The Reading Room

I don't know. I will go to bed, though.

6:45 AM

@verbose I'll be honest, my first reaction to your message was "who's Derek Chauvin?" Having Googled it ... oof, yeah, extremely coincidental timing. My bad. I don't know how to remove a tweet, but it can't be done from the chatroom. Do you really think it should be removed, or can it stand now that the verdict is out?

Complete coincidence. Since indigochild and b4rtr were mentioned in the quarterly best-of, I was going through indigochild's answers for a good one to promote, and that post stood out for its outstanding in-depth research by two different users.

6:58 AM

@Randal'Thor Well as things turned out it wasn't all that inflammatory thanks to the verdict. I would still delete it, if it were up to me. (it's easy to delete from twitter itself, if you have the login and password to the actual Twitter account. I know @Mithical does; maybe they could delete it if they're around)

I didn't think you did it deliberately; I realize it was just a horrendous coincidence, but honestly, any discussion of murder trials and expectations of being acquitted, etc. are just painful right now in the US

Yeah, I don't follow US news and had no idea this is going on right now.

I wouldn't follow US news either if I didn't live here. I should have stayed in fucking NZ instead of coming back here

Oh, you were in NZ before? That's a haven in so many ways.

I mean, granted, NZ was weird in its own way. People think of Auckland as a teeming metropolis. "Oh yes, Auckland is so cosmopolitan! We even have a gay bar!"

(Not kidding, someone actually said that to me)

I didn't live there. I went there on a long visit in 2018.

Ah. I just went there on a short visit in 2013.

Took me years after that to be able to easily tell the time by the sun again. Changing hemispheres is so confusing!

7:11 AM

It's beautiful. I never knew where to look, because something captivated my eye wherever I turned. Flowers in someone's garden; birds or leaves on a tree; hills or the sea in the distance. It pampered the eye.

On an unrelated topic, @verbose, did you finish revising your answer about unlucky Macbeth? I remember you did a big rewrite from 1920s to 1970s, but were you talking later about doing another big rewrite based on some more evidence you found?

(I'm considering accepting the answer, and wondering if I should wait for further revisions.)

I found it very difficult to tell north from south. The fact that all the Auckland maps have downtown on the top (which is south) didn't help

Jeez. It's like they're trying to confuse hapless visitors from the northern hemisphere :-P

@Randal'Thor It's next on my list of things to tackle. Don't accept it yet. I would have been done except I think I've been spending the time I would have spent on it on the Basel course that @Tsundoku made me enroll in, so it's his fault

k

7:16 AM

After that, the Ur-Hamlet one

I'm even worse than @bobble when it comes to procrastinating on finishing up answers I've actually begun working on

here's my list of answers to work on. I know @GarethRees has a similar list. Of course in my case "to work on" could mean anything from "I know the answer to this one" to "I have a hunch, will need to verify" to "I have no clue but it's an interesting question" to "wow, the existing answers are wrong"

Or in a couple cases (like the "vowel shift" question) just a matter of looking more deeply into the answers and seeing if I have anything to add

78? Wow.

That's going to take you a long while to grind through.

there's no rush

also, some of the questions I bookmarked when there were no answers, and there are answers now so I could probably un-bookmark them but just haven't because of inertia

There's a list of questions here that people have found interesting enough to offer bounties to whoever can answer them.

@Randal'Thor wait I have that wrong. Downtown Auckland is north; the map my host there gave me had it at the bottom.

@Randal'Thor Yup. I need to start offering bounties now instead of seeking them, I guess

7:37 AM

@verbose Well, either/or. Maybe some of those questions already listed would be good targets for you, or maybe you'll feel like adding your own answer there.

I feel like the Jekyll/Hyde question may be ultimately answered by Gareth, and the earectomy one by Tsundoku.

I'm not sure about the J&H question; I read it as unanswerable, because the novel isn't secretly set in Edinburgh. But I agree that it seems up Gareth's alley. The earectomy one is definitely the 'doku's

Yes, I should probably take some of my bookmarked questions and turn them into open bounties instead of thinking I'll work on them myself.

Oh well, I'll work on that

Some of Tsundoku's bounty offers are also marked as things he'll eventually answer himself if nobody else does and he gets around to it.

And Gareth already answered one of his and withdrew the bounty offer.

So it's fine to offer an open bounty and then later answer it yourself, if you want.

8:42 AM

@verbose It's just a tweet from a literature-related Twitter account that few people follow and even fewer people respond to or retweet. Aren't we being over-sensitive if we decide to delete that? The USA is not the entire world, you know.

Q: Walter Malone's "The World is My Home"

@Tsundoku No, we're not being over-sensitive; we're being appropriately sensitive.

I'm quite aware that the US is not the entire world, thanks.

