The Reading Room

Bookworm

00:43

0

Q: What is the source of this poem/song Captain Hastings quotes in Agatha Christie's "The Market Basing Mystery"?

Agatha Christie's short story "The Market Basing Mystery," narrated by Hercule Poirot's companion Captain Arthur Hastings, includes the following: "This is the life," said Japp. "When I retire, I shall have a little place in the country. Far from crime, like this!" "Le crime, il est partout," re...

verbose

06:06

@Mithical It will. It would drive me away if I came here looking for information about an author; saw that there was a question someone asked about them; saw that the author had given an answer; and saw that the powers that be decided the author's answer needed to be demoted. It would cause me to think that the powers that this site doesn't really understand how literature works—how statements from an author ought not to be tampered with.

Make no mistake, moving an answer to a comment is tampering with the author's words. It is not the case that the words are "still preserved." They are preserved differently, and that is hugely material. Speaking as both a scholar and an enthusiast of literature: if we let this change stand, we are losing the very audience this site is intended for.

We're saying "we get to judge how or whether to preserve an author's works", and "we don't mind tampering with the historical record about literary works."

those are massive turnoffs.

verbose

07:22

@Bookworm fuck, that made it to HNQ.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Hypothetically (that's not what happened here, but I think it has happened on SFF), what if an author posted an answer about their story that in no way addresses the question that was asked?

Which is more important, not tampering with authors' words (at all) or adhering to SE's Q&A principles?

verbose

If it's relevant to the story but irrelevant to the question, I'd make the same sort of argument; it's important info about the literary work and as folks who claim to value literature, we should keep it around as an answer. Nothing prevents a mod (or even a non-mod) from putting in a comment saying, "Since this is from the original author, we're keeping it around, although similar answers from others would have been/will be deleted/converted to a comment."

This is not about saying the author is the ultimate authority. It's about the fact that literature is, for the most part, produced by authors, and an author's statements about his work are valuable sources of info for any reading of the work.

Rand al'Thor

Hmm, that's where I'd've disagreed with you (I agree with you on the specific case at hand), but I do see your point that anything the author says is a useful part of the historical record.

verbose

Someone could build an answer (or a critical essay outside of LitSE) based on that seemingly irrelevant answer from the author.

Rand al'Thor

It'll be interesting to see how such an answer fares on meta. Should be a featured post, probably, to get as many opinions and eyeballs as possible.

verbose

07:33

m yeah. It's just easier to ask questions about (sigh) Christie. (Which reminds me, I owe b_jonas an answer.) I've just been putting off framing the q&a for meta.

@b_jonas Part of it is that at least in her Poirot novels, some of the fractured prose is in the dialogues, capturing his mistakes while speaking English. Part of it is that even at its best, and outside of the Poirot scenario, Christie's prose style does not sparkle the way, say, Sayers's or even Nicholas Blake (Cecil Day-Lewis)'s does.

She was never better than a workaday stylist. Some of her prose is godawful. The last line of The Mystery of the Blue Train, for example, is something like "Trust the train, because it is le bon Dieu who drives it." That's ... simply terrible. Blue Train is an awful novel for many reasons (it should have stayed in its original short story format as "Plymouth Express") but the style and characterization is one reason.

And Blue Train is an early novel! She has her share of clunkers in the early novels (The Big Four, where Poirot claims that the cigarette he's been allowed to smoke by the would-be assassin contains a deadly blow dart) but her 1970s novels are unreadable. I couldn't make it through Passenger to Frankfurt or Postern of Fate.

The writing there is in great, bloated loops. The same thing is said over and over and over again. The plot does not advance. It's not clear what's being investigated or why.

By "labored" I don't mean "difficult to read, the way Joyce is difficult to read." I mean she appears to struggle with putting sentences together in a coherent and attractive way.

Speaking of Cecil Day-Lewis, in my lifetime the sitch has gone from "Oh that nice young actor Daniel, he's the son of the poet, you know" to "Wasn't Daniel Day-Lewis's father some kind of poet?"

Rand al'Thor

07:48

I'm a cultural troglodyte and haven't heard of either.

verbose

Cecil Day-Lewis, poet of the 1930s, associate of Auden, Spender, and MacNeice. Best known for Elegy Before Death, I guess. Poet Laureate 1968-1972.

Also wrote several excellent mysteries under the cognomen Nicholas Blake. Best known is probably The Beast Must Die. Quite an amazing work. Made into a movie IIRC

Daniel, son thereof. Charismatic and very sexy Oscar winning actor: lead roles My Beautiful Laundrette, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Phantom Thread. Wikipedia claims (with citations) that he is "Often described as one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema".

See also MacSpaunday

Rand al'Thor

Huh, even the son is 66 now.

@verbose Yikes, that doesn't meet my standards for a good portmanteau word.

verbose

And still sexy as hell. I wanna look like that when I'm 66. Who am I kidding, I didn't look like that even in my twenties.

Rand al'Thor

Speneicauday would be a fairer mix of the four names.

verbose

@Randal'Thor it made me chuckle when I came across it in the 1980s :)

@Randal'Thor how would you pronounce that? Inquiring minds wanna know

Rand al'Thor

08:07

Devious minds made it deliberately ambiguous :-)

verbose

ah

Rand al'Thor

A soft "c" would be closer to the poet's original name, but a hard "c" would be more consistent with coming before an "a".

So better to maintain a policy of strategic ambiguity.

verbose

Don't tell anybody, but (whispers) I actually like MacNeice more than I do Auden.

Goodbye winter / the days are getting longer / the tea leaf in the tea cup / is herald of a stranger.

