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user15026
12:00 AM
You're not, no.
2
 
1:13 AM
@Ash Yeah, I haven't been in chat as much as I've used to...and I don't remember having ever seen that title before...but I'm with you.
If I took the time to read EVERY title mentioned in chat...my GPA would be so much worse off. And I suspect I have more free time than many chat users.
(Again, it could be that the ...was it eleven? ...times that book was mentioned were in a different context. But still.)
 
user61230
1:25 AM
(Somewhat ironically, I did, in fact, read Playing in the Dark - on Hamlet's recommendation, at that.)
 
user15026
I don't remember it being mentioned but I have the memory retention of a concussed goldfish sometimes.
 
user15026
I read a lot, I read fast, but I am still horribly picky about what I read, because I tend to read solely for the pleasure of it. That's not to say I don't educate myself or widen my horizons or what have you, but my English degree basically taught me life is too damn short to read books that don't have some kind of enjoyment factor in them for me.
 
user15026
So I am unlikely to read a thing just because someone insists without it I will be a terrible human or whatever.
3
 
user15026
(sometimes I try but then that means I sometimes end up trying to read things like Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which was a terrible book)
 
@Ash Honestly, I don't think there's any book such that without reading it one would be a terrible human.
 
user15026
1:29 AM
Oh my, it's full of stars! :D
 
user15026
@Randal'Thor agreed, wholeheartedly. There are books people like because they like what it taught them, but it doesn't mean I necessarily need that lesson in the same way, or can't arrive at it through other means.
 
user15026
This strange feeling that you have to read the right things in the right ways and apply the right sort of critical lenses in order to interact with literature...kinda goes against all our supposed ideas here of the nature of literature itself, in a way.
 
user15026
Anyway, that's enough rambling out of me. goes back to their book about the history of grocery stores
 
@Ash Right. The whole authorial-intent thing (or what I got out of it, anyway) was about being broad-minded, not just using the "what the author says, goes" lens to the exclusion of all others. The same principle can be applied to any other lens.
 
user15026
@Randal'Thor aye, I think most of our stuff comes back to "approach everything with an open mind"
 
user15026
1:38 AM
Also I do intend to poke my latest answer with a firm stick when I am not on a bus at some point. I wrote it at like...later my time than I should have been actively thinking so I am not surprised it wobbles in spots
 
user15026
I've just been out of town for all of today and am on the aforementioned bus at the moment which is not all that amenable to a lot of thinking and typing and editing
 
Doing anything serious on a phone is largely terrible and bothersome, let alone a proper SE post with formating, links, and all kinds of elaborate business.
 
user15026
Amen to that. Simple mod tasks are hard enough, let alone something where I am putting my "wheeeee let's dust off the English degree" hat on.
 
user61230
@Ash Okay, I want to preface this by saying that a book on the history of grocery stores actually sounds legitimately fascinating, but...
 
user61230
You've gotta admit there's something funny about saying you don't read books that aren't entertaining and then follow that up with reading a book about grocery stores :P
 
1:43 AM
*leaves this pre-order buttons just lying around* https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079KX1XFD/
 
user15026
Haha I suppose that's true, but that's the fun bit, we all are going to have massively different ideas about what "entertaining" entails!
 
user61230
Truuuuuth!
 
user15026
@BESW book two? I did not know there was a book one!
 
@Ash Yes! It came out a few months ago!
 
user15026
@BESW I am not sure how I missed that!
 
1:45 AM
Maybe I did not mention it in chat!
Though I did link to this in RPG chat!
One other thing about @UrsulaV 's CLOCKWORK BOYS worth considering is its treatment of paladins as a class. I'm going to write a thread about it, but first I have to walk the dog.
 
2:00 AM
This is a good late answer buried beneath higher-voted ones. I may possibly bounty it, but at the very least it deserves some more votes.
 
2:14 AM
BESW has removed BESW from the list of this room's owners.
 
 
4 hours later…
6:20 AM
0
Q: Why did Lilith help the factory if she wanted Manson destroyed?

