The Reading Room

Bookworm

05:50

0

Q: Why did Yusuf's father have a silver rupee in his pocket?

At one point in Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yusuf stole a coin from his father's jacket pocket, which ended up being a "silver Rupee." I'm aware of Indian rupees, but they're currently definitely not made out of silver. In fact, if I'm reading the Wikipedia article correctly, the Indian govern...

Rand al'Thor

07:48

@b_jonas I guess he meant in the tag wiki - with the tag name still being simply star-wars.

verbose

08:49

whoever upvoted this answer didn't have time to read it.

Or else reads fast, i guess

Rand al'Thor

11:02

@verbose Are you fishing for votes? ;-)

Bookworm

11:53

0

Q: How are the Chekov passages handled in the translation of 1Q84?

I'm curious about the Chekov passages which Tengo reads aloud to Fuka-Eri. Presumably they are in Japanese in the original. Were they copied from an existing Japanese translation of Chekov? In the English translation (by Rubin and Gabriel), did they take the Chekov from an existing English transl...

translation haruki-murakami

Namaskaram

12:10

@verbose I wasn't that first upvoter, but I did read it fully before suggesting an edit (and upvoting!)

My institute gives me access to Scholes's essay "Who Cares about the Text?"

I can send you a PDF copy, if you'd like.

Prince North Læraðr

14:31

@Randal'Thor Right

Tsundoku

16:08

Will star-wars need synonyms? E.g. start-wars or star-warts? Considering what goes on in that franchise, the first one would be very apt.

Rand al'Thor

17:14

@Bookworm Huh, apparently it's possible for a question with no votes to go HNQ.

@Bookworm A silver rupee in the HNQ.

@Tsundoku I've heard of several similar names of sci-fi things beginning with Star. Should we synonymise star-wars and star-trek?

Rand al'Thor

17:28

@verbose Despite being confident a priori that it'd be a good answer, I dutifully waited until I'd had time to read it before upvoting. I think it's exactly the kind of answer that question needs: after reading the question originally, I was thinking that it raises a very interesting issue but it may need a slight frame-challenge or goalpost-shift in order to usefully answer it, which is exactly what you did.

DLosc

19:00

As an amateur consumer of literature, I get a bit impatient with critics who make bold statements like "The author's intent doesn't matter" or "The text has no meaning without an audience." All of it matters: the author's intention, the text itself, the historical & literary context, the individual reader, the community of readers. Just because you can come up with a pathological example to prove a point doesn't mean your point is a useful way to approach literature in general.

Tsundoku

19:38

@Randal'Thor My suggestion: battle-star-trek-wars

verbose

@Randal'Thor 🎣🗳️

Tsundoku

@DLosc Where do you get the author's intention, though?

verbose

@Namaskaram ooh thanks, that would be lovely! My gmail username is the same as here. Thanks for the edit as well.

@MattThrower I revised that answer pretty extensively a moment ago, hope you'll still like it after the revisions. When you say Fish is being postmodern, how are you defining postmodern? If you accept the tripartite premodern-modern-postmodern dichotomy as "meaning exists, meaning is constructed, there is no meaning", Fish is modern rather than postmodern, no?

er rather than postmodern I mean

Tsundoku

"Meaning is constructed" is something I often see mentioned as a feature of postmodernism. And "There is no coherent meaning" with modernism.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Your emojification of Watership Down is still on the tags list for this room :-D ----->

verbose

19:52

So I noticed ;-)

Rand al'Thor

@verbose re your comment on meta: I guess I have a little more knowledge of Hungarian now than when I asked that question, and I keep meaning to run this past a Hungarian friend IRL. Also @b_jonas didn't say anything against your answer, did he?

> election begins
> in 4 minutes

verbose

@Randal'Thor I didn't assume @b_jonas had read that answer! And how great that you have a smattering of Hungarian now. I don't know any non-Indo-European languages. I asked a Finnish speaking friend if he knew Hungarian, and he said, "I'm Finno, they're Ugric."

Tsundoku

I have voted

Rand al'Thor

Three voters so far.

Tsundoku

Check the Constituent badge page to track who has voted ;-)

2

b_jonas

20:05

What on meta?

Rand al'Thor

@verbose I don't actually speak/understand any Hungarian beyond a few words (I have more knowledge of a couple of other non-Indo-European languages, which I also can't really speak/understand), but there's a few general principles that make your answer totally make sense: the fact that the stress is always on the first syllable, and the importance of syllable "length" as indicated in writing by accents (hence Hungarian being perhaps the only language having a letter with a double acute accent).

verbose

@b_jonas Let's see if I can correctly link a comment

I didn't like voting in this election. I like all the candidates! Any of them would be great!

b_jonas

I'm thinking I should do a bit more research about the candidates to decide who to vote for, but I probably won't have the energy to do it.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Toss a pentahedral die :-P

@b_jonas We're all pingable in chat, if you want to grill us about anything.