Prognosis, poem continues on the next page

I puzzled somebody just the day before yesterday, when he remarked "the days are getting longer" and I began talking about tea leaves and strangers named Jonah.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose So tempted to star this for posterity.

verbose

@Randal'Thor LOL! You are a wicked man, Randolph

ah well. I shall go brush my one remaining tooth and head off to bed. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

Rand al'Thor

08:17

Having read Gareth's analysis of an AI-generated answer ... wow. It's kind of scary how a totally false but seemingly well-researched answer can be spat out in a fraction of a second by these bots.

verbose

m yeah

Rand al'Thor

Did you read Gareth's analysis of a ChatGPT-generated answer on this site? The only way a human answer could be that bad would be if someone was maliciously trolling, inventing spurious chapter/page numbers to back up false claims in a plausible-looking way. I'd consider that sort of behaviour potentially grounds for suspension even if no AI was involved. — Rand al'Thor ♦ 2 mins ago

@verbose Goodnight, monodont!

verbose

oh yeah that's a good point, I'dn't thought about how such an answer would cause a user to be suspended

Mithical

@verbose FWIW, that history isn't visible to anyone without the privilege of seeing deleted posts (4k rep).

Rand al'Thor

*2k

Mithical

08:24

right

Rand al'Thor

09:01

@Bookworm The HNQ's a pleasant place, / Its private life is a disgrace: / I really could not tell to you / The awful state of HNQ.

Bookworm

10:23

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Q: Why must "she" perform impossible tasks in order to be "a true love of mine" in "Scarborough Fair"?

"Scarborough Fair" is, according to Wikipedia, a traditional English ballad, with many different versions. However, one thing that the versions have in common, is setting impossible tasks and saying "then she'll be a true love of mine". For instance, in the version sung by The Hound + The Fox, t...

song-lyrics

Tsundoku

10:39

What would you find in Charles Dickens’s pantry?
The best of thyme, the worst of thyme.

Why is John Milton terrible to invite to game nights?
Because whenever he's around, there's a pair of dice lost.

Alex

12:20

@Randal'Thor Humans apparently make things up too. Even respected literary critics.

15

Q: Why did literary critic Harold Bloom say something that didn't correspond to reality regarding Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone?

In this opinion piece by renowned late literary critic Harold Bloom, we see him levy the following charge against Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: I went to the Yale bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The...

harry-potter literary-criticism harold-bloom

Alex

12:39

Or this one, since you pointed it out:

14

A: Where in the books does it say the first victor of District 12 was female?

It doesn't, in the original trilogy. We don't really know anything about the other District 12 victor who wasn't Haymitch, except the facts that they existed and that they died prior to the start of the first book. It's important to be aware that the Hunger Games Wikia is extremely unreliable. ...

Alex

12:59

Regarding the point about page numbers:

1

A: Source for Frodo/Gandalf exchange about wounds in "The Return of the King"

Beginning of Chapter 7 (Homeward Bound)... This happens to be, in my edition, page 325, though is probably different in yours because there can be many different editions. I suggest reading the Table of Contents to determine this. Here's an excerpt: Chapter 7 Homeward Bound At last the hobbits h...

Gareth Rees

13:38

@Alex Do you really consider that a fair comparison with the ChatGPT answer?

DLosc

19:25

@verbose I like Christie, but I have to agree that Passenger to Frankfurt was really bad. I assumed that it was because she was trying a new genre and it didn't go well.

Gareth Rees

20:03

More thoughts on language model policy. Alex's argument is that language models are just tools, and any tool can be used in error. We don't ban people from using libraries even though their shelves contain myths, hoaxes, misattributions, etc.

This is an attractive argument but in my opinion it doesn't adequately engage with the nature of language models. Our main defence against myths, hoaxes, misattributions, etc. is diligent use and careful checking of citations. But language models can generate arbitrarily many plausible claims, replete with pseudo-citations, at the touch of a button, overwhelming anyone's ability to check up on them.

The way to appreciate this is to spend time carefully fact-checking and correcting a sample of language model output. This ought to bring home the terrible ratio between the ease of generating nonsense and the difficulty of checking and refuting it.

Tsundoku

21:59

In addition to confidently providing incorrect information, LLMs can also violate copyright. Generative AI has been caught plagiarising content: Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem.

Tsundoku

22:11

I disagree with the statement that LLMs are "just tools" for another reason: they rely on the same type of cheap labour as other parts of our extractive economy: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic.

For people tired of the AI hype, read for example Dan McQuillan's articles We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it. and ChatGPT: The world’s largest bullshit machine.

Alex

23:49

@GarethRees I agree that AI makes it easier to quickly generate lots of bad content, but I don’t think that fundamentally changes the way we should look at it. If this was a bigger site and we were swamped with such posts on a daily basis, my approach might not be as practical, but with our current volume it seems to be easily workable.

Bookworm

0

Q: A children's book with a rhyme naming cities in western England

I remember reading a few details about three children's books I read in elementary school, presumably borrowed from the school library instead of the local library, because I remember them in connection with a school I attended in November 1961 to June 1962. And it is possible that maybe those de...

identification-request

Alex

My Meta answer about this was already at -4 a few hours after I posted it, and that was with it not being on the main site and not being a new question, which would seem to indicate that the site has the manpower to sufficiently downvote posts as they come along.

So when someone posts something invented by ChatGpT we can just downvote it to indicate that it is not a good answer.

@Alex Though I suppose it could be the reverse, and on Meta it’s easier to accumulate the negative score, since the main site might have hordes of users who just blindly upvote things.

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