GallifreyanIn Rachel Rising #38 the readers learn that Lilith once met a banker she had known some 60 years before that, and her acquantance with said banker helped save the factory she worked at. But why would she do that? Firstly, she hates Manson and wants to see it destroyed for good. Secondly, she see...

 
 
3 hours later…
9:03 AM
"Language shapes how we remember, but also how we talk about what we remember. It guides what we tell those who come after us. These are our stories. The words we use are important." #LetsShareGoodTeReoStories via @etangata
#LetsShareGoodTeReoStories has a lot of inspiring feel-good stories.
 
What does "Te Reo" mean?
 
Literally "the language," te reo Māori.
 
Cool, thanks.
 
The revitalization of te reo Māori is an ongoing story of struggle and success, and it's easy to focus on the frustrations, so groups like e-tangata magazine are working to keep success stories visible as well.
(I like reading magazines like that, because they're not glossed.)
 
9:19 AM
Wow. That's quite an enlightening article for me - I never knew that this is how it was like in New Zealand.
 
If you only read material about another culture that's been written to be easy for you to read, you're not actually learning much about that culture.
It's much more enlightening to read material about another culture that's been written both by and for that culture.
 
Of course it is. I just also haven't read anything about the current political situation there.
 
I learned that working with the editorial board of the Storyboard literary journal, as they talked about why they were changing the journal's previous submission policy that required English translations of Pasifika-language works.
 
9:38 AM
@Mithrandir Sorry, I didn't meant to imply anything about you personally. I was typing that before you responded.
...this is why I usually try to edit my statements to avoid using the impersonal you.
 
It's okay, I didn't take it personally anyway :)
 
On the subject of the importance of the words we use to tell stories, Douglas Hofstadter continues to interrogate the digital approach to our multilingual reality.
I actually laughed out loud when he wrote a whole paragraph of bad multilingual puns and references that an algorithm could never make sense of.
(He doesn't say that's what he's doing, or why he's doing it.)
 
10:28 AM
When libraries troll their patrons.
@Metafrantic @justadandak Lolz my library did this too. I took a photo because we used to get this question all the time when I worked at a bookstore.
No joke, this is how I sort several of my shelves.
 
 
8 hours later…
6:45 PM
@Fabjaja I think you have some competition in providing great Thomas Hardy answers :-)
Whoa. He's the author of a work of interactive fiction set in Hardy's Christminster.
Looks like you can download it from his website.
That's pretty awesome.
 
7:06 PM
@BESW This is a very interesting read, and I'm not done yet.
I might be "pi-lingual," but French is not one of those languages.
I repeated his "his car and her car" experiment in Hebrew, and Google couldn't manage an accurate translation there either.
 
Presumably machine translations get worse and worse as the source/target languages get further away.
English -> French is relatively good. English -> Hebrew not so good. English -> Chinese, forget it.
 
This is true. I forget what/when/where, but I was very pleasantly surprised at GTranslate's ability to translate an entire webpage of...either French or Spanish...to English.
I wouldn't even bother asking it to do that for Hebrew.
 
At one point, I asked Google Translate to translate a sentence that I had written into Korean, and then back into English. It did not take long to lose all meaning entirely.
 
(try Google-Translating the same text with varying numbers of that symbol, and watch how drastically the English text changes each time you add/remove a symbol)
 
7:11 PM
@Randal'Thor Japanese is not one of my languages either...but I flipped the translation and found a much better way to say "it has been a five minute walk to the hotel." :p
@Randal'Thor I just tried that with some Hebrew letters. Impressive.
 
@Shokhet It is possible to do a decent job of translation even into a language you don't know using only web tools. Some combination of Google Translate, Google web search, Wikipedia, and Wiktionary can work wonders.
Wikipedia's "same article in different languages" thing tends to be much more reliable than Google Translate, for translating individual words or phrases.
 
@Randal'Thor Right
I do use Google Translate on occasion, but only for languages that I know (and can therefore double-check the results)
I'd be pretty uneasy using it for an important conversation in a language that I have no handle on.
 
