The Planet

thiskurt wrote: ↑

Tue 29 Nov, 2022, 6:36 pm

InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑

Tue 29 Nov, 2022, 5:52 pm

thiskurt wrote: ↑

Tue 29 Nov, 2022, 4:22 pm

Suddenly we get a banking 101 introduction course.

Confession: I totally skipped Mr. Holder's ramblings on about banking and how great his bank was.

I skipped it and then, because I didn't remember if the minutiae of banking procedures were somehow relevant to the story, I skimmed it to be sure and I feel betrayed. Betrayed!

InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑

Tue 29 Nov, 2022, 6:06 pm

This is the other tricky bit with Holmes and the Holmes stories, which is that Watson and Holmes are, together, a somewhat unreliable narrator. Holmes tells Watson that he values reason over emotion and cool logic over the distracting human passions. Watson relays this to us as an absolutism. Generations of readers take it as fact.

Holmes' and Watson's reading of Holmes and Watson is totally wrong.

thiskurt wrote: ↑

Tue 29 Nov, 2022, 6:36 pm

InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑

Tue 29 Nov, 2022, 6:17 pm

I think this is a good take, but I disagree almost entirely. It's true that Watson doesn't ever figure out the case, but it's also always very obvious that it's largely because Holmes just has more information. And he doesn't give it to Watson until "the reveal".

That's true, here too he was off galavanting doing a bunch of investigation work on his own. I think I was taken in by how Holmes will often give Watson a ribbing for not figuring something out, but more often than not he just knows more.

thiskurt wrote: ↑

Sun 04 Dec, 2022, 6:01 pm

Shall we do The Adventure of the Copper Beeches next weekend?

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Stra ... er_Beeches

Bee wrote: ↑

Tue 13 Dec, 2022, 12:47 am

I haven’t managed to reply to the most recent posts nor read this week’s story, but please do say something!! I actually really enjoy reading both of your takes

"Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried, with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker-street.

But Holmes shook his head gravely.

"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

"Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"

"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

"You horrify me!"

"But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and ​indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

Bee wrote: ↑

Mon 06 Mar, 2023, 10:01 pm

Hey, friends, are we ever picking this back up or should I just start reading the next anthology on my own?