The Reading Room - 2017-03-30

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12:03 AM

(To be clear, it's not mocking the Sussex dialect but rather satirising books which fetishise rural life and feature ridiculously bad attempts at accents.)

Okay.

(Cold Comfort Farm satirises everything from futurism to rural romanticism to the preponderance of male voices in the literary canon.)

Recommended read?

Oh, yes. It's hilarious AND smart.

The movie's great too, in its own way; kinda like Princess Bride, the film captures much of the essence of the novel without even trying to encompass the novel's breadth.

I'll see if my library has a copy.

@BESW That is really cool. I enjoyed Princess Bride

12:08 AM

From her introduction to the novel:

> [...]it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons, not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops, and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two, or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius.

(Baedeker invented the star system of rating things for tourists.)

So throughout the novel, particularly florid and overwrought bits of prose have asterisks declaring them Especially Good.

@BESW That's cute

I've requested a copy from my local library

1:04 AM

> The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

Cold Comfort Farm Sermon - No Butter in Hell

1:22 AM

@Riker Inspired by our chat in the other room, I kicked off what I hope will become a valuable community resource on meta. Not exactly what we were talking about, but still.

0

Q: Significance of the True Bloods

In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, what is the significance of the True Bloods?

1:38 AM

0

Q: What are some good (legal) resources for finding the text of books?

Many good answers on this site are going to require quoting passages of the text of a novel, poem, play, or other piece of literature. Thus, knowing where to find such passages is going to be very important for the site's users in composing their answers. Copying them out by hand from paper book...

support quotations resources

0

Q: What is the plot significance of the discovery of Dunstan and the money?

Warning: major spoilers follow for the plot of Silas Marner. In George Eliot (Marian Evans)'s novel Silas Marner, the eponymous weaver's life goes through several significant stages: his years-long period of living alone and hoarding gold; the miserable period immediately after his gold is sto...

george-eliot silas-marner

1:56 AM

closes 90 tabs

Mar 27 at 1:03, by BESW

@Randal'Thor Wait, you close tabs?

Which question have you been researching? :-)

Nice answer from @VicAche. Just needs one more upvote to get us another 1k-rep user.

1 hour later…

3:10 AM

0

Q: What does its future setting add to Cold Comfort Farm?

Cold Comfort Farm is set gently but irresistibly a decade or two after its original publishing date, with video phones and the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of '46 and so forth. However, setting the action in the future doesn't impact the plot or characters in any particular way, and although Gibbons pla...

cold-comfort-farm stella-gibbons

3:25 AM

@Shokhet I've now asked three questions about Cold Comfort, so you can keep them in mind as you read!

3:36 AM

0

Q: What does the sukebind represent?

Stella Gibbons invented the sukebind for Cold Comfort Farm, and she wields it with metaphorical deftness as if it had its own long floriographic history to draw on. For the most part sukebind and its blooming seems to be indicative of animal urges, especially un-premeditated sex. But it's also a...

cold-comfort-farm stella-gibbons

0

Q: Who is the constellation which burns in their midst?

In her forward to Cold Comfort Farm (which takes the form of a letter to Anthony Pookworthy) Stella Gibbons exclaims, Talking of men of genius, what a constellation burns in our midst at the moment! But she offers no clear elaboration. Who is this brightly shining genius?

cold-comfort-farm stella-gibbons

4:27 AM

@Randal'Thor I wish. I have no time to try to answer question at the moment unfortunately.

3 hours later…

7:01 AM

ALOPEX: Can you imagine bedazzling a WHOLE ELEPHANT? ME (glumly): I'm a writer. That's basically what writing a book is LIKE. @alopexfoxy

Tweeted by UrsulaV on March 30, 2017 at 2:18 AM

7:17 AM

@Randal'Thor ahah I would rather have that upvote on a 24 score answer on Shakespeare :)

Locutus of Borg

8:03 AM

I'm still here? Huh, didn't realize I was still open...

3 hours later…

11:27 AM

@VicAche Congrats on your 4-figure rep :-)

Does metaliterature come under intertextuality?

11:38 AM

Alphabetically, yes.

12:31 PM

@Randal'Thor I would say not, "any literary text which takes the nature of literature as its object; such texts collectively." vs "The relationship between texts, especially literary ones." ie metaliterature can happen with no explicit nor implicit references to existing texts, while I would say it's not the case for intertextuality

@VicAche Ah, OK. I thought metaliterature was more like "books about other books".

Still, there's a lot of overlap.

Is there a good general term that covers both?

1:06 PM

@Randal'Thor I would say intertextuality comes under metaliterature, if anything

mornin

1 hour later…

2:33 PM

so, query: in the foreward of my newest book, one of the authors discuses a life event that happened. I'm unsure if said life event really happened or if they made it up for drama. would it be on-topic here to ask if said event in said forward has been stated as being real or made up by said author?

@DForck42 I would say yes. It's asking about something in the author's life as it relates to their books. Hang on, I think there's a meta or two about this ...

the reason I ask is because the forward isn't quite a part of the actual literature, but I don't know if we have a precedent on this or not

@Randal'Thor k

12

Q: Are questions about authors on-topic?

Are questions about authors on-topic, or just their works? For example, asking about authors lives, motivations, interviews, or anything relating to their work.

discussion scope

9

Q: Are questions about author's personal opinions on-topic?

I recently asked the question What is C. S. Lewis' opinion about homosexuality?. The question was closed as being off-topic. Are questions about authors' personal opinions on-topic or off-topic?

discussion scope

@Randal'Thor neat. I had no idea how to tag it other than the author's tag, so feel free to add any tags that seem relevent

It could maybe have the short-stories tag, but AIUI it's not technically about the short story itself.

