The Reading Room

1:48 AM

0

Q: Tom and Nick's meeting in the Great Gatsby

At the end of Gatsby when Tom and Nick meet, after their conversation Nick states that Tom: "went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace — or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons — rid of my provincial squeamishness forever." I have a few questions: Why didn't Nick tell Tom it was...

BESW

3:28 AM

Alone in the empty house I asked, "Is anyone there?" A whisper from the darkness: "If I said 'no,' would it comfort you?" #TwoLineGhostStory

Tweeted by realbadger on October 21, 2017 at 1:04 PM

user15026

@BESW oooh, this gave me the shivers as I mulled it over for a while

BESW

4:13 AM

VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Brooke C. Obie.

Rand al'Thor

9:06 AM

@Zyera Thanks for the answer! I was going to say I'd upvote but not accept, because it covers all the terms I'd specifically mentioned but not all those used in the book, but in fact you do link to a source which seems to cover all the dialect terms in the book (and even some more standard English words like "oblique", "gait", "abyss"). One suggestion though: maybe you could incorporate the info from that source into the actual text of your answer? "Link-only answers" and all, you know ...

user61230

9:39 AM

@Randal'Thor I added the ones you'd specifically asked for in the question.

Rand al'Thor

@Zyera Sure, but those were just examples - my question is asking for a comprehensive list of all the dialect words used in the book. (Again, not saying I don't appreciate your answer - I do, and I've upvoted it, and I did say partial answers are welcome.)

user61230

@Randal'Thor Hmm... I can see what you're saying, but I'm a little iffy on copying wholesale out of other texts. At minimum, though, I should change the link to indicate the name/ISBN of the text, so it can be found independently of the answer. I do see what you're saying, though.

user61230

I might just be being lazy ;)

Mithrandir

9:55 AM

hey, would one of you mind repinning chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=40416587#40416587 ?

I already pinned it once, so...

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir status-completed

Mithrandir

Thanks

Rand al'Thor

bug: the thing I clicked said "unpin this message", but still worked to pin it.

Bookworm

12:46 PM

0

Q: Did Thomas Hardy's books get more miserable with time, and was this because of his own life?

Thomas Hardy is best known for his tragic romances, novels which are really miserable and depressing to read. However, not all of them are equally so: Far From the Madding Crowd, one of his first novels, actually has a happy ending for the main characters! The Mayor of Casterbridge ... I didn't...

thomas-hardy

Long John Silver

1:14 PM

8

Q: Ray Bradbury says Fahrenheit 451 isn't about censorship. Is he right?

According to this question about Ray Bradbury's intentions, Ray Bradbury did not intend for Fahrenheit 451 to be about government censorship, and went so far as to say "Fuck you" to someone who argued that Fahrenheit 451 was about government censorship. Is Bradbury right? Is Fahrenheit 451 not a...

censorship fahrenheit-451 ray-bradbury

Rand al'Thor

7:10 PM

That's the point. Saying what is on and off topic is a political statement. (See, for example, how colonizers oppress cultures by not considering their literature literature). If you hate political subjects and like reading... our site isn't for readers, it's for people who want to talk about reading. And if you hate political subjects, you're going to have a very hard time talking about any sort of literature. — Hamlet ♦ 3 mins ago

@Hamlet ... I can't express how much I disagree with this.

2

"our site isn't for readers" - are you saying that people who love to read aren't EXACTLY our target audience?

"if you hate political subjects, you're going to have a very hard time talking about any sort of literature" - what on earth? There are hundreds of Q&A about literature which don't touch on political topics at all. It's perfectly possible to appreciate literature and hate political discussions.

4

Can we please please please not turn this site into another political battleground or anyone's soapbox? That's, like, the best possible way to build a toxic atmosphere.

3

There's a reason why I don't have an account on Politics (or History or Skeptics, or various other politicised sites).

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor ok, fine

@Randal'Thor yes, that is exactly what I said

You can love to read and hate talking about what you read. Which is fine. It just means that you're not going to enjoy answering questions on this site (with the exception of maybe story-id questions and a few book-care questions). Which is a consistent piece of feedback we have gotten from people when asked why they don't participate.

