The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by James:

They're thinking "George Eliot's good, right? What did George Eliot do that's shorter than Middlemarch?"

I like Silas Marner, and was not particularly happy with either Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss. I think that they were thinking: "This is an enjoyable, well-told story, accessible, with a simple plot, a moral point, and not too long". In short, the sort of book that a lot of people genuinely like.

I think that one of the ways of approaching some of this is that fen typically give a book extra points for extraliterary challenge -- literature of ideas, if you will -- of the sort which is usally referred to as senawunda. A lot of people also (or in some cases, instead) get equally pleased by intraliterary challenge --experiments in form and the like. The obvious extreme instance of this is Finnegan's Wake.

There have always been counterpoints (such as Trollope -- the author of what Henry James called "loose baggy monsters") who manage to become literary if they last long enough. And up until about 1900 nothing written in English really measured up, offficially -- it's only then that they were admitted to academe, under the shadow of their elder classical siblings.

One of my teachers (Hugh Kenner) suggested (orally; I don't know if he ever published this point) that our model of the Canon was largely shaped by what was public domain when the first modern copyright acts came into play -- basically, what was available in Everyman's Library at the time. What we call "literary" is pretty much an accident of a whole lot of factors.

I have reasonably catholic litarary tastes, and read a lot of light SF as well as having a couple of degrees in English and a taste for "classics". From where I sit much of the problem with many modern "literary" fiction is not that it's literary but the fact that it's inferior to many other exemplars. (I don't usually find people dissing Anthony Powell when they take aim at modern lit. They do aim at Joyce, but it's easy to see why people find Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake hard going; and he's hardly "contemporary" any more.) And what is the problem with much light reading is that although it repeats familiar tropes, sometimes with technical skill, it frequently brings nothing new to the party.

It's entirely possible that what people will be pointing at a century from now as late Hegemonic American Classics will include, say, Stephenson, Le Guin, and maybe Stephen King. We lack a lot of perspective.

Mary Dell @ 146:

The Canterbury Tales are (deliberately) a grab-bag of types, from the purely non-fictional and didactic (The Parson's Tale) through various forms of fictional type. At least three types of fantastic fiction are represented: chivalric fantasy complete with Roman (i.e. fictional to the author) gods (The Knight's Tale), chivalric / Arthurian fantasy (The Wife of Bath's Tale) and the beast-fabliau (The Nun's Priest's Tale). Two miracle-stories, The Second Nun's Tale and The Prioress' Tale (the latter rather distasteful to the modern reader for other reasons) are also included, although they stand a little outside the later fantasy genre, blurring as they do a little with what the author might have thought "realistic". There are realistic stories as well -- The Miller's Tale being the best-known example.

I am thinking of the prosecutions towards the end of First Lensman of the Morgan-Towne-Isaacstein gang, and Samms' insistence on a government of law, not of men.

But I think that it's a pointer towards the fact that, for all the fact that that sort of thing has often been put forward as an ideal, nothing like it has taken place except in the context of older politics of "faction" -- where the aim has not been one of even-handed justice -- or where some external power has demanded the prosecutions, as in the case of war crimes trials.

I think it would be very good for prosecutions of that sort to take place (but then I would; I have the ground-in respect for the rule of law of an Anglo-Canadian ex-law student); but I would also bear in mind that smaller-scale prosecutions of misuse of power, usually against police, frequently end up with hung juries or "nullification" because there is sufficient support for the misuse of power by the authorities to gum up the system even when evidence is clear and decisive. And the downstream effects of that might be not so very good.

While I'm at it, I would like the US to accept the jurisdiction of the Word Court in The Hague, as well as allowing the extradition of the Bush 6 to Spain ... which I expect to see about when flying boars are sighted over BWI.

To emphasize what Keith said in #478: I used to have some connection in both an editorial and then a systems role with a bibliographic publication called the Index to Canadian Legal Literature, which used the LC Subject Classification as adjusted for a Canadian context to organize its data. It took quite a bit of effort to do the classification, by a trained law librarian, which could not be short-circuited. Similarly with legal classifications for other publications, such as the Canadian Abridgment. Generating consistent and correct classifications for the latter (which had far more context in the text available than would have been available with CIP or similar data) would have been a nightmare and effectively impossible, and I looked into the possibility several times, as a developer who also had an LL.B.

