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I have a problem with the digest format. It comes to me as a series of attached files, one per message, each of which I have to expand if I wish to read it, schematically: […
30 Jan 2002, 22:20
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The PIE for "five" is *penkwe, not *pan The PIE for "all" is *pan or *pant. I don't have my references here, but I believe the two are distinct. -John…
09 Oct 2001, 16:20
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I think there's another Wolfean theological point to be made about the use of Reason to understand the Universe. Dan says: : ...The detectives, professional and amateu…
22 Aug 2001, 14:09
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Nigel, et al: I think there's another point about the mysteries to be made. We get both hard ones and easy ones. This is (I think) a deliberate strategy on Wolfe's part, to get …
20 Aug 2001, 15:52
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I've seen some figures for "war materiel" produced per year by the major actors in World War II. Here's the quotes (from rec.arts.sf.written, by aspqrz at sydney.DIALix.oz.au (Philli…
13 Aug 2001, 15:51
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Dan'l, The Lemony Snicket books are mildly funny, but clearly aimed at kids. It's one joke ("Dear reader, this book is not a happy story, maybe you better not read it") repeated …
09 Aug 2001, 14:23
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I can easily accept that a non AH Germany would be nationalistic and anti-Semetic; I find it hard to believe that it would be so impractically idealistic as to do more than rob and…
07 Aug 2001, 13:17
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I have an actual child (now 11) who has finished _Compass_ and is reading _Subtle_Knife_. He had no problem whatsoever with "daemon", and figured out quickly that it was unrelated…
07 Aug 2001, 12:52
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Personally, of the Narnia books I prefer _The_Magician's_Nephew_, because it has that wonderful vision of a dying world, and because the Empress castigates the English, "You treat …
02 Aug 2001, 14:00
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I think "Gnostic point of view" means the following: 1) The literal "gnosis": the idea that since most people are illiterate or semi-literate peasants and artificers, the…
01 May 2001, 13:30
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I'll chime in to agree with the Pullman consensus: the third book fails to close the arc started in the first two, and drops the ball thematically and practically. (*mild spoiler*…
23 Apr 2001, 16:10
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_Sky_and_Telescope_ had a big write-up on the October 1998 (I think it was '98, but it might have been '97) lunar eclipse, as it was almost exactly a repeat of the one Columbus use…
11 Oct 1999, 13:37
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Apparently this was actual practice in Classic times: herewith a quote from a reference http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/hyper-lists/bmcr-l/1991/02.06.16.html : The s…
29 Sep 1999, 14:12
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I had a different impression than Alex; Veidt saw a war coming (and we readers are made to see the same, so he is correct), and used a drastic but relatively cheap method to stop i…
15 Sep 1999, 17:58
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Mantis says: ..the agricultural technology really has to be =much= better than that [quasi-medieval] to support Nessus. Three points: 1. Gyoll is a big river, which implies …
16 Aug 1999, 10:05
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You have to alternate between long and short months, or the lunar connection disappears: if you pick any whole number of days, it'll be off by half a day. This means that the full…
13 Aug 1999, 10:22
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Mantis says: Not that I ever read. The islamic calendar still offically depends on a witness to the new Moon, the Judaic calendar used to (before it could rely on calculation), a…
12 Aug 1999, 16:08
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The confusion is understandable, as the history is messy. At one point in the past English had both (as Icelandic does now), but subsequently edh disappeared and thorn was used fo…
31 Mar 1999, 09:14
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It's not true that all time-travel (properly considered) has to lead to paradoxes. First, forward-in-time travel is non-paradoxical. The proof is that we are doing it right now!…
30 Mar 1999, 14:36
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Oddly enough, I recently re-read _Jurgen_. I agree with Roy Lackey, and spell out one implication: fiction that makes references to other literature (or to people or events) can …
23 Mar 1999, 09:42
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It may not be related, but "Isangoma" is a "diviner" in traditional Zulu medicine. Is there a Robert and Marie in South Africa who would be the obvious referents? http://www.hst.…
16 Mar 1999, 08:48
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I think all or most of the little asides are a reference to something; the airplane is a clue which I can't decipher, but if there isn't a (reasonably) famous Robert and Marie in a…
02 Mar 1999, 15:32
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re "Ubermenches" (Ubermenschen in German) I think Latro and Severian, to take the two most obvious examples, are super because otherwise their stories change from the ones Wolfe w…
01 Mar 1999, 13:41
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The painted bus sounds like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (see _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_), or some other '60s bus (I remeber seeing those painted buses and VW minibuse…
11 Feb 1999, 08:52
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Cute, but no cigar: o "Call me Ishmael" is a reference to the son of Abram and his concubine Hagar (search for "Ishmael" in http://www.tagnet.org/freebies/KJBible/01_GEN.H…
05 Feb 1999, 09:07
