The Reading Room

"Local author Simone Bollinger publishes second children's book written in Chamoru, to promote language," by Chloe B Babauta for Pacific Daily News.

user15026

@BESW Oh, yeah, that would TOTALLY COUNT

user15026

@BESW I am so excited for this.

@Ash The sad thing is, it shouldn't count for what he should have been asking: they're black people in space, but the writer's room is still white.

user15026

12:05 AM

@BESW This delights me as a thing. What a great way to help kids learn and be more familiar with the language!

user15026

@BESW Yes, that's true. It's answering the question as stated, not as needed to be asked

"Over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow As if the bow had flown off with the arrow." Edward Thomas, 'Haymaking', 1915 (Image by pau.artigas, Flickr)

Tweeted by RobGMacfarlane on May 8, 2018 at 2:03 PM

@Ash Because as asked it just makes him look silly at best, and a fraud at worst.

user15026

@BESW Yeah, which I find very odd

Virginia Woolf book cover designs by her sister, artist Vanessa Bell (c. 1920's - 30's) #womensart

Tweeted by womensart1 on May 8, 2018 at 1:44 PM

"Afrofuturist 419," by Nnedi Okorafor for Clarkesworld Magazine.

user15026

"Afrofuturism. I learned this word just before I left. Blacks who love space and the future—like Sun Ra, P-Funk, black-rooted scifi. I am true African Afrofuturism. Unlike any of those guys, I actually left the Earth to see what was out there. Did I know that I will be seeing it for 14 goddamn years?"

user15026

12:17 AM

Augh that bit

user15026

I mean the whole thing is just BEAUTIFULLY put together but that bit

user15026

just right now perfect

[grin]

Q: Explanation of a line from the poem"I do not love you " by Pablo Neruda

2:00 AM

"Open Letter to Faleena Hopkins," by Cassie Sharp.

"When Aliens Join Your Horse Fantasy: Walter Farley’s The Island Stallion Races," by Judith Tarr for tor.com

Bookworm

5:57 AM

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" I loved her like certain dark things are to be loved, in between shadow and soul." Can someone explain this? What dark things are being talked about?

poetry

Christophe Strobbe

8:19 AM

@Mithrandir I would have preferred "Save brick-and-mortar bookstores". Once these are gone, you will be unable to buy any books anonymously, which will bring us one step closer to customers being "transparent" to companies ... and to governments that these companies share our data with.

Q: Examples of men choosing honor/duty over love

10:46 AM

The Hero’s Journey 1. The call to adventure 2. Refusing the call 3. Village burned down by orcs 4. Make out with an elf 5. Get drunk with gnomes 6. Eat suspicious mushrooms that might be magic 7. Make out with a wizard 8. Obtain the hookshot 9. Beat the water temple 10. Bearwar

Tweeted by SamSykesSwears on May 7, 2018 at 9:28 AM

Christophe Strobbe

4:49 PM

Inspired by this month's topic challenge, I bought Earthsea: The First Four Books, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. And tomorrow is a holiday ... :-)

Bookworm

7:19 PM

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In the Iliad there's a famous passage where Andromache tries to get Hector to stay and not go to fight Achilles “Wife, I too have thought upon all this, but with what face should I look upon the Trojans, men or women, if I shirked battle like a coward? I cannot do so: I know nothing save to f...

theme

8:23 PM

@Randal'Thor ("California Uber Alles";) Pretty sure this is exactly what American poet Jello Biafra was talking about...

Chomsky, apparently, had a comment recently also on this subject

@DukeZhou Sorry, I'm missing some context here. What's this in relation to?

a recent kerfuffle where you were being taken to task (ps- my experience is that most programmers are ****** to libraries, frameworks, etc., even when it's not the optimal approach)

Ah ;-)

Well, I have zero knowledge of programming, which probably helps my own Luddite attitude.

But being a mathematician gives me a different set of idiosyncrasies.

For me, I was extremely lucky to have found a programmer for the M project without these tendencies. Led, recently, to him writing his own server for cross platform PvP, as in, any platform with connectivity

Such as obnoxious pedantry ;-)

8:32 PM

On a more appealing subject, really like Jordan's take on magic

it's solid

Yeah, it's pretty rigorously constructed, even though you don't realise it for the first few books.

In terms of what you can and can't do etc.

user15026

@DukeZhou please don't drag things from room to room. Thank you.

@DukeZhou Have you already read some Brandon Sanderson? His magic system (at least in Mistborn) is suuuuper structured and solid, so much so that sometimes it hardly feels like magic.

Not super interested in fantasy these days. But right now, for me, Susanna Clarke still holds the crown

Oh, Strange and Norrell?

That was a great book in a very different way.

8:38 PM

Her mythology rings the most true to me

She captures the style of 19th-century English lit extremely well (at least to my eye - perhaps a more experienced reader of the latter would disagree).

I wholeheartedly agree. I'd go so far as to say she schools every other writer in the genre, stylistically speaking

but that's just me

Heh, you certainly don't go halfway with praising the authors you like :-)

nope. artists can use hyperbole, unlike academics

so I use it liberally where I can

Not I!

8:41 PM

plus, I like to champion certain authors and books

I already mentioned the obnoxious pedantry.

sort of a private mission

lol

That even goes for similes: I use them sparingly and think them over a lot beforehand, so before saying "X is like Y" I've always thought a lot about X and Y and whether they're really analogous or not.

@DukeZhou If you want mythology ringing true, I strongly recommend William Horwood.

I've read two books/series by him, and in both of them the legend behind the main story sounded so realistic that I actually went and looked it up to see if it was a 'real' legend.