It's pretty useful provided you check the results.
I often try multiple variations of the same English word or sentence to check the different results of translation.
 
That's smart.
I know people who use the conversation mode in the GTranslate mobile app to talk to clients who only speak Spanish. I hope they don't have too many misunderstandings that way.
@Randal'Thor Oh, there are some Chinese examples later in the article. I've just reached those.
"A sixth oddity is that the last sentence makes no sense at all."
 
@Shokhet :-D
I saw that too.
 
7:28 PM
(done)
Thanks for the link, BESW. It was very interesting!
 
@BESW Do you happen to have any recommendations for stories which a) were originally written in Maori by Maori people, and b) have good translations into English, which c) are freely available online? I was looking for some a while back, hoping to start a tag here, but ended up with this instead.
 
7:43 PM
@Randal'Thor Yay! The more TH stuff the better :-)
 
8:41 PM
@Randal'Thor I googled maori novels "te reo" and got this, this, and this which look like good jumping-off points.
 
8:59 PM
Call out to my pals @Mithrandir and @Rand al'itterateur: Literature.SE seem to have no questions comparing the myth of Tiresias with Virginia Woolf's Orlando.
In Greek mythology, Tiresias (; Greek: Τειρεσίας, Teiresias) was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo. Tiresias participated fully in seven generations in Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus himself. == Overview == Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson, fall into three groups: one, in two episodes, recounts Tiresias' sex-change and his encounter with Zeus and Hera; a second group recounts his blinding by Athena; a third, all but lost...
Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A high-spirited romp inspired by the tumultuous family history of Woolf's lover and close friend, the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, it is arguably one of Woolf's most popular novels: a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing...
Wikipedia skims the comparison.
(. . . sorry for the intrusion . . . i'm not brave enough to post questions here . . .)
 
@humn You should ;)
You seem to have an interesting question; why not ask it? :)
 
@Randal'Thor A graphic novel.
> But will Dr Joseph's own works be translated into English? The stories would have to be revised and rewritten, he says.
“It would be kind of fun so my wider family could read them. The thing is that in the trilogy I have created language tricks, jokes and puns that only work in Maori. There are even rhyming limericks that would not work in English.”
 
@Mithrandir , I'm working up to a more general question about transformation and perspectives.
@BESW , I should read back to find out what you're talking about!
 
The Christchurch City Libraries website lists some books with parallel te reo and English.
 
9:15 PM
Maori looks phonetic! Like other languages that developed alphabets relatively recently. LIke my native Suomi/Finnish.
 
Of course, the trick with phonetic alphabets is that regional dialects and pronunciation drift still exist.
 
Understood. Same with my native language.
When i speak it, most people run away because i learned it in the mean streets.
 
And with colonized languages, there's a lot of political implication in the chosen orthography. That's why there's something like three and a half different orthographies for Chamoru.
 
(Looked that up and learned something new.)
 
I have to keep on top of Chamoru orthography because it's important to my work.
...also because, yanno, I live here and it's the language of my peers even if I'm absolutely rotten at it.
 
9:22 PM
I'm not sure what you mean by "orthography," @BESW. Independent variables?
 
The way the language is written. Its alphabet and spelling conventions, capitalization, etc.
 
Got it. Thank you!
You're a damn scholar!
 
For example, Chamoru is spelled three different ways depending on which orthography you use: Chamorro is the "traditional" Spanish-derived form, Chamoru is the modern "international" form, and CHamoru is an even more controversial "modern native" form.
 
More power to you!
(I'm a damn editor and recognize research of all kinds.)
 
I'm a graphic designer who often has to do copy-editing on the material as well, and I specialize in caring about Pasifika concerns like this.
 
9:26 PM
You're a damn scholar in your spare time!
It tastes better that way, in my opinion.
 
Also I'm not indigenous, but I am local. I grew up when Hagåtña was Agana and Malesso' was Merizo. I remember the Chamorro Language Commission, and my mother remembers when Chamoru was banned from being spoken in school.
 