2:45 PM

0

Q: Did the event in Jim's foreword actually happen?

In Jim Butcher's foreword in the short story collection Shadowed Souls, he discusses an event in which a pack of coyotes surrounds his home in an attempt to prey on his pet dog. This story seems a bit farfetched to be real, and I wouldn't put it past Jim to make up such a story just to have a li...

@Randal'Thor yeah, that's why I didn't tag it with shadowed-souls

figured dropping the title in the body was good enough

3:00 PM

@DForck42 Answered :-)

@Randal'Thor was not expecting that quick an answer, lol

I feel a little dirty for using Twitter as a source on a literature site.

@Randal'Thor lol

Urgh, rep notifications are still broken here, even though they started working again on Puzzling.

@Randal'Thor but you're not claiming that Twitter is literature. You're using it as a reference for what the author said...

3:11 PM

Or maybe they started and stopped working, rather than it being a per-site thing.

Apparently it's been iffy everywhere.

And I didn't get any notifications from reporting it :P

Speaking of which, I still have no idea what the downvote was for...

Also, hello.

@Mithrandir Sure. I'm not saying it's an invalid answer (obviously, since I posted it :-P ) I just feel like the words "Twitter" and "literature" don't belong in the same sentence.

What's that XKCD?

[title-text similarly alphabetized]

@Mithrandir hello

@DForck42 *waves*

3:22 PM

@Randal'Thor I mean, you could in theory write haikus on twitter, so...

@film_haikus

14 tweets, 10 followers, following 2 users

Not just in theory, right @Napoleon?

@Randal'Thor hah!

I guess I'd be guilty of "literature snobbery" if I said that tweets aren't proper literature ... so I'll just shut up about Twitter at this point :-P

Napoleon Wilson

@DForck42 It can have its difficulties, though.

4

Q: How to convey newlines in tweeted poetry, if at all?

Suppose I've written a haiku as 3 consecutive lines with standard punctuation as if it was normal free text, which means I don't use special punctuation at the end of a line just because it's the end of a line but only if normal language rules demand/allow punctuation. Now haikus in their concise...

publishing formatting punctuation

Whoa, I've had 10 accepted answers in a row here, 11 if @DForck accepts my Jim Butcher answer.

A streak which I'm likely to break when I get round to answering some older questions some of which already have accepted answers.

3:34 PM

@Randal'Thor maybe, I like to let my questions age a little before accepting ;-)

Oh, I'm not trying to rush you at all! Just saying that if you accept it at some point, I'll have a streak of 11.

Napoleon Wilson

@DForck42 Which is an excellent attitude!

Agreed.

@NapoleonWilson :-D

although, on occasion I forget about a question and come back a year later and accept it, so...

Napoleon Wilson

I do occasional rounds through my unaccepted questions every few months at least.

I use that also for checking unanswered ones and issuing any possible bounties.

3:43 PM

so, this is a thing

upworthy.com/amp/…

Napoleon Wilson

Measuring traffic to their website might not be much of a significant conclusion. I too like to read those thingies and usually know enough about the books to find them funny. Doesn't mean I go buy let alone read one of their books.

@DForck42 Oh dear God.

@Randal'Thor lol

5 hours later…

9:10 PM

Twitter fiction is a thing which exists and about which people argue.

I find the cell phone novel more interesting.

@BESW interesting

Micro SF/F stories

@MicroSFF, England

Very short science fiction/fantasy stories by O. Westin. Please RT any you like. Book: https://t.co/utkBev93up Patreon: https://t.co/P5OoD3Q842

6.1k tweets, 31k followers, following 93 users

I used to do the micro fiction stuff with the writers chatroom

it fell apart at some point, dunno if they still do it

It's not as regular as it used to be, but it's still going.

Last year I entered a 200-word RPG contest.

That was a lot of fun.

@BESW interesting

9:22 PM

I wrote a set of NPCs for the Fate system, and a stand-alone game commenting on a gap in Dog Eat Dog's theme.

@BESW Is it also called twitterature?

Portmanteaus FTW.

@Randal'Thor I imagine that'd be something people argue over.

9:37 PM

I remember reading about stories shared over the telegraph, but I can't find the reference right now.

The Telegraph has some long articles ...

There is this article about the telegraph genre, a whole category of novel about how the telegraph changed peoples' lives. Many of them are about long-distance romances.

I'm always being given so much interesting new reading material in this room.

Pretty appropriate given the room name and associated site!

[bow and a flourish]

@Randal'Thor yup

my fiancée is now reading through my old blog. her responses are funny

9:49 PM

Btw @DForck42, a little bird told me that Lit.1 used to have a blog ... how did that work? Was it a BlogOverflow one? Are the contents still available anywhere?

Sep 16 '11 at 22:45, by DForck42

@unusualhabit it's a general blog about the literature site and how things are going so far. you're going mentioned because you're one of the 5 users with 1k+ rep.

(And yes, the little bird was a member of the Chatroomus transcriptiensis species.)

@Randal'Thor I honestly don't remember

it might have had 1 or 2

10:04 PM

A Lauzanne (The Virtuous Rake, a Prose Poem in Four Odes, Suitable for a Drama Performed Twice a Week, if Necessary), by Charles-Georges Doucet Coqueley de Chaussepierre in 1770. "By putting nothing into it, we cannot criticize the style."

.@PuffinBooks to publish a picture book edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species:… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/847516280189927424

Tweeted by thebookseller on March 30, 2017 at 6:30 PM

10:24 PM

I'm amused at the voting on my cold-comfort-farm questions.

1 hour later…

11:37 PM

Mary McCarthy's 1986 review of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

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