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Bookworm
Bookworm
1:42 AM
0
Q: What is the relationship between the poem "Caged bird" and the book "I know why the caged bird sings"?

temporary_user_nameWhat is the relationship between the poem "Caged bird" and the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? One seems to be an autobiography and the other apoem, but they have overlapping titles and I'm unclear which was written first or whether the poem inspired the book or whether the poem is in the b...

maya-angelou
 
bobble
bobble
I have finished finals and took the time to read the election question collection. Added two of my own.
 
 
2 hours later…
b_jonas
b_jonas
4:17 AM
@bobble Yeah. I saw "are you in chat" when I checked previous election questions on Sci Fi for ideas, but since all four known candidates are in this chatroom I decided it was pointless to ask.
There can still be more candidates, but still at least some moderators will be in chat.
 
 
3 hours later…
Mithical
Mithical
7:00 AM
@DLosc Yep, although I actually only use one - *\*text here** becomes *text here*.
 
 
5 hours later…
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
12:15 PM
@verbose There's a minimum of 3, which I think is so that mod teams can have discussions and form majority consensi among themselves if necessary. Beyond that, it's usually decided based on workload, i.e. current mods decide how many they feel are needed and communicate their recommendation to SE employees who set up elections accordingly.
Sometimes a site may also be overstaffed due to reinstatements: e.g. Lit was never active enough to need 4 mods, but we had that for a while after Mith applied for reinstatement and before Galli stepped down. There's no upper bound, so nobody should feel forced to step down in order to make "room" for someone to come back.
 
 
3 hours later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
3:38 PM
1
Q: What does "were with him when Divine Love first moved those fair things" mean in Dante's "Inferno"?

MithicalTowards the beginning of the Inferno, when the narrator encounters the leapord, lion, and wolf, we find this passage: The time was at the beginning of the morning; and the sun was mounting up with those stars, which were with him when Divine Love first moved those fair things: so that the hour o...

meaning italian-language dante-alighieri divine-comedy
 
Mithical
Mithical
@Bookworm That translation is impossible to get through... still just in the first few pages :P
 
 
2 hours later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
5:21 PM
0
Q: Who is "Old Nicky" in The Son by Philipp Meyer?

Johnathan ParkerIn Chapter 67, Eli McCullough thinks: "I started to tell her, but couldn't. Old Nicky himself had pinched my jaw shut." Who is Old Nicky? I suspect it's some folklore, but can't find anything on him.

terminology
 
verbose
verbose
6:15 PM
@Mithical Is there a reason you are sticking with this translation, then, as opposed to finding a different one?
 
Mithical
Mithical
@verbose I'm dual-wielding that one and John Ciardi's. Ciardi's preserves the rhyme structure, but sacrifices a lot of the nuance; while the Carlyle translation is hard to understand, it's more complete in terms of including more of the original nuance and ideas. Also, I'm extremely stubborn and those are the copies I have.
And hey, if sticking through the tough one means I can get good answers from Lit that add context I hadn't thought about, all the better.
Like, I could guess that "him" referred to the sun and that "Divine Love first moved" referred to Genesis - I had considered those before posting the question. The zodiac part was not something I would have thought of, though, and explains context I would have otherwise missed.
 
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
6:47 PM
I think it's worthwhile to have these Dante questions on literature.se, because even though the answers are well known, since people have been writing commentaries on Dante since the 1320s, there are often little corners that can be filled in.
For example, all the notes I looked at agreed that it was believed in the medieval period that the creation occurred on the spring equinox, but the only commentator I found who actually gave a reference (Charles S. Singleton) gave one to Macrobius, which didn't seem right to me (Macrobius says that the Chaldees claimed that "Aries was in the middle of the sky" on the day of creation, which I think would place creation around midwinter).
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
7:06 PM
0
Q: What is the significance of the chapter title “Detention With Dolores”?

AlexIn Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the title of the thirteenth chapter is “Detention With Dolores”. It strikes me as odd that Dolores is used in the title, as the book is from Harry’s perspective, and he would not think about her with that name. Is there a particular significance to usi...

name-significance title j-k-rowling harry-potter
 
verbose
verbose
@GarethRees Gareth, you walk on water. How on earth did you find in the space of an hour a reference to Bede that explained this idea, when none of the other commentators over seven centuries gave as watertight a source? And as always, your answer is a model of clarity and lucidity. You should teach a masterclass on "how to write good LitSE answers."
 
Mithical
Mithical
I'd take that class
 
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
7:28 PM
I don't intend to blame the other commentators—they probably considered it common knowledge so that it did not need a reference. But it's not common knowledge to me, so I wanted a reference
Anyway, how did I go about it? I started at the Dartmouth Dante Project search form and looked at the commentary on Inferno 1.39. Here's the Singleton comment which led me to the Macrobius dead end.
Nothaft mentions "Bede’s doctrine that the sun and moon had been created when a Wednesday coincided with the vernal equinox and a full moon" which was just what I wanted. Although Nothaft does not give a reference, it was not difficult to guess that it might be in De Temporum Ratione.
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
8:09 PM
@verbose In all seriousness, that could potentially be a meta post, if there's useful general points not specific to a single question/book/author for how to find and write a good answer.
It's been done before on meta, collecting general tips on researching and answering (certain types of) questions.
 
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
Not sure if any of that helps? I've found the Dartmouth Dante Project very useful in the past, so I added it to the answer on meta about resources for finding the text of books. Also, there was an element of luck. You don't get to see the times when I needed a reference for something and I failed to find it.
 
verbose
verbose
8:43 PM
@GarethRees my man, nobody said you were blaming them. I merely said you were showing them up :D
@Bookworm Does name-significance apply to this question? I'dn't've thought so. If y'all'dn't've either, maybe an edit is warranted
 
 
1 hour later…
Alex
Alex
10:00 PM
@verbose When I originally wrote the question, I had included a possibility that the title choice was related to the significance of the name. I ended up removing that part (since it would be more appropriate it an answer).
 
verbose
verbose
@Alex oh ah
 
Alex
Alex
10:12 PM
Which I have since posted as (part of) an answer.
 

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