Bookworm

0

Walter Malone's poem "The World is My Home" is, on the face of it, openly a plea for humanity to come together as one united brotherhood rather than engage in disputes and wars: Travel to East, I wander to West: Each land that I see is dear to my breast. I greet the green hills as I float down t...

Mithical

Gonna agree with verbose here.

And if we have few people following us, all the more reason to be sensitive to their feelings. I don't see how deleting the tweet harms anybody, and keeping it definitely has the potential for harm right now. Even prudence dictates that we delete it. We don't want someone to get upset and accuse us of being deliberately inflammatory.

Mithical

@verbose Done.

8:55 AM

Thanks @Mithical

Mithical

(:

@Bookworm Let's see if I can attract another David Anson answer to the second walter-malone question.

@Randal'Thor the more I think about it the more confused I get. I think maybe what happened was that the hosts gave me a map conventionally oriented (north on top) but the only way I could actually orient myself on it was to hold it upside down.

@Mithical I'd tend to agree with Tsundoku - surely there's at least one high-profile murder trial going on somewhere in the world at almost any given time? - but I'm a bit too ill-informed about the news/politics of that particular country to have much of an opinion about it.

I admit it actually looks like we were trying to capitalise on a controversial news case by drawing publicity to ourselves with a topical question on that very day. That's not what happened, but 'twould've been in poor taste if it was.

Maybe we can re-post that same tweet later, at a better time. It's still a good Q&A, and will still be there later.

@Randal'Thor agreed

@Randal'Thor yes, that was my concern

It wasn't just the fact that it was a high-profile murder trial. It was the fact that it was specifically a racialized murder trial where the white guy murders someone and the justice system is rigged in a way that leads to the assumption that he will get off scot-free

9:13 AM

Yeah, we could hardly have found a more relevant question if we tried.

oh well Imma brush my teeth and toddle. night night.

Q: What does "ladies" mean here?

Goodnight!

Eng Lit Learner

10:27 AM

0

I am wondering what "ladies" means in the following sentences: ‘The first part,’ Angus says, ‘is: “Do brave deeds and endure”, which was the school motto. The second part was added in by us boys: “If I can’t move heaven, then I shall raise hell.” It used to get chanted before rugby matches.’ ‘An...

meaning literature

Eng Lit Learner

10:50 AM

0

Q: What does "Had enough in there?" mean here?

I am wondering what "Had enough in there?" means in the following sentences: I push into the drawing room next door and as I walk through I stop short in shock. A figure’s sitting there on the sofa, in the gloom. After a moment I recognise it to be Olivia. ‘Oh, hey there,’ I say. She looks up. H...

Q: What does "Can’t think of the last time I did that." mean here?

0

I am wondering what "Can’t think of the last time I did that." means in the following sentences: ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I’m not all that tired. And I don’t have to get up early tomorrow morning to deal with two crazy kids. There’s some wine in our room – I could go and grab it.’ She gives a small s...

Q: What does "he wasn’t very subtle about" mean here?

11:02 AM

@EngLitLearner Ask @verbose :-)

Eng Lit Learner

11:14 AM

0

I am wondering what "he wasn’t very subtle about" means in the following sentences: Hannah speaks first. ‘Olivia.’ The cave replies in a whisper: Olivia, Olivia, Olivia. ‘God,’ Hannah says, ‘that echo. Did your ex . . . did he do anything to you? Someone I know—’ She stops, starts again, ‘my sis...

Q: What does "show Callum what he was missing" mean here?

0

I am wondering what "show Callum what he was missing" means in the following sentences: ‘I was on my phone,’ I say, ‘and I could see that Callum was with Ellie. She’d shared all these pics on Snapchat. There was one of her sitting on his lap. And then another one of her kissing him, while she he...

11:38 AM

We might have a new subject matter expert on the site.

Alex

11:52 AM

@Tsundoku I am a literary scholar from São Paulo, Brazil. I live and work in the United States, where I currently am Assistant Professor of English at the University of Florida.

From his website.

12:11 PM

Ah, he hasn't put that on his profile.

12:34 PM

@Tsundoku Nice. Might be one of those people who are passionate about some particular topics and will answer questions about it.

And he has published a book that I would be interested in reading.

12:46 PM

literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1566/139 @Tsundoku I wonder which one of these would apply to Rejtő Jenő. Not that I want to ask questions about his books, he's just not my style.

@b_jonas Based on the Engiish Wikipedia article, it is a bit difficult to say. Are the books he published under the pseudonym P. Howard now republished under that pseudonym or as Jenő Rejtő?

@Tsundoku Yes, though some modern editions show both names. I'll look how they're filed in library catalog.

The German translation Ein Seemann aus der Neuen Welt: Ein analoger Revuekrimi (Piszkos Fred közbelép Fülig Jimmy őszinte sajnálatára) from 2016 uses the pseudonym; the author's real name is mentioned inside.

Other German translations also use the pseudonym. But I don't know whether that is consistent with current publishing practices in Hungary.