Wow!
I'm a stranger in a strange land (too?).
 
Then, I learned a lot when I was working on I Aftabeton Chamorro and the Storyboard literary journal.
 
These are languages I knew nothing about, having edited linguistics since 1989. Sheltered life until now.
Very grateful for a wider view.
@humn , incidentally, back to another gear, Anaïs Nin belongs in the conversation.
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977), known professionally as Anaïs Nin, was an American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of composer Joaquín Nin and Rosa Culmell, a classically trained singer. Although Nin spent some time in Spain and Cuba, she lived most of her life in the United States, where she became an established author. Beginning at age eleven, Nin wrote journals prolifically for six decades and even up until her death. Her journals, many...
 
Yeah, my work on Storyboard exposed me to a lot of Pasifika languages I'd only barely heard of before.
 
9:35 PM
Storyboard as in film outline?
(I'm encouraging someone to develop one about saving the seas. She has the inspiration but hasn't yet chopped the wood.)
[phone interruption]
 
No, storyboard as in the Belauan art of carving stylized depictions of oral traditions into portable-sized chunks of wood to sell to tourists, derived from the tradition of similar carvings in the beams of their meeting houses.
The University of Guam literary journal took its name from that art form.
 
9:54 PM
[This is really fascinating, @BESW! But the phone interruption will continue in a minute. Incidentally, "chopped the wood" up there was allusory. Interesting that Belauan storyboards are on wood.]
Just looked up some images. They're resplendent!
 
The history of the storyboard, and its evolution, is pretty cool.
They were invented by an ex-pat Japanese artist who settled in Palau in the 1930s, and gained the trust of the leaders and storytellers enough that they helped him accurately translate their bai carvings into the storyboard form. Then he taught the carvers how to make storyboards to sell to tourists, so they'd be more economically independent.
Over the decades the style of storyboard changes with the kind of tourist that visits the islands most and what that tourist culture likes/expects. So you'll see some storyboards painted bright colors, and others that just have a deep polished finish with dark varnish in the recesses; some storyboards that are plain rectangles and others that are shaped like an animal.
There's even a subset of storyboards that focus on the most erotic oral traditions.
 
10:14 PM
^ That could be an answer on Lit.SE! Not all literature is written as words. [Phone interruption over.]
I have some familiarity with centuries-old rock carvings in USA. Completely nonlinear.
But do they tell stories!
 
If someone asked "What is the origin of storyboards?", I'm sure that BESW would be able to write a very good answer...
 
Yeah, I brought up storyboards as an example during early-days discussions of lit.se's potential scope, and pretty everybody thought I was either acting in bad faith or being really stupid.
 
They just weren't ready.
 
@BESW Fortunately, I think that we've hopefully gotten largely past that stage.
 
To me, songs, even without words, count as literature.
 
10:18 PM
To be clear, I don't think storyboards are necessarily a good thing to include in lit.se's scope.
 
I haven't noticed. Is the site getting congested?
(checking)
 
I think that it shouldn't be our main focus but that it could be an interesting example of a way of writing down and communicating stories and ideas that isn't what Westerners always think of.
Personally, I wouldn't mind either way, to be perfectly honest.
But that's not a discussion I want to get into at the moment, so I'll drop that for now.
 
Just checked, looks like an average of 2 or 3 questions a day. There's certainly room for more.
 
@humn There's always room for more questions :)
And answers.
 
Western literature is a safe haven.
 
10:22 PM
(Wow, I sound inconsistent above. I think I just managed to confuse everyone.)
 
(Including yourself!)
 
(Especially myself.)
 
Do you consider Greco-Roman mythology as Western?
 
I don't know.
Probably.
 
How about Norse?
(I'm working up to the tough questions.)
 
10:26 PM
Again, probably... But I know pretty much nothing about the formal definitions of these things.
 
(Okay, easing off.)
My knowledge is extemely spotty but, thanks to BESW, with more spots now.
 
I really haven't done much to formally study literature. Literature.SE is basically my way of starting to learn about the subject.
 