2

@Randal'Thor I'm just saying that something (defining literature) is political

@Randal'Thor I agree with not turning the site into a political battleground. But making the site political... it always was political.

A question about whether a character was raped, for example, is obviously going to be political.

We can do our best to make the politics civil, which I think we've done OK so far.

But you can't really have a site about literature that isn't political.

You might have more success with a site about books, but even then, you'll still get questions about politics

Rand al'Thor

Yes, we'll get questions about politics. That doesn't mean the site as a whole has to be political.

Hamlet

I have to go. See ya

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet OK, replace "love to read" by "love to read and discuss what they read". That still doesn't imply they enjoy political arguments.

OK, see you later!

doppelgreener

7:25 PM

I agree determining topicality re what we consider to be literature is fairly political, whether it sides with common Western positions or actively differs from them. It's a bit like if RPG.SE chose to cease to regard certain RPGs as RPGs, and there are certainly people who want to argue that certain well-recognised games do not count as RPGs based on arbitrary reasoning.

3

Rand al'Thor

I'd be OK with saying something like "literature from any culture in the world is considered on-topic for this site".

2

If you want to call that a political statement, OK, but it's not an unfriendly political statement.

doppelgreener

There's definitely discussion about literature that can be had without politics, but if one's an active participant in broad areas of a literature Q&A site, they are going to come across discussion of literature that gets political in some form, and if they interact with meta topicality discussions they will definitely come across politics.

Rand al'Thor

Hamlet's wording has a suggestion of "these other people are trying to politicise literature and they're wrong". I don't want to make anyone feel unwelcome on the site, even if they have political views I disagree with.

b_jonas

Sure. If you want to discuss literature without politicizing it, then find only the questions where that doesn't happen, and come to Sci Fi SE.

Rand al'Thor

Pfft. SFF has political questions too (and doesn't always do a good job of dealing with them).

I bet most of Lit's questions so far aren't political.

Narusan

7:29 PM

I've not really been to this site apart from visiting from time to time, but here are my two cents: SciFi.SE has clearly defined what Fantasy and Sience Fiction is. RPG.SE also has a definition of RPG's at hand. Maybe it would help to have a community definition of literature as well?

I'd think that having a few controversial books as edge case would speed up the process of creating such a definition.

Rand al'Thor

@doppelgreener Right, but don't we want to embrace people who are active participants only in narrow areas (perhaps experts in specific fields), and don't use meta, and hate political arguments?

@Narusan SFF hasn't clearly defined what sci-fi and fantasy are; in fact, we've given that up as an impossible goal.

Narusan

@Randal'Thor oops. How can you close questions as off-topic then? :O

https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/40697868#40697868 Is non-fiction considered literature?
What about controversial autobiographies by unpopular politicians?
Are ancient myths and not-so-ancient sagas literature?
What about fairytales?

Rand al'Thor

Well, some things are clearly not sci-fi or fantasy. Some things clearly are. (Where "clearly" usually means general community consensus, rather than any kind of objective definition of what sci-fi or fantasy is.)

b_jonas

@Zyera thanks for that review

Rand al'Thor

@Narusan Sometimes, yes, yes, yes. ("non-fiction" is too broad a term to say all of it is literature, but we've definitely had questions about non-fiction here.)

Narusan

7:34 PM

@Randal'Thor Wow, that scope is huge.

Rand al'Thor

@Narusan Yep, we're pretty inclusive :-D

And, again, it's fine to say we're pretty inclusive in the help centre, but not with a side helping of looking down on people who aren't.

Narusan

By the way, I'm almost done with the eye of the world. I bet Rand and that daughter-heir of the queen that had an affair with Thom are going to get together eventually. (I'm bad with names)

I mean the book Rand, not you. Jeez, this is confusing

b_jonas

I was thinking about suppressing culture recently, and in fact I have a question. You know how much the communist regime opposed organized Christianty, both at how people of the street interact with it, and at hurting the leaders in churches and breaking monasteries? And how after the fall of communism, there was a period when people went a bit overboard on destroying everything the communist regime set up, including the occasional good things too?

I wonder, how much, if at all, did that pushback help organized Christianty churches spread in the 1990s and 2000s?

