The Reading Room

3:12 AM

upvoted

Q: What does «speed the plow» mean in david mamets play?

3:36 AM

I know that it is a traditional song that farmers song and asked God to bless their crops. But i cant figure out the Relationship between the meaning of that song and the play. The play is about two film producer that they want make a movie for summer but some artistic novel came out to their off...

title david-mamet speed-the-plow

Q: Where did Jacques tell this story of how the mole accent was from truck-driving through Somerset?

According to the Redwall wiki page on moles, The mole dialect is derived from the region of Somerset, England. Brian Jacques frequently tales the story of how when he was a truck driver, he drove through this part of the country and encountered the men speaking with this accent. However, I can'...

quote-source redwall-series brian-jacques

@Bookworm I vacillated between quote-source and identification-request, hopefully I got it right

@bobble I don't see how that could be id-request at all

identifying an interview

I don't think an interview counts as a work of literature

also, I got my chaser earlier today and I don't feel so good 😢

I mean, I'm happy I got the chaser

Hi @Alex

my side effects passed in the 36hrs they said such problems would

3:44 AM

hi @b_jonas

@bobble that's good

I think I should go to bed and watch Jeopardy! on Netflix

what do you think?

Alternatively, you could research another book-length answer for us :)

@verbose Hi back. Not sure if this is a time I’m allowed to be chatting though.

@Alex i'll just chalk it up to your desire to confuse me, and I'll let it pass

@bobble my brain doesn't work well enough for that if I don't feel very well

b_jonas

@verbose Bill gates is having a vacation in Hawaii. Suddenly he finds an old lamp mostly buried in the sand. He rubs it, a genie comes out and gives him one wish. “I want to make it easier for people to come here on a vacation. Build a highway from the U.S. west coast to Hawaii.” “A highway all the way through the ocean? That's impossible. Don't you have a more realistic wish?”

Confusion is good, in moderation.

b_jonas

3:47 AM

“Very well. The serbs and the croats are locked in an endless grudge war. I would finally like peace in the Balkan.” “Would you like four lanes or six lanes?”

@b_jonas ah

b_jonas

The joke is quite popular, it's told with all kinds of variations instead of the Yugoslav war, such as “I want to understand women.” And it's not always Bill Gates of course.

You can find it all over the internet.

@Alex Not site moderation.

@b_jonas ah

@Bookworm @bobble 'twas amusing how I edited the post to add two letters and then you edited it to add a third

2 hours later…

A. B.

5:34 AM

Surprised to see so many Michael Ende questions and not one about "The Night of Wishes"!

3 hours later…

Q: Scarce food/Porridge in Jane Eyre

8:24 AM

I'm writing an essay on Jane Eyre's trauma and recovery. I'm trying to explain how she overcame adversities in her life. I think that ,although food was scarce at Lowood, she benefits from eating porridge. First, because porridge (boiled oats) has many health benefits, as shown by numerous studie...

meaning character-analysis literary-device charlotte-bronte jane-eyre

1 hour later…

Rand al'Thor

9:27 AM

@Alex But not in moderators?

Q: Why is Monkey a monkey?

The titular character in The New Legends of Monkey is named "Monkey", which is short for his apparently being the "monkey king". The series is a fantasy/comedy adaptation of the historical Chinese book Journey to the West, where the character identified as the "monkey king", Sun Wukong, is ... we...

names the-new-legends-of-monkey

^ question on SFF about adaptations of Journey to the West, might be of interest to @Tsundoku or whoever else was into that here

Rand al'Thor

9:52 AM

@A.B. I hadn't even heard of The Night of Wishes before. I've only read The Neverending Story and Momo, and heard about another one with an engine driver.

6 hours later…

Q: Literature on the use of "camp" in queer poetry

4:03 PM

I was wondering if there might be some articles or books about the use of camp aesthetics in LGBTQ+ poetry (either thematically or written by queer authors). I don't think campiness is at all foreign to many poets in general, but I would like to know if it has been studied, especially in a queer ...

poetry sexuality

3 hours later…

CowperKettle

7:01 PM

1 hour later…

8:12 PM

Perhaps I should have linked this question in my meta post

I think it was a mistake to only link well-received posts, probably biased it

8:25 PM

@Randal'Thor Thanks for the pointer; answer submitted :-)

8:47 PM

I'm disgusted by SFF SE's childish fixation on "in-universe blahbah". My account there is now scheduled for deletion.

Mithical

Ah... Valorum.

Q: What are "smoking-room stories"?

9:42 PM

@CowperKettle Smoking/No Smoking is a film about what might have happened if the characters had made different decisions. One of the differences is whether a certain character smoked a cigarette at a certain point in time.

I recently started reading C.S. Lewis's book That Hideous Strength, the third in his Space Trilogy (and I'm devouring it - what a story!) The following passage, from when Mark first meets Miss "Fairy" Hardcastle, isn't quite clear to me: It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had i...

meaning c-s-lewis the-space-trilogy

10:20 PM

@Randal'Thor It’s good if you’re confused when talking to me, not when wielding your superpowers.

@Tsundoku Not quite the same thing, but I just recently received another comment on that site telling me that my answer is contradicted by something the author said.

(The whole point of my answer was to disagree with the author.)

10:37 PM

@Alex That's one of SciFi SE's other fixations: the author's statements are taken as holy writ. The don't seem to understand the concept of literary interpretation on that site.

They also can't recognise interpretations that don't make sense, e.g. when someone claims that the white horse at the end of GoT S08E05 refers to one of the horseman of the Apocalypse when the available context points in a completely different direction ...

It sounds as if our dear doku has an axe to grind with SF&F