Ride the wild pony!
I read so many books so early, in a couple of languages, but didn't have a glimmer until a Comparative Literature genius broke them down.
Still only a glimmer.
Classic books in Suomi/Finnish generally have a non-western feel.
But do they tell stories!
Sometimes like music, where you just have to absorb the whole piece before it makes sense.
^ (that's not Suomi/Finnish, that's USA rock art from the 1800s. And what a story!)
. . . disclaimer: I know (USA) English to a T. The bookshelf behind me is filled with reference books that I know by heart. It's just that there's more to story-tellling than that.
(The hallway is filled with novels and non-writing-related technical material.)
(The sofa is loaded with art books. "Every picture tells a story.")
(There's barely room to sit, stand or walk.)
(If my books were cats I'd be arrested.)
. . .
. . .
And now i can't find my favorite book. Must be left behind in a motel room. It has a bunch of lost stories from all over the world from all over the centuries.
My favrite story was from somewhere "far east." Reminded me of One Thousand and One Nights. It was a story about a story-teller retelling a story told him by someone he didn't believe.
So the story-teller went on a journey to find out whether or not it was true, and was confounded by more tale-spinners along the way. Kinda like an early O Henry.
 
11:16 PM
@BESW Thanks for the links! I'll check them out.
@humn ... yet :-) Sounds like you've got one in mind though!
(Good to see you here again!)
 
(And you!)
 
@humn Now there's a name I've heard before, but not sure where or how.
 
Now you've heard it all, @Rand al'absorbent.
The question i'm working up is how novels shift through situations in order to cover various perspectives on a certain object.
 
@humn Probably. It's certainly European, and it's had a big influence on a lot of European/Western culture since then.
Even the US tries to pretend to be a successor of the Graeco-Roman empires.
 
And how!
(And nice spelling.)
But there's so much surreal about it that i feel has been lost through imitation.
 
11:23 PM
@humn Again European - Western European, at that - so probably yes. But somewhat more culturally isolated from other European literature than the Graeco-Roman stuff.
Much of Scandinavia had its own Dark Ages which lasted far later than in other parts of western Europe.
Just look at the alphabets.
The Greek alphabet gave rise to the Latin alphabet, which is still used today throughout most of Europe.
The Nordic futhark simply ... faded away.
 
Ooooooooh, that's a looker-upper!
Lovely!
 
I'm not sure what the history there is, actually.
Did people stop using the futhark because of literacy dying out in Scandinavia?
Or was it due to the spread of other cultures? As Christianity ousted the Norse pantheon from people's consciousness, perhaps the Latin alphabet ousted the futhark.
(That could probably be turned into a main-site question ...)
 
This site just keeps branching out.
 
@humn I'm still meaning to dip into the Kalevala some day. Maybe even ask about it here.
 
It's a beast.
And loses a lot in translation.
 
11:30 PM
I bet a lot of things do.
Speaking in tongues is a superpower.
(tongspeakingues = super^...)
 
Mhm! Hearing tongues is so much easier.
 
(making this place feel like Puzzling!)
(or like home)
 
Much of story-telling and puzzle-solving overlap. But i've promised to not post video after video anywhere but The troll.
When someone tells a story, it's up to everyone else to figure out what they're trying to get across.
Someone recently asked me about intuition.
She was asking about intuitive decisions (not my strong suit), but i took it as asking about intuitive understanding (my strong suit, which is one reason i love to read).
(Spoiler: We got both our points across.)
. . .
Enough for now? More to follow at some point. I really enjoy this, but feel a need to take a walk in the most absurd weather ever. It's midwinter here and should be hailing, if not snowing. But it's 30C/85F. Here's to global warming!
 
11:51 PM
Pardon my drifting away.
A big event just happened on SFF which I should be helping to take care of.
 
0
Q: What are the "mind-forged manacles"?

Rand al'ThorFrom "London", a short poem in William Blake's Songs of Experience collection (free to read online): In every cry of every man, In every infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear: What are the "mind-forged manacles"? I think understandi...

 

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