Rand al'Thor

@Narusan That's as good as confirmed in tEotW, if you look closely enough :-)

"The Queen is wed to the land. The land is one with the Dragon, and the Dragon is one with the land." -- from Rand's fever dream somewhere in Andor.

Narusan

@Randal'Thor I mean, it's been confirmed that Rand and Egwene are not going to get together and that she (whatever her name is) will be married to someone from Two Rivers

@Randal'Thor Ummm. I haven't picked up yet that Rand is gonna become the "land", neither who the dragon is. Maybe I'll continue reading a bit before discussing it here, otherwise I would get spoiled. I've taken abstinence from SciFi.SE for the same reason.

Rand al'Thor

7:40 PM

Once you finish tEotW, you'll get what I mean.

(Also, if even that is a spoiler, don't read my profile!)

b_jonas

Teknős Péter has an interesting pop science book written for children in a QA format, called Kérdezz, felelek mindenre, in which there are a few communist propaganda answers of this sort sneaked in. One of them is "Does God exist", which tells how God doesn't exist but people have come up with myths about him for various reasons in the past but now with the modern developments science will replace those myths and religion will dwindle and will be a thing of the past in a few decades.

Narusan

I mean, I can sort of guess where this is going, and I have read your post explaining why you are named the way you are before starting to read WoT

b_jonas

And then there are people in modern times who say basically that in a serious way and unrelated to the communist propaganda, and I wonder if that idea being associated with communism hurts how their message is percieved.

Narusan

@b_jonas Not in Germany. After the reunion, catholic members decreased by 16% and protestants by 23%. That was after the Communist Regime collapsed

b_jonas

(The few other propaganda questions in that book aren't related to religion.)

Gilles

7:43 PM

@b_jonas some people were already saying that during the Enlightenment (18th century)

b_jonas

@Narusan Yes, Christianty is still declining, but I wonder if the pushback after communism is slowing that down a bit.

@Gilles Yes.

Narusan

@b_jonas I think there is a need for faith in most humans. Even as someone who doesn't agree with most of theology, the "open approach" (Weltoffenheit) in theological anthropology seems genuine to me. We humans receive a broader amount of information about the world we live in compared to most other animals, and we have the tools to select information, and this makes us rooting for something that bounds us to somewhere. Faith can give that to you. Atheism can only do that in parts.

b_jonas

I don't know the historical context in the Enlightenment, but the communist regime had very good political reasons to fear organized christanity, because of how they always helped save people oppressed by the system in the background, during the communism and before.

There were people hidden and helped in monasteries, and stuff like that.

There are memorial plaques and entire books about that.

Which gives an even better reason to think of the communist regime's systematic disassembling churches as evil.

Gilles

@b_jonas in the context of the Enlightenment, organized Christianity was (part of) the system that oppressed the system

Narusan

@b_jonas Marxism was just a follow-up of enlightenment. As giles said, organised Christianity kept oppressing scientists and humanists alike, and Marx famously said it's "Opiods for the people", because they can endulge in hope about the afterlife without focussing on what's relevant now. And to be honest, I do agree with him

The thing is - are we discussing Communism as-of-state? Like under Lenin, Stalin and Mao? Or are we talking about the communist ideals developed by Marx and Engel?

b_jonas

7:54 PM

@Narusan Not the ideals. The state, from the 1950s to its fall in the 1990s.

In Europe.

doppelgreener

8:08 PM

@Randal'Thor Sure. I don't think Hamlet's implying we're going to have, say, Democrat vs Republican arguments here.

But politics and literature are pretty tied up some of the time. Discussion of books and their contents and trivia about the fictional events/characters/locations/etc aren't political (usually), but literature above and outside that area can be political, again not in political parties sense, but in a sort of sociopolitical arena sense.

Mithrandir

Politics. Can't get away from them.

Whether it's the US, Britain, Spain, Syria, Israel... I can't escape them.

doppelgreener

Yup

They're pretty prevalent in our lives. Nowadays since the mid-2000's that's been especially true since social media has been an enormous catalyst for all kinds of social advancement, which is awesome, but quite something to be around and difficult to ... not ... be around.