(Skooba isn't pingable in here but is in the election chatroom)

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Yes, if I do the research then I will probably talk about it in chat.

verbose

20:12

I wonder whether STV is in some objective sense "better" than approval voting, of which I've always been a fan.

b_jonas

@verbose they're probably both better in some objective senses. they just optimize different things.

verbose

One reason I am a fan of AV rather than any kind of RCV is that it's so much simpler to explain. And RCV ballots when you have multiple elections with ~10 candidates in each (as we do every two years, when we elect our House representatives, often a senator, every so often a President, plus everybody local from assemblyperson to city councilperson to dog-catcher) are just ... massive and error-prone.

To explain to voters, I mean.

"Just put a checkmark beside any or all candidates you like."

b_jonas

The circumstances are kind of different in a government election versus an SE moderator election.

DLosc

@Tsundoku I think that's a separate, epistemological question. I'd claim that the author's intention is intrinsically part of the meaning of a work (though not the only part, and arguably not the most important part). If we have no way of accessing the author's intention, then that aspect of the meaning of the work must remain mysterious, but that doesn't make it unimportant.

verbose

@b_jonas that is true.

I mean, the stakes are so much higher here.

b_jonas

20:23

Government elections need to have a lower floor for voters, we want to allow everyone to vote, and in secret too, so we need a simple easy to understand procedure. SE moderator elections only give a vote to people who are active on SE. Also SE elections can be run with SE as a trusted arbiter organizing them, while government elections have no single trusted authority so it needs this distributed procedure where each political party can send representatives to the vote counting groups.

So voting by drawing a cross in a circle works well for government elections. It is simple enough to teach to all voters, the voters don't need to be able to handle a computer. The election organizer representatives can all check that only people who are allowed to vote get the physical ballot and that nobody does anything sneaky with the box of cast ballots, and then count them in a way that keeps anonymity of the voters.

It would be harder to do that and get the voters specify a preference ordering of the candidates.

You'd need like a whole matrix of circles and voters would have to draw multiple crosses. Everyone will probably blame each other that the ballot is either too confusing or too slow to fill or something.

verbose

Yes, we appear to be in complete agreement. Or as Mrs Slocombe says, I am unanimous in that.

Tsundoku

@DLosc What makes you think you can ever have access to the author's intention? Authors can make any sort of claims about their intentions, e.g. imperfectly remembering what thy had in mind, embellishing it, intentionally leading readers astray, etc. How do you know whether an author's statements about their intentions are reliable?

b_jonas

@Tsundoku Yes, we all know about George Lucas.

But some authors seem easier to trust.

Tsundoku

@b_jonas George Lucas??

b_jonas

@Tsundoku Yes, the creator of Star Wars. He said so many contradictory and impossible things about the films that nobody believes anything he says about his original intent anymore.

DLosc

20:32

@Tsundoku Literature is made of words, and the point of words is communication from one person to another. Saying that one of the two people involved doesn't matter is very strange to me. The fact that people can lie doesn't make it pointless to try to figure out what they mean.

Tsundoku

@DLosc What are you going to do to "try to figure out what they mean"?

b_jonas

29

A: Weren't there originally going to be nine Star Wars films?

Depending on his plans at the time and when you asked him, George Lucas has variously said there would be one film, three films, six films, nine films or 12 films. A trilogy of trilogies It was widely reported in 1980 that there would be nine films: a trilogy of trilogies. Al Walentis wrote in th...

DLosc

@Tsundoku What does one do to try to figure out what anyone means?

b_jonas

@DLosc Tell them which part doesn't seem to make sense and ask them to clarify. Very important to do my job.

Tsundoku

@DLosc Many, possibly most, authors have not left us any statements about the intention behind their work. For those works, we can only look at the works themselves. For the other works, some people look at what the authors said about them and others don't. Are those that ignore the author's intent therefore of lesser quality?

The quality of an interpretation is best "measured" by how much of the work it explains. The interpretation that explains more of a work than the others may or may not correspond what the author said about it. But if we use authorial intent as a yardstick, we get two categories of interpretations, distinguished merely by the existence of authorial statements about the works they interpret.

DLosc

20:46

@Tsundoku True, most authors (at least, pre-Twitter) haven't left a lot of statements explaining their intentions. In addition to the works themselves, we also have the author's other works, what is known about their life, and the cultural / historical setting they lived in.

