exhibited it as a sculpture. There is a good argument to be made that by doing so, he did turn the urinal into art. In fact, few art critics/historians would debate the issue any more.

@Randal'Thor Well, I did it anyway, so there. I spent five long paragraphs arguing that Gareth is right and Catija wrong. (He is, and she is.)

bobble

11:46 PM

I'm tempted to go find a room that Catija is in and poke her for thoughts

verbose

@Randal'Thor As of right now, Catija's answer is not alone in first place. BESW's answer is tied for first, and it's a much better answer. Gareth's, better still, is next but is only a three upvotes away.

@bobble I commented on her answer earlier today, so she'd've been poked already.

@Tsundoku do it, if you'ven't already!

bobble

D'ya think we'll ever manage to get down to only 1k Unanswered?

Recently we waver in the 1080s

verbose

@bobble Let's at least get it down to 1066 so we can all make Hastings references

bobble

We're also approaching 2021 tags. Shall we throw a party then?

verbose

@bobble ooh yes

Transcript for