Mithrandir

And I don't check the news even. I'm also not on any social media, with the exception of sometimes signing in to the TombQuest wiki Twitter and the Literature.SE Twitter...

doppelgreener

Mithrandir doesn't have a facebook!? :O

this is highly unusual and not necessarily a bad thing at all

Librarian

-1

Q: How do I ask homework questions on Literature Stack Exchange?

Mainly copied from https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/714/7433 What is the policy on asking homework questions on Physics Stack Exchange? What kinds of questions are considered homework questions? Are homework questions allowed? What should I include in a homework question? Why don't...

discussion scope asking-questions

doppelgreener

8:19 PM

i have so many reasons to shut down my facebook, but just a handful of reasons to keep it anyway.

Mithrandir

.I've never seen the need.

doppelgreener

@Mithrandir That meta says physics stack exchange in its opening lines and I can't edit it D:

Bookworm

0

Q: Is Ozma a lesbian character?

Throughout the Oz books, we see that Ozma has several indicators of perhaps being gay: She never takes a boyfriend, she has a... erm... very close friendship with Dorothy, and some people claim that she actually married Dorothy in book 6. She was also a boy for the large majority of her childhoo...

l-frank-baum oz

Mithrandir

...I've also only been able to create an account in keeping with their TOS for the past two years so I haven't had that much time to create one :p

Rand al'Thor

@doppelgreener Fixed.

doppelgreener

8:21 PM

@Randal'Thor yay! thanks :D

@Mithrandir oh yeah, fair enough.

Mithrandir

@Bookworm oh, that's me BTW, I just didn't want that on my main account

Gallifreyan

@Mithrandir 1. Why not?

2. Why Morpheus? :D

Mithrandir

@Gallifreyan because reasons

@Gallifreyan because you

b_jonas

@Mithrandir You post regular serious questions as an alternate account? Is that even allowed for you as a diamond moderator?

Mithrandir

@b_jonas yes

Gallifreyan

8:25 PM

I am touched

Mithrandir

Socks are perfectly allowed for everybody, but. BUT. You have to be very careful when using socks, to make sure that you don't interact with yourself on another account.

b_jonas

Anyway, if she was lesbian, that would probably have come up in the Heinlein book. Who was the Heinlein expert? Let me check the chat history.

Mithrandir

And socks being misused will be deleted.

b_jonas

@Mithrandir Yes, that's the problem. I think back when I had two accounts, there were a very few questions or answers I have accidentally upvoted twice.

Rand al'Thor

I guess that gets automatically fixed if the accounts are merged?

Mithrandir

8:28 PM

@b_jonas I make sure not to vote from my socks now, after that happened a couple times and I had to edit to retract the vote :/.

b_jonas

@Randal'Thor Probably.

Mithrandir

(this isn't the first time I've posted from a sock on Lit. There are at least two others ;) )

Those were experiments, though.

Rand al'Thor

:-O

goes hunting

Mithrandir

And I must say that I was a little disappointed with the way that one of them got... no suggestions for improvement.

It was a one line question. It really could have been fleshed out more. But it didn't get a single comment.

doppelgreener

@Mithrandir I can respect that.

b_jonas

8:35 PM

Did you at least get a Tumbleweed out of it?

Mithrandir

No. It got one upvote.

@b_jonas was that squirrel?

Gilles

@Mithrandir link?

Mithrandir

Ah, you want to take the fun out of the search ;)

'twas literature.stackexchange.com/q/3770/58

Gilles

@Hamlet There's a difference between involving politics some of the time — which is unavoidable, as a significant proportion of literature is at least in part about political topics — and making everything political.

3

b_jonas

@Mithrandir It was multiple people actually, but mostly chat.stackexchange.com/users/33740/donald-mclean

BESW

8:57 PM

I suspect the above conversation may be confusing "politics" with "partisan politics."

I'm a big fan of avoiding partisan politics, but there are other kinds. In particular, "informal" politics really is infused into pretty much everything and generally only the folks toward the top of the power structure can afford to ignore that, or are in a position not to notice it.

