The Reading Room

muru

2:46 AM

Do we want a christmas tag?

Bookworm

4:00 AM

0

Q: create a paragraph on why Youtube is a prolefeed using arguments below

please use all three of the arguments in the photo to explain why youtube is prolefeed (needs to be a expository paragraph)

Rand al'Thor

7:46 AM

@muru Gone.

@Tsundoku First she disguised herself as Athena ;-)

Bookworm

8:06 AM

0

Q: What do the names of the Decameron characters signify?

The Wikipedia page for the Decameron claims (without citations) that: Boccaccio himself notes that the names he gives for these ten characters are in fact pseudonyms chosen as "appropriate to the qualities of each". The Italian names of the seven women, in the same (most likely significant) orde...

character-analysis name-significance italian-literature giovanni-boccaccio decameron

Mithical

8:29 AM

@Randal'Thor Yeah, yeah...

See my comment in the revision history.

Bookworm

9:45 AM

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Q: Democratizing original occult texts

Search engine results for occult libraries tend to have mostly commercial interests at play (vendors of trinkets and spell books and the like). Another issue I've run into is the genre tends to get treated like tabloids and scholarly resources are a bit muddled. I suppose it would be career suici...

identification-request genre

Eng Lit Learner

0

Q: What was Mark Twain's purpose by writing 'What Stumped the Bluejays'?

This is my first time asking a question. It is also the first time that I have to write a review for a short story. I appreciate any help you can provide. The genre, Development of characters(are they believable), any literary devices used in the story. If you answer these questions, I would be v...

meaning-in-context expressions writing literature metaphors

Tsundoku

10:45 AM

@EngLitLearner Making a living by writing fiction?

Tsundoku

10:57 AM

Mark Twain was born in 1835, shortly after an appearance of Halley's Comet, and died in 1910, around the time of the comet's next appearance. Why aren't there any science fiction stories around this?

Namaskaram

11:15 AM

@Bookworm not quite sure what to do about this (I skipped the review in the First Questions queue). It’s more of a resource request, if I understand correctly. So, the identification-request tag is not correct, at least…

Mithical

11:26 AM

@Tsundoku Really strange, considering he apparently died 20 years before he was born. An astounding feat.

b_jonas

11:46 AM

@Tsundoku Have you checked all of Asimov's five hundred books? There's probably already a story.

b_jonas

12:00 PM

A quick web search goes to uh.edu/engines/epi1642.htm which says that Mark Twain made a remark on this

That said, there are so many famous people that some of them are bound to be born in 1835 and die in 1910. Based on en.Wikipedia, they include en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Schiaparelli astronomer, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Rudolph_Fittig , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Agassiz .

That Schiaparelli was also born and dead in those years is actually funnier trivia than Mark Twain.

When we were young, some of us looked for trivia about our own birthdates. I was born on an anniversary of the day when Hitler was assassinated, when the first astronauts landed on the moon (if you pick the timezone right), and when Petrarca was born (in the Julian calendar). One person I know advertised that he was born on an anniversary of two famous music composers' birth.

He gave that as a quiz to us to find which two composers they were, and back then when the internet was in its infancy that was not a trivial question to solve. I did figure it out eventually.

sonicsid

12:17 PM

@Bookworm Could someone point this OP to esotericarchives.com ? I do not have enough internet points to comment on the post.

It is not a physical library (if that is what OP wants) but democratized occult literature nonetheless.

Rand al'Thor

12:50 PM

@sonicsid Done.

I confess to not understanding exactly what that question is asking, but if it's seeking resources and you know of a useful resource, maybe you could post that as an answer?

sonicsid

Thanks.

I am unsure as well, but after a couple of rereads I think it is expressing dismay over people not being able to access original occult texts and instead having to depend upon the interpretations of modern figures of the same, among which mingle advertisements and people looking for opportunities for personal gain.

The website I linked above is the only resource I am aware of that hosts occult texts that seem to satisfy OP's criteria. Anything that is available gratis on the internet is "democratized" already, is it not?

But I am no expert (the only thing mildly occult I have ever read is a version of The Necronomicon that I obtained from some seedy corner of the internet) and have no means to verify the originality of the texts hosted by the site.

Bookworm

1:53 PM

0

Q: What was the purpose of Mark Twain by writing 'What Stumped the Bluejays'

This is my first time asking a question. It is also the first time that I have to write a review for a short story. I appreciate any help you can provide. The purpose of the writer, The genre, Development of characters(are they believable), Theme, any literary devices used in the story. If you an...

short-stories character-analysis literary-device mark-twain theme

Bookworm

4:48 PM

0

Q: Meaning Of The Phrase "seemed of their own will" and "man were a whole"

In the short story, The Enemy by Pearl S.Buck, there is this phrase that I'm not quite certain whether I have correctly understood. Here is the short para which contains the phrase: "What shall we do this man?" Sadao muttered. But his trained hands seemed of their own will to be doing what they c...

meaning short-stories

bobble

@Bookworm Goodreads says this is 64 pages and a hardcover book, so it's not really a short story

Tsundoku

5:03 PM

@b_jonas Re trivia: I share a birthday with a famous Argentinian author.

@bobble Apparently "The Enemy" was first published in the collection Far and Near: Stories of Japan, China, and America (1947). Maybe it's a novella rather than a short story.

@sonicsid Since "occult" means "secret" or "hidden", any text that is openly available on the Internet is no longer occult in the proper sense of the word :-P

sonicsid

5:52 PM

@bobble It is 24 pages in the NCERT textbook (ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?levt1=4-8) which is probably the OP's source.

@b_jonas I share my birthday with Stephen Wolfram and Dhyan Chand.

>adjective
involving or relating to mystical, supernatural, or magical powers, practices, or phenomena.
"an occult ceremony"

Much more specific than "secret" or "hidden".

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