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If you read more about WWI tactics, the naive view that stupid generals threw away young lives becomes less tenable--though some generals were stupid, or at least careless about th…
30 Nov 1998, 11:46
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re Chesterton No, I never heard of that, and would welcome a summary. (I notice, Rostrum, that you are at unc.edu--I got my Master's there in 1980, and liked the area--do you?) …
30 Oct 1998, 17:16
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Mothman _et_al_: In 1991 I wrote Gene Wolfe, asking him whether he had read Jaynes, and whether that had influenced _Soldier_. He wrote back saying that he had not read Julian Ja…
30 Oct 1998, 10:27
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Oh, I didn't mean to imply that Wolfe was thinking of Madonna--I was remarking on my failure to properly understand Laura until I could find a analogue in the current world. This …
22 Oct 1998, 08:53
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In his interview, Wolfe said that he saw Lara as what a pagan goddess might be like if paganism had survived to the modern era. ...Laura is my idea of what a pagan goddess mig…
20 Oct 1998, 16:59
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I've read most of them, a long time ago. I subsequently learnt a bit of anthropology, linguistics and history, all making me doubt the background element of matriarchy replaced by…
19 Oct 1998, 17:23
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I'm another fan of "Watchmen"; are there other such you can recommend? I know about "Maus". What is "pomo"? There've been a number of references in the discussion of Eco and "Th…
03 Sep 1998, 18:51
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Fellow sufferers-- I've sent mail to "Internet Megantic", telling how to unsubscribe. Let's hope that stops the mass posting of mass quotes. Given that directions on unsubscrib…
22 Jul 1998, 09:57
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Woody Allen uses the term as well, in a context implying that it's an old, old term, and not specifically gay. In that film, Allen is a "beard" when he is the escort for a mobster…
08 Jun 1998, 10:21
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Paul C Duggan <pduggan at world.std.com> asks: [6] What's with the memos and such nailed to Weer's desk? I saw this as: 1) saying the office is unchangeable, fixed--it is a memory,…
22 Apr 1998, 10:23
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In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", one of the versions of the narrator is Phaedrus. If I recall correctly, Phaedrus is a child of Apollo by a mortal woman, who begged…
10 Apr 1998, 08:14
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The quote "...Patterns of beats. Yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes." could be specifying a binary number. In standard 7-bit ASCII, 1100011 is a lower-case 'c'. It's also the binary…
06 Apr 1998, 08:15
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I get to see a lot of snow; maybe I can speak to this based on my upstate New York/New Hampshire background. The crust is a result of settling and freeze-thaw cycles. It can vary …
27 Mar 1998, 08:51
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I had asked for a run-down of the worlds, and found this via AltaVistaat http://www.busprod.com/walls/seph4.html : Archangel of Briah Tsadkiel - Justice of God, the prince of…
17 Mar 1998, 10:20
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I seem to recall that Isaac Azimov once wrote an essay in which he worked out that you wouldn't see the moons of Mars from the surface as "hurtling Moons" in the Barsoomian sense. …
04 Mar 1998, 07:48
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It's my understanding that white holes aren't permanent, as they rapidly "fill up" their neighborhood with matter, thus driving a collapse into a black hole. I'm not a physicist, …
13 Feb 1998, 13:48
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With respect to rats writing, I read that as saying that rats fouled the books with their waste and left footprints, etc. These tracks and evidences are a kind of writing in that …
06 Feb 1998, 07:45
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Others besides Wolfe have pointed out that medieval and early modern daily experience was violent and gory; no one in 1100 would find the idea of Satan grilling sinners over …
03 Nov 1997, 10:11
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Over the weekend, I got a clue: "Cim" is capitalized the same way that "Nashhwonk" and "Min" are, not the way "boat" and "tree" are. It's not a thing, it's a name. And give…
03 Nov 1997, 10:00
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I looked up "cim" in the OED and the OED supplement; there is a "cime", an alternate spelling for "cyme", which is a technical term for a particular kind of bud ("a head of u…
24 Oct 1997, 09:57
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Fellow Wolfians: Please don't post stuff twice, especially if the second posting is HTML-source. It's ugly and takes up space. Ditto for long quotes, especially quotes …
23 Oct 1997, 15:44
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"One more thing..." (reminds me of Columbo) The around the edges vs. through the middle stuff shows up in Kipling's "Rikki-tikki-tavi". -John…
22 Oct 1997, 14:25
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I was re-reading saved digests (no, I _do_ have a life), and wanted to a) thank Alice Turner and =mantis= (and others) for the animal identities and b) disagree with them on …
22 Oct 1997, 14:23
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I just re-read this story. I'm having trouble understanding it. First off, the surface we see can't be true; no post-human "masters" would tolerate the number of deaths i…
18 Sep 1997, 15:50
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Prometheus is the other classic "wound in side" reference; he can be seen as a prefiguration of Christ, in that he sacrifices himself for the benfit of mankind. Prometheus is …
11 Aug 1997, 10:44
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