@Narusan Both RPG.SE and Scifi.se have tried to come up with a clear definition of their subject material and discovered that it's both impossible and unnecessary. "Off topic" in the Stack context means that it's something the Stack can't handle effectively. For example, most Stack sites have rejected product recommendation questions as off topic: obviously asking for a book recommendation is a question about literature, but it's off topic for this literature site.

Gilles

9:14 PM

@BESW Counterpoint: only the folks toward the top of the power structure can afford to make everything about politics. It's a disenfranchising tool — it's politics and not a concrete issue, so create a subcommittee to discuss it, pass motions, etc. but never resolve the problem.

Also, while there is indeed a difference between politics and partisan politics, distancing them is also a disenfranchising tool, used by people who are well-represented by political parties.

Also, on the importance of politics, I recommend this movie:

Sullivan's Travels

Sullivan's Travels is a 1941 American comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges. It is a satire about a movie director, played by Joel McCrea, who longs to make a socially relevant drama, but eventually learns that comedies are his more valuable contribution to society. The film features one of Veronica Lake's first leading roles. The title is a reference to Gulliver's Travels, the famous novel by satirist Jonathan Swift about another journey of self-discovery. In 1990, Sullivan's Travels was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress...

Rand al'Thor

@Gilles This, exactly. I don't feel comfortable with making a potentially alienating political statement in the help centre of an SE site.

2

doppelgreener

@Gilles I think you're misunderstanding what BESW's saying about the scope of politics. Namely, consider how much minorities (ethnic minorities in countries, LGBTQ individuals, etc) have to engage in sociopolitical discussion to change things for themselves -- they're basically immersed in sociopolitics as a matter of their state of being.

@BESW <- In terms of RPGs we've just taken up a "we know it when we see it" basis of judgement, but we have an easier time knowing what RPGs are than literature folks have knowing what literature is. Our fringe cases are way more easy to figure out, and sometimes have just been chosen because of our expertise -- choose your own adventure books are sort of RPGs, but the experts for them aren't necessarily on RPG.SE.

Rand al'Thor

@doppelgreener Even the fringe cases of sci-fi and fantasy are easier to figure out than the fringe cases of literature.

doppelgreener

@Randal'Thor I'd agree with that.

Rand al'Thor

Partly because SFF (thanks to Gilles, in fact) established early on a policy of inclusiveness. So if we're in doubt, we'll probably allow it.

doppelgreener

9:20 PM

(@Gilles Actually I think you might be conflating politics with bureaucracy there, now that I think about it.)

Rand al'Thor

(It's interesting to note that there are six points in that answer, and the one which goes "If ..., it's off-topic" has generated far more further debate that all five "If ..., it's on-topic" put together.)

Gilles

@doppelgreener In other words, consider how much minorities need to do politics in order to effect political change. Well, duh. But not everything in life is about politics. People are individuals, even if they belong to this or that minority. People are people, not the label you attach to them.

3

@doppelgreener I have no idea where you're getting that from.

doppelgreener

@Gilles Creating subcommittees, passing motions, creating red tape, are bureaucracy. Those can be used by people in positions of power as a political tool (especially in partisan politics) but are not, themselves, an essence of politics.

Beyond that I'm noticing I might've misunderstood in some ways based on a gulf in how we're approaching the subject cognitively, but it's way too late in the day for me to figure that out all the way & broach the gap. I am a bit of a sleepy individual at the moment so now is not the time for me figuring out complex sociopolitical thought approach differences.

Gilles

@doppelgreener Bureaucracy does tend to invade politics. (Ask your local Trotskyst.) But that wasn't my point. My point is that by making everything political, you take away the here-and-now. A woman is passed for a promotion? It's a political issue! The government must pass a law about it. But in the meantime, you don't get the promotion. Because it's politics, you see.

doppelgreener

Mmm, I see where you're coming from on that.

I think BESW and you are coming at it from almost-the-same-but-slightly-different angles (acute angles, even!) but for aforementioned reasons I can't tease out the differences & similarities in how you're approaching the same stuff.

(let alone figure out just how to articulate it to show where they're meeting)

Rand al'Thor

9:33 PM

@Gilles You keep putting the best points towards the end of your messages. Now when I star them, the important bits don't show on the star-board!