THIS IS REAL: THE COCKY COCKERS: 1) Romance, any subgenre 2) Must feature a cocker spaniel 2) ~5k words 3) Due 05/31/18 If interested, email (jackie at http://jackiebarbosa.com) or DM. I'll edit, get cover art, format, etc. Royalties to legal costs, equally distributed if none. https://twitter.com/jackiebarbosa/status/992542336113561600

Tweeted by jackiebarbosa on May 5, 2018 at 12:23 AM

@ChristopheStrobbe I would vote no. Nobody is likely to be an expert in one particular character in a work of literature, or to search for questions about that character - and most characters won't get enough questions about them to be worth their own tag anyway. (FWIW, my experience on Science Fiction & Fantasy also suggests no: character tags are among the most controversial topics on a site with many tag controversies. I think most people want to burn them with fire, but they're just too big to handle now.)

@ChristopheStrobbe Congrats! About time :-)

@ChristopheStrobbe Awesome! Looking forward to your questions :-)

I should also post Le Guin questions, but I'm so overloaded atm - haven't posted here for quite a while, and I've still got a backlog of questions for The Neverending Story.

8:58 PM

Hornwood looks interesting. I'll keep an eye out. On that subject, strongly recommend Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist

@DukeZhou I think you mentioned this to me before. I really do need to read more Wolfe.

@Randal'Thor I find that Clarke is very good at matching the modern pop culture impression of 19th-century English drama/romance literature.

But she's no Wilkie Collins.

@BESW But not the real thing?

I don't really know what the modern pop culture impression is, but her writing reminded me strongly of things like Jane Eyre and Pride & Prejudice.

To my ear, it sounded rather like a Neil Gaiman impression of Wilkie Collins: knows the tone and cadence but doesn't quite hit the vocabulary and cultural values.

...why doesn't anyone ever try to mimic the style of Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood?

I feel like there'd be a good modern audience for that sort of absolute insanity.

9:32 PM

@BESW and the Hobbit is surprisingly modern

but, then again, who really can beat Wilkie Collins

... The Hobbit is from an entirely different century.

user15026

@BESW curious headtilt

Woman in White is almost as many years distant from The Hobbit as the The Hobbit is from us.

@DukeZhou I also really enjoyed the TV adaptation of Strange & Norrell. Normally I'm sceptical of screen adaptations of good books - especially massive tomes like this where a lot had to be cut - but I thought that was mostly really well done.

@Ash Omigosh omigosh. Varney the Vampire is a penny dreadful gothic horror serial published weekly from 1945 to 1947, almost 667,000 total. It was riding the vampire craze kickstarted by Polidori's 1819 short story "The Vampyre" (which was falsely attributed to Lord Byron so everybody wanted to read it).

Varney is overblown, inconsistent, jumps between points of view without warning, the prose is purple enough to choke on... but it's the source of many modern vampire tropes that people now attribute to the more readable Dracula, and it's also peculiar in that its title character may not be a vampire at all--just an ill man tortured by the conviction that he is a vampire.

(The story itself can't seem to decide whether Varney really is UnDead, or if he's mentally ill.)

You can read as much of it as you can stomach at Project Gutenberg:

Varney the Vampire; Or, the Feast of Blood, by Thomas Preskett Prest and/or James Malcolm Rymer, at Project Gutenberg.

9:45 PM

@BESW Ha. I missed that the "or" was italic in your original message, and thought you were referring to two different works.

> The solemn tones of an old cathedral clock have announced midnight—the air is thick and heavy—a strange, death like stillness pervades all nature. Like the ominous calm which precedes some more than usually terrific outbreak of the elements, they seem to have paused even in their ordinary fluctuations, to gather a terrific strength for the great effort. A faint peal of thunder now comes from far off. Like a signal gun for the battle of the winds to begin, it appeared to awaken them from their lethargy, and one awful, warring hurricane swept over a whole city, producing more devastation in…

Can you tell they were paid by the word?

> Now and then, too, there would come a sudden gust of wind that in its strength, as it blew laterally, would, for a moment, hold millions of the hailstones suspended in mid air, but it was only to dash them with redoubled force in some new direction, where more mischief was to be done.

Oh, how the storm raged! Hail—rain—wind. It was, in very truth, an awful night.

I think this prose is far purpler than the more famous "dark and stormy night".

I'm not sure I've ever found prose more sustainedly purple.

user15026

@BESW that's....something

10:01 PM

"Trademark Shenanigans: Weighing In On #Cockygate," by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware.

user15026

@BESW This doesn't even get into the bits like her ridiculous over the top video she posted the other night where she claimed she was descended from slaves as a defense of herself

Classy.

One thing Clarke didn't quite capture that's common to 19th century prose, is the tendency for the omniscient narrator to frame scenes as if it were a movie camera, panning across a room then zooming in to focus on something the audience should pay attention to before doing a match cut to a related space.

user15026

Sorry, I've just been following #cockygate (for obvious reasons) and the whole thing just hurts my head

That style seems to have slowly died away with the increased influence of actual movies.

@Ash It just won't die.

user15026

I spoke today with Lauren Emerson, an attorney from the top-notch New York intellectual property firm @LeasonEllis. Lauren and her colleague, Cameron Reuber, have offered to work on the legal challenge to the "cocky" trademark pro bono to help make sure it succeeds!

Tweeted by kneupperwriter on May 9, 2018 at 7:07 PM

user15026

10:14 PM

This brings me hope

user15026

(well, even more hope because he's already doing the thing but now he is doing the thing with even more excellent backup)