There is no magic way to patch up this sort of metadata (and make it internally consistent): it requires a large (and ongoing) investment in human eyeballs and judgement.

And that's just to get consistent information where you have complete control over it (and Amazon also has to juggle user-supplied metadata via its tags). Applying that data for anything more than a convenience to the user is another huge step entirely.

#470

I had been under the impression that (1) strict liability offences tend to be for regulatory offences such as weights and measures (or, as mentioned above, some motor vehicles offences) and (2) (at least here in Canada, which may not map well to elsewhere, though it ought to be similar to Emglish law, at least, and a quick search finds at the very least H.L. dicta supporting this view) the canons of statutory interpretation will involve reading in the need for mens rea unless the opposite is specifically provided for in the statute.

It's arguable that human rights legislation resembles weights and measures legislation more than it does criminal law (i.e. the aim is to provide a level playing field for customers/clients/employees affected) and that infringements would be strict liability offences; but it would still be the case that a requirement for mens rea would probably be read in unless either the statute explicitly excluded it or (more recently) evidence led regarding the intent of the drafters indicated that it was their intent to create an offence of strict liability.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this may have involved second-order data analysis in an attempt to be preemptive, and that there may have been no internal setting of a particular set of categories as "adult".

The way it would work is this: You decide initially that you're going to downrank books which have received a certain threshold of complaints as regards "adult content". And then somebody gets a bright idea: you can run a high-level analysis which looks at categories grouping the works which regularly get complaints over the limit (again, once you have a large enough set in the various categories to be statistically valid). So that code goes in. Nobody inside actually sets any values directly, except for the books previously flagged manually.

And for a while things run along until external input pushes some values above critical limits .... and the whole thing goes pear-shaped.

The fundamental problem with this -- which would not be obvious to the developers -- is that category metadata, which is basically CIP information, is set by the publisher, is wildly inconsistent, and can't really be used in this way in the first place. The next problem (probably not on the developer's side, since they'd probably set this up to be tweakable) is that if you get the thresholds for this kind of analysis wrong you get unexpected results. Plus there's the fact that you probably have to do extensive hardcoding tweaking for (1) categories which are too broad, and therefore useless at actually capturing useful metadata for this purpose and (2) categories which are so small that, although they are what you want to target, never get enough complaints to push them over the trigger limits.

Throw in the coexistence of groups with very different "community standards" on the net providing inputs and you have the seeds of a major blowup.

26:

I don't think the identification of 20 can be right, because, IIRC -- I don't have Fgebat Cvbfba with me at present -- Jvzfrl was involved because the case involved was Cnexre'f.

Lizzy @44: When the Queen is in Scotland, she is a Presbyterian. As James I / 1066 And All That said, 0 Bishop == 0 King.

The "Anglican" Church in Scotland is the Episcopal Church, which has Laudian roots but is not established. The Church of Scotland is established, but Presbyterian. (There are non-established Presbyterians there as well, such as the Free Church of Scotland and the Wee Frees.)

Fragano @62, the westerners (in particular, Albertans) seem to be upset at the idea that under the coalition government they would have effectively no representation in the government, so they aren't happy. On the other hand, they chose, collectively, to vote monolithically for the Conservatives, so it seems to me to be a case of what goes around, comes around. They also seem to be really fuzzy on the principles of parliamentary democracy.

Citing the Revolution of 1688 here is apposite: in my own opinion any attempt to prorogue Parliament to allow a government not only without the consent of Parliament but against the will of Parliament to continue for any period of time is reminiscent of the period leading up to the Civil War -- especially given the very large powers now available to a government without Parliament via regulations and other Orders-in-Council. In terms of parliamentary democracy, it's that which is "undemocratic", not having a perfectly legitimate arrangement between MPS who collectively represent over 60% of the popular vote.

The sybils are part of Christian symbolism because the "Sybbilline Oracles" of late Antiquity, accepted during the Middle Ages, were Christian pseudepigraphical works which made them predict the coming of Christ (along lines reminiscent of the Fourth Eclogue, but rather more circumstantial).

A couple of notes on terminology: the "bleeding heart" is normally referred to as the "Immaculate Heart of Mary", and the litany from which much of this comes is normally called the "Litany of Loretto". (The "golden house" could very well be the Holy House of Loretto.)

John @ 60:
This "misunderstanding" makes good sense when you/youse all consider that 200 years ago, the British executive was drawn from the (unelected) peerage, and the crown appeared to have genuine executive power. "Parties" were more like factions, with the monarch working with leading peers to manage elections to the commons.