BESW

Oh, hey, look at my morning Twitter feed.

1. everything is forced in a story because they're not magic 2. stories are not a natural state and so nothing occurs naturally within them, nor can they "call for" anything 3. inclusivity is part of good storytelling 4. not being inclusive is also a political choice https://twitter.com/danhoogkamp_art/status/922070069097644033

Tweeted by ChuckWendig on October 22, 2017 at 12:24 PM

Happy birthday Ursula Le Guin, who once turned down an offer to blurb an all-male sci-fi anthology with this letter http://bit.ly/1LLC0t8

Tweeted by LettersOfNote on October 21, 2016 at 1:45 PM

'My work was never meant to be an exploration of the African Female body. I just happen to be African & female' Nandipha Mntambo #womensart

Tweeted by womensart1 on October 20, 2017 at 6:36 AM

People like Nandipha Mntambo are politicized whether they want to be or not, by the nature of their identity. It'd be lovely to be able to ignore that and just say "They're all individuals," but identity is not just individualistic--that's, in itself, a political perspective which doesn't reflect the truth of many individuals.

Rand al'Thor

(In the meantime, I'm arguing on SFF about whether it's OK to edit, against the OP's intent, a question requiring some actual knowledge/analysis of the material into a request for "Word of God" from its creator, because the latter is supposedly the only answerable way to pose the question.)

BESW

When Star Wars novelizations double down on the film's depiction of harassment as a legitimate romantic tactic, that's political.

And if you read about allyship, one of the big things people with more influence and voice can do to help marginalized people is to engage with deconstructing these concepts so the marginalized folk don't have to spend all their time and energy justifying their concern and can actually do the work only they can do.

doppelgreener

9:50 PM

@Randal'Thor On RPG.SE we decided that when someone was asking for why a game is the way it is, the only version of that question we can reliably handle is one that asks exactly what the designers have said, and is answered only by answers that include, somewhere, citation directly from the authors themselves. Because anything else gets people guessing what the case is, deciding they're right, and asserting their assumption as the truth.

While they sound very truthy we decided those answers weren't OK within the Stack context.

BESW

Yes, but that's for questions about intent.

For questions about the text's effect, the creator's word is often neither more nor less credible than anyone else's.

Rand al'Thor

@doppelgreener Well, I don't know about games. But questions about books which aren't Word-of-God-oriented can certainly work within the SE context, and I'd say questions about films can too.

doppelgreener

Oh yeah that's right.

I ... forgot about that context completely for a bit.

Rand al'Thor

Not that I've even commented on the question's answerability over there; my only action has been to roll back the edit which changed the question and invalidated existing answer(s).

BESW

The author can say "I wrote X because I hoped it would cause Y effect." Any member of the audience can say, "X caused Y effect when I read it."

Rand al'Thor

9:57 PM

@BESW I thought this answer put it quite nicely.

BESW

@Randal'Thor And by the way, that's also "political" inasmuch as it's a declaration of where authority lies with regard to cultural curation.

Plenty of folks would disagree with it strongly, because they feel that only the creator, or only trained interpreters, can make those kinds of statements: authority lies in the training of a few, not the experience of many.

Rand al'Thor

@BESW Sure. Making political statements in answers here is pretty much unavoidable in a lot of cases. But an answer is an answer, and it's got a single user's name on it, and it can be voted on. Making political statements in the help centre ... :-/

BESW

NOT making a political statement is also a political statement. We can't pretend to be neutral arbiters; the act of trying to be neutral is impossible because that, itself, implies contentment with the "normal" state of literary politics.

2

There's no comfortable solution here.

Hamlet

As usual besw and greener are making excellent points

BESW

By joining a literature Stack, we have, each one of us, entered an arena of cultural politics. There are no sidelines here.

This is, very specifically, something I deal with in my profession.

Rand al'Thor

10:04 PM

OK. Can we at least not make confrontational and alienating political statements in the help centre?

2

BESW

That might get some more traction as a request, yes.

But no matter what we say or do, someone will be offended and alienated.

Gilles

@BESW Yes. When she says, in effect, “stop compartmentalizing me as an African female”, that is, indeed, a political statement. As is your insistence on compartmentalizing her.