Prince North Læraðr

@Tsundoku You're about to start some nerd war

Tsundoku

@DLosc That can be interesting and worthwhile, but it's just one way of looking at a literary work, among many others.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Let's not start calling every conversation a war.

b_jonas

It gets even better when it's recently deceased authors who said something about their work when I met them and now all you can rely on is my hearsay, whatever I can remember they said.

Prince North Læraðr

Fight

DLosc

@Tsundoku I agree, and I'm not saying that authorial intent is the yardstick for interpretation. I'm just saying that it is one of several important pieces.

@Tsundoku The author's intent, no matter how inaccessible to us--and perhaps even subconscious on the part of the author--is baked into the work. (Maybe "intent" isn't the best word here, since that does seem to suggest a conscious effort.) So an interpretation that ignores the author's intent is intrinsically not explaining as much of the work as it could be.

I also want to distinguish between the author's intent and what the author has said about the work. As we've mentioned, those can be two different things.

Tsundoku

20:52

@DLosc If you're into that sort of thing. It can be a very interesting exercise to take a very different approach; you may find out that the author's statement are contradicted by what you find.

b_jonas

Sure, and sometimes what the author writes in one place is contradicted by what they had written in another place but forgot since.

Tsundoku

@DLosc I think we should let go of the idea that an author's work is determined by a single, coherent intention. Authors aren't machines so we can't assume everything is consistent with that intention (assuming it was a coherent intention to begin with).

DLosc

I've certainly read statements from authors that contradicted the conclusions I'd previously come to about their work, and I've sometimes decided I liked my version better. :)

But sometimes, interpretations that disregard authorial intent come across as twisting someone's words to mean the opposite of what they were trying to say, and I don't like that.

Tsundoku

See :-) But what I said was not so much about subjective preference; it was about the "explanatory force" of an interpretation.

Bookworm

1

Q: C. S. Lewis after life with Joy

After the death of Joy, did Lewis ever seriously consider suicide? He mentioned "An overdose of sleeping pills" in A Grief Observed but I believe that was written from a strictly academic point of view (CS Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York, NY.: HarperCollins Publishers, 1961) p. 29).

c-s-lewis

b_jonas

20:59

Like for example, in everything2.com/user/sam512/writeups/July+17%252C+2006 Sam is surprised that the Guys know his name, which doesn't make sense because he should know that they know his name from stickman.qntm.org/comics.php?n=275 . And I asked Sam about that and he said that oops he forgot about that strip. And of course this is just hearsay, but luckily in this case the author is alive so someone else can ask him if they want to confirm that.

Tsundoku

@PrinceNorthLæraðr How do they say that again? Never bring a book to a nerd fight?

Prince North Læraðr

Hehe

DLosc

21:23

@DLosc The example I'm thinking of concerned the minutia of how two side characters were related; which, now that I think of it, feels a bit different than questions of the central themes/meaning of a work.

Alex

22:34

@verbose Is a tripartite dichotomy possible?

DLosc

Reminds me of the old radio program Car Talk: "Welcome back to the third half of our show..."

Alex

@DLosc Reminds me of this:

Apr 14, 2021 at 0:55, by Alex

This answer is way better than the one from JKR herself! — Shana Tar Oct 3 '18 at 15:12

verbose

23:06

@Alex nice catch

Alex

They don’t call me Willie Mays for nothin.

verbose

oh, how much do you pay them to call you that, then?

Alex

Nothin. They don’t call me Willie Mays.

verbose

ah. That makes sense.

Is there any way to edit a post without bumping it to the top of the question list? I realized I made a mistake in one of the references in that piscatorial answer

b_jonas

@verbose No. Except sometimes editing the tags implicitly when tags are merged or renamed or something, or by SE staff's divine intervention that they only do when they have to do a really big mass edit that affects so many posts on multiple sites that they don't want to change the mtime of each of them.

verbose

23:18

@b_jonas ah. Too bad. thanks!

oh skooba and sean duggan are both from Pittsburgh. H'm I wonder whether they know each other

I mean, it's only a small town

Alex

Only 300,431 people.

DLosc

@DLosc Found an example where the author wasn't able to communicate his intention accurately to the reader:

12

A: Why does Robert Frost contradict himself in "The Road Not Taken"

First let's take a quick look at what Robert Frost himself said about this poem: “One stanza of “The Road Not Taken” was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England. [It] was as found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about m...

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
"I wrote a poem for a friend, and I—
I thought he'd know my tone was wry;
But people!—Oh, they are just too dense!"

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