English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Neat. I really liked it—it's one of the only books I've had to read for school that I've enjoyed.

nohat

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Here? not too much. I've been very busy in my day job stemming the tide of fraudsters trying to defraud my employers

What did you like about it, @Mahnax?

@nohat those darn fraudsters. I have to do a bit of that too for my job.

3:10 AM

@JosephWeissman I thought that Merseault was a very interesting character.

@nohat ghastly!

Go on :)

We talked about the philosophy involved in the book (absurdity/existentialism) and I found that interesting.

Cool! Yeah, me and @Cerberus were talking about existentialism for hours today. For no reason at all!

Or was there a reason...? :D

Haha, nice.

I even get to keep my copy of the book, which is nice.

Perks of the IB program, I suppose.

I don't suppose you've read Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky?

3:15 AM

Crime and Punishment?

Not as carefully or recently than The Stranger.

The story where a man murders a women and angsts over it?

Something like that.

I read it in first grade.

It's almost the opposite in a way.

3:15 AM

Independently.

Of L'etranger.

My mom freaked out, telling me not to read that kind of stuff.

It's pretty dark.

Fairly brutal about the stakes and risks of human existence.

I find it incredibly difficult to believe that a six year old could read Crime and Punishment.

Well, it was condensed korean version for 6th graders.

But my mom wanted me to jump higher.

I took one look at the title and I was interested.

I never really understood what I read at that time.

3:17 AM

That's more understandable, I suppose. Someday, you should read the real version. It's good.

The Stranger is (as) beautiful, but somehow even more tragic.

Or at least more resonant today.

Naturally, they take out gory parts of the story to fit for young readers.

Well, it's more the nihilism that would make it inappropriate than the violence as such.

Plenty of children's stories are very "dark" in the sense of violence. Kids get violence, as long as it's within a comfortable narrative context, that cleans things up well, etc.

I suspect they kept the murder part of the story short.

Crime and Punishment is darkest in terms of the presentation of anguish, unresolved violence, (the dread of) judgment, etc.

3:20 AM

I also read Edgar Allen Poe stories at similar time; all in same package, condensed and less gory.

It was story of a black cat or something...

Poe's great, for sure.

I loved the way Edger twists the ending.

(I really wish Literature.SE had been able to generate more steam.)

The nihilism is in why he commits the murder.

It's to test his thesis: that people are capable of doing these things, and even have the right.

Hello again!

The character repeats it over and over again; he says it out loud at least several times -- that murder is right on behalf of a higher power.

3:23 AM

I liked C&P.

Hello!

L'Étranger, not so much.

Hi Cerby!

Yo!

@Cerberus Pourquoi?

Oops.

A: How and when did American spelling supersede British spelling in the US?

3:24 AM

I read at around your age, I think.

J'sais pas.

Perhaps I just don't get existentialism.

tchrist

@Mitch And now . . . you have . . . the rest of the story:

6

It actually isn’t that way at all. Your question has too many false assumptions. Yes, there were a few changes that Webster tried, but it is much more complicated than that. English has never had a single agreed-upon spelling, even within any one country. There is no such thing as the Americ...

@JosephWeissman Is this about l'Etranger?

@Cerberus no, that's C&P I thought?

Ah OK.

He talks about Bonaparte, of course.

3:28 AM

I read C&P as being about whether means can justify the end in the case of murder.

That's definitely most of it :)

And whether one can live with such a deed.

Apparently, one cannot, but for the forgiveness of God.

I might just emphasize this mantra of his -- that it's right to do it in service of a higher power. He identifies here with Napoleon.

But the ending seemed a bit incongruous, as is typical for Dostoevsky.

@JosephWeissman Of Raskolnikov?

He says it: but does he believe it?

Exactly. I think that invocation is really important in explaining the breakdown that occurs. He tries to justify his decision -- at least in part "because Bonaprate" did it.

It points to the order of history stuff we were talking about earlier -- the shape of universal history.