@BESW “you're either with me or against me”? shudder

doppelgreener

@Gilles Reductive responses here are a dog that won't hunt.

There was no binary set up in that statement, for instance.

BESW

@Gilles I'm not. I'm amplifying her observation that people compartmentalize her whether she wants to be or not. And no, I don't deal with false dichotomies. "No sidelines" means everyone's an active participant.

Gilles

@doppelgreener could you translate that into English?

BESW

10:10 PM

Anyway, I gotta go engage with this concept in my professional life now. ttfn

doppelgreener

@Gilles Saying that there's no sidelines or neutral ground isn't creating a "you're either with me or against me" dichotomy.

Rand al'Thor

Imagine I'm someone who loves to read and discuss 'literature', which I see as being only written, published, well-respected classics. I've never been interested in e.g. comics, oral literature, or fanfic. Would you rather I come here, see engaging Q&A about all these things, and come to see them as valid branches of literature? Or that I read the help centre, see some snotty statement about "politicising" by "excluding certain cultures", and assume people with my mindset aren't welcome here?

Even if there's no neutral ground, we don't have to be overtly critical of people with the opposite view.

doppelgreener

@Gilles Oh, seeing the requote: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/that_dog_won%27t_hunt

Rand al'Thor

352

Q: If you're gonna talk Politics, you must respect those who disagree

This is sort of a follow-up to two past discussions: Toward a philosophy of Chat Does the Be Nice policy require SE users to "be nice" to people who are not SE users (e.g. public figures)? Over the past year, there's been an uptick in discussions of politics in chat. JUST LOOK AT THIS CHART! ...

discussion chat etiquette

Gilles

@doppelgreener Ok, so you did mean “this idea won't work”? What idea are you referring to? What do you consider a reductive response: is this something I wrote, something someone else wrote, something I mentioned, something someone else mentioned, ...?

Rand al'Thor

10:13 PM

@doppelgreener Is the dog that won't hunt a relative of the dog with no nose? :-P

doppelgreener

@Gilles Both responses you gave immediately before my message.

Both appeared to be dropping a whole lot of nuance in what BESW was saying so as to construct a virtually wholly different analogue, which isn't really workable in a conversation like this.

Also, I too have to go, since it's about time I address that whole being-late-in-the-day-and-tired thing.

b_jonas

@BESW Hmm, that distinction might matter.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

10:29 PM

@BESW Translation: I'm a poor storyteller and therefore have to explain away my poor stories in special ways (and yes, Wendig basically is not a very good author to put it mildly, if his Star Wars books are anything to go by).

DVK-on-Ahch-To

10:58 PM

@BESW there's a middle ground between respecting the creator and "only respecting trained interpreters". And, frankly, people with your views are - unconsciously - succumbing the just that exact veneration of authority of the trained few. You simply replace the set of who the allowed few are. You're rejecting the experience of those many who do agree with authorial intent, either by rule (respecting the author) or simply by agreeing with the author.

@BESW OK, on this one I completely agree with you. Questions extrinsic to the text (e.g. its effect) definitely are NOT ones that depend on author's point of view (other than, for completeness, add "this is effect author hoped for"). However, not every question about literature is of that nature.

user61230

11:19 PM

Ooh, looks like I've missed discussion.

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor no one new reads the help center fyi. The only people who read it are stack regulars

And that sentence is quite vague about who is using lit politically. So I don't see how you can read the sentence and walk away thinking "oh, that's me."

user61230

....looks like I've missed a lot of discussion.

Hamlet

@BESW as someone who does not engage with definitions of literature except when forced to because I'm a mod of a lit Stack, let me step in here.

@Bookworm @Mithrandir this is a fantastic question FYI.

This site will, at some point, have to take political stances. For example, we will have to decide whether we want to downvote questions because they are about books that aren't considered "literary".

Oh wait that's a stance we already took.

We will, for example, have to take a position on whether answers that challenge the author's word of god are allowed and worthy of upvotes. Even if that means that those answers put the author in an uncomfortable light.

I personally believe political discussions work if everyone states their assumptions and backs up their claims. Which is one reason why I view back it up as a solution, not a problem.

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