I'm going to be finicky here. The statement above is probably more accurate regarding Britain three hundred rather than two hundred years ago. (Think, e.g. of the Harley ministry under Queen Anne.) The eighteenth century saw the emergence of the authority of the Treasury Bench in the Commons with Walpole's term as the first "prime minister" (a term originally used as mockery/criticism). By 1800 or so and into the Twentieth Century, Prime Ministers and members of cabinet could and did come from the House of Peers: Wellington and Salisbury being obvious examples on the Prime Ministerial side. IIRC, The last Lord seriously considered for the Prime Ministership was Halifax, during the war, and his peerage was one of the reasons he didn't end up getting the position.

The wearing away of the Crown's active executive involvement, on the other hand, took hold only really strongly under Victoria, although it had been proceeding slowly for some time before that.

Xopher @ 397:

The hanging came first.

The full sentence was: "That you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being (still) alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure".

In a word, no.

I can't say I've ever wondered any of those things.

Actual code can be copyrighted; however, this is of little practical use, since once an algorithm is known, the same effects can be achieved, typically, in a different manner (and copyright protects expression of ideas, not ideas in themselves). In addition, aside from copylefted and BSD-licenced material (which does make use of copyright to ensue its distribution rules) most software is distributed in binary, not source form.

#97, 109:

For the New Testament, the RSV (not the NRSV) is fairly good.

I use a decent Greek NT with the current Nestle/Aland text as a check against readings in mass. I can witness that frequently the NRSV reads like a loose paraphrase, and sometimes is worse.

I'll give a simple example: in the Gospel of John, there is a point where the Greek says, literally: "If you release him, you are not Caesar's friend". The NRSV changes the proper name Caesar -- this is under Tiberius, when the name is very much still a family name -- to the title "the Emperor". This has reference to the same person, and but it replaces one term which is a proper name with another which is a title. I presume the change was made because they were worried that readers wouldn't know the meaning of "Caesar". There is no evidence of variants in the textual apparatus.

The AV is a bad source not because its translation principles were bad, but because it used the Textus Receptus as a base text, and that is not a very good text by modern textual standards (wrong text family, among other things). I do find that the translation is a good one in those cases where I have already determined that there are no variances involving the underlying Greek. (For OT it's much less usable, since the changes in understanding of the Hebrew text are far more substantial than the degree of variation between the current accepted NT text and the Textus Receptus.)

Of corse, there are areas where you pretty well have to use the AV -- where you're treating the influence of the Bible on non-Catholic English writers over a period of about three centuries and a bit. And those where it is unacceptable for the same reason (I remember doing a paper on influences of apocalyptic in Shakespeare as an undergraduate and carefully using the Geneva bible).

Fragano @383: Carter was heavily influenced by the Quakers (and served with a Friends Ambulance Unit during the War) but he was formally C of E (confirmed as such, buried as such, and some of his songs, such as "The Vicar is a Beatnik" assume a C of E context).

He was perfectly willing to admit a conscious influence on "Lord of the Dance" from a statue of Shiva he kept on his desktop...

Sometimes you can see the bookseller's manipulations as they shift practices.

Chapters/Indigo (in Canada) used to discount and promote the books on the Globe and Mail Bestseller list (yes, I know that all bestseller lists are manipulated, but at least this one is not manipulated by the bookseller directly, although they have some input as one source referred to by the Globe). Several years ago, I went in to get a Neal Stephenson book which appeared on the list -- and found that they were now using their own internal "bestseller" list, with all the obvious attentant possibilties for manipulation.

Amazon.ca still uses the Globe list for deeper discounts; so I went away and ordered from Amazon. But that shift from a (comparatively) impartial arbiter for some of their promotions to their own internal system rankled.

abi@112:

There is an irony here: my recollection, from an editorial/bibliographic discussion of "what do you do when authors rewrite their own works?" (in terms of establishing a copy-text) is that the verses you quote were later removed/modified by Auden from his own work as his opinions changed (in summary, he became more sympathetic to Kipling and Claudel). Auden wasn't as bad as Yeats at refashioning himself in his earlier works, but he sometimes came close.

I can't get either LJ entries or comments in today. However, I was able to post several short comments last night. The LJ status site says that "long" comments or entries may have problems ("long" in this case being three paragraphs).

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