3:30 AM

Uh huh?

@tchrist yay! +1 from me. Now do the ngrams for all the other words and I'll create a sock puppet just to give you another +1!

I don't understand what you mean by that.

I mean, it's immediately political.

It could be, but he doesn't really go into politics much?

Desire invests history in this schizophrenic way -- identifying with great figures; at its' best it moves beyond to peoples.

3:32 AM

Isn't Napoleon only mentioned semi-casually as one of many desperate attempts to justify himself?

The right to kill another is justified in the service of a higher power -- are we not close to the problem of politics here?

Yes, but...I didn't feel D. was really that much concerned with it.

That Napoleon is mentioned at all, and in this context, would seem to indicate that at least some political implications might be drawn as to the motivations of the work

I may be over-reading a causal remark, for sure

I don't know.

It seems too minor.

I think the general point about desire still stands -- that it immediately invests large-scale social and political investments

What is right for the powerful?

3:34 AM

But it could be that D. would have expressed similar meanings had one asked him.

What do you mean by "invest"?

The schizophrenic breakdown is critical too -- that it latches onto powerful historical figures as justification for its action seems critical in terms of understanding the logic, the trajectory of the collapse that occurs

What collapses is the social fabric itself, the psychic fabric of the narrator -- all because of this "thesis" he has, that killing can be right in the service of (higher) power

It would have been interesting if Napoleon had collapsed like that...

Desire works by continuously breaking down... :)

How does that work?

Does it matter?

It does (work)!

3:36 AM

Heh.

I rather mean I have no idea what you mean.

Desire produces something, right? It makes something happen.

It produces a gap, something new, a difference, the disaster.

Every moment, every thought has this risk associated with its development.

This is all completely general. Pure metaphysics.

The question is about higher, rarer types of thought and action.

I'm afraid I still don't understand.

The questions raised in C&P strike me less as moral (about transcendent good/evil distinctions) than ethical (about evaluating according to 'aesthetic' principles various ways of thinking, living and feeling)

I think we would have possibly to go back to Spinoza and Nietzsche to really unpack all of this :)

What do aesthetics have to do with ethics? To me, moral and ethical are synonyms?

I would like to have a chance to read more carefully, though.

3:39 AM

Oh dear, and it's 5:39!

I'm so sorry, @Cerberus!

I have only myself to blame.

And you're jetlagged!

It's midnight, but subjectively it's only 9 PM for me :)

Ah the good kind of jetlag!

Well, or the bad kind tomorrow morning.

I guess so. My body's still all confused about it.

Right. A lot of that! :)

3:42 AM

Goes to show how wicked our age is, that it forces people into being in different times at once.

Too true!

shakes heads

Good night from me, @Cerberus. Thank you again :)

Mitch

@tchrist holy crap! I upvoted you way back when, I can't do it again!

Good night to you too, eventually!

We have explored many interesting topics.

3:43 AM

We have!

Au revoir!

poof

Ciao!

teleport sound effect

weird crackling noise

@Cerberus *pooves

teleportation continues...God knows whither

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I'll leave that to you.

Bye!

Mitch

3:45 AM

@tchrist I hesitate to make another comment for fear that it will encourage you to spend so much more of your labor..but I can't resist.

It seems to me though you've covered an example pair from each recognizable classes (ignoring the ad hoc differences). But it could be for each class, the transition is consistent (or let's go with -more- consistent than all classes put together).

I found in my own dubious and short investigation that most of the 'ou' words (like colour/color) transitioned to 'o' words in the same few decades, 1840-1860. It wasn't a sharp transition for any particular word, and some transition windows were a decade earlier or a decade later, but they were pretty much around mid 19th c.

And the point is that there are -many- words in that class. Maybe it really was 'ou'-> 'o' in mid 19thc generally.

And maybe there was a difffernt range, but one that applied to many of the '-ise'->'ize' words.

that's all.

ampersand

4:01 AM

Hi folks!