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Adam Stephanides wrote I haven't read the story, but I can't resist pointing out that the two shepherdesses in the sheep-shearing scene in A Winter's Tale are called Mopsa and Dor…
10 Sep 2000, 21:20
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This is a fascinating point. Here's my guess. The mausoleum is the grave of Severian's alter ego. At one level, this is a real other Severian. But the only time Wolfe works at …
07 Aug 2000, 22:10
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Missed that, sounds fascinating. I wonder why it's in fashion at the moment? I've been thinking I really ought to go... For ages I've been planning an essay on time themes in th…
27 Jul 2000, 21:47
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Two thoughts inspired by the meeting with Hethor in chapter XXXV (the last) of Shadow. The first has two threads. Some time last year, I noted a similarity between Severian's nig…
23 Jul 2000, 21:49
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A propos of which (although it doesn't apply any more), I noticed an oddly Wolfian passage the other day. It would be ultraborskian to suggest any genuine parallel, but it rather …
21 May 2000, 18:44
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Yes, I agree with both of these. Anyone think there might be a dash of the `tortured Catholic soul', as in Graham Greene or (sometimes) Evelyn Waugh, or [puts on BBC arts correspo…
20 Jan 2000, 20:11
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Hmmm. I don't think this is entirely appropriate with Wolfe. If you look back in the archive I think you'll find we have had the same question over and over, and each time with d…
14 Dec 1999, 23:44
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Perfectly reasonable --- she was, after all, already dead when she was weighted down with lead shot. (Well --- I hope so.) If the Claw brought her back to life, presumably a bit …
30 Sep 1999, 08:32
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Ciao Leute, Someone was remarking a few weeks ago about Paul J. McAuley's `Confluence' series. I've finished the first one, `Child of the River', quite recently, and rather than …
22 Sep 1999, 13:28
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OK, I didn't look that up. I may have got confused with the older english for marzipan, marchpane, which is no more like the french than the modern word, but different enough to c…
27 Jul 1999, 08:32
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I said I'd report back if I found anything relevant in Proust on the subject of hawthorns. This turns out to be embarrassingly rich for what in Claw is only about two pages (and I…
26 Jul 1999, 14:04
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Aha, that sounds to me distinctly Proustian. It may agree with the time themes present in that particular episode (starting at the begining of the chapter with the comparison with…
24 Jul 1999, 11:45
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Yes, it would, although maybe he's just saying Wolfe refers to anything and everything and has picked some extreme examples, like Polonius ends his list of things the players in Ha…
22 Jul 1999, 11:49
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You (and other people) might like to know that a lot of the books are available over the net from Project Gutenberg. Go to http://promo.net/pg/query.html and enter Baum in the…
25 Jun 1999, 08:37
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This was going through my mind, too, and it seems to tie up the loose end in the most plausible. It's the sort of mistake Severian makes a lot. Nice way of illustrating that even …
24 Jun 1999, 09:12
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I still can't really agree with this for two reasons. In the first place, it's not at all so clear that reality is like that. There are plenty of people arguing for one extreme or…
16 Jun 1999, 11:46
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I don't think it can be that simple. As someone was saying just earlier in the week, Wolfe writes about non-humans as if they have `souls' in some sense. They're not completely h…
12 Jun 1999, 11:29
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Don't you mean `they're still Greys, because there's nothing wrong in being grey, of course, but they have a much more fulfilled inner life now they have been purged of their anach…
06 Jun 1999, 14:42
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I don't want to drag this out into a pointless argument over points of view (viewless argument over views of points?) [I was arguing the green man, although he comes from the futur…
02 Jun 1999, 07:46
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What, presumably: it's turned into a citadel, with torturers, witches, magic atria, homunculi, the works. Nowhere a hard-working sailor can land a spaceship any more. (Borskian e…
01 Jun 1999, 14:05
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(late again, holiday trip to Ravenna, Urbino, life's hard. sigh.) I haven't gone back to check, but reading the Book before my impression was very strong (in fact, I was quite cer…
31 May 1999, 09:14
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Ranjit, thanks from me to. I have no doubt that at some time in the future/past http://www.urth.net/urth/ will in its turn give rise to http://www.urth.net/urth/, and so on ad inf…
24 May 1999, 12:12
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I wrote (weeks ago): Whoa! sorry about this, our mailer seems to be stuck in another age. Jonathan's had enough stick about this, and anyway his subsequent remarks make it clear I…
21 May 1999, 07:20
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kn i play 2? I'd like to be Hildegrin, because Mr Badger in Wind in the Willows is one of my favourite fictional creations. I've been wondering if it had it in his mind when he w…
10 May 1999, 08:38
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Actually, maybe that's the only way to understand it... the characters blunder around senselessly for most of the novel so that even Free himself gets infuriated, and at the end ar…
07 May 1999, 07:48
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I can't quite agree with this, or what it seems to me to say, though I may be reading too much into it as usual (and I realise how much it blights your career in literary criticism…
30 Apr 1999, 09:20
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At least there's no danger of Wolfe being underrated on this list. I can't agree about Asimov being overrated, though. Books like `The End of Eternity' and `The Caves of Steel' a…
28 Apr 1999, 09:53
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Surely, at least to some extent, Severian is Everyman? That may seem hard to accept of a rather dour torturer with a perfect memory, but I think Wolfe wants us to make the imagina…
22 Apr 1999, 09:49
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Francis Bacon, presumably? That's not so silly... I mean, it's not true, but what is truth? It's plausible in a sort of Borskian sense: the stature of the exultants suggests a ce…
18 Apr 1999, 14:28
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This is an interesting point, and it seems to me that the critic in question has largely got the wrong end of the stick about worldmaking in fantastic literature in general --- but…
20 Mar 1999, 16:41
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It's not even quite Deuteronomy. The original biblical quotation is about Moses, who isn't mentioned by name in what they're reading --- I forget the term used, it's some generic …
17 Mar 1999, 14:05
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Looks like you're on to something here, since this document also contains the sentence: The Thikoloshe is the familiar of the night sorcerer and sent by him. which is presumably…
16 Mar 1999, 14:09
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I would tend to caution against seeing Prufrock as anyone too specific --- he may well be a horny old man, but Eliot is saying `there's a lot of it about'. To me he stands for all…
01 Mar 1999, 15:05
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Isn't it associated with the London department store Dickens 'n' Jones? It goes with their famous advertising lines: My shop closed twice before it closed; It yet remains to …
22 Feb 1999, 09:51
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I just wanted to suggest the scenes were parallel. I'm certainly not implying the books are parallel, and the subject line was just a throwaway, there's certainly no overt connect…
05 Feb 1999, 14:13
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Has anyone noticed the strange resemblance between the following? Are they perhaps related? (If anyone has, I should just look back in the archive for the same subject line, sinc…
05 Feb 1999, 11:10
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It's been quiet, has it? Oh, *I's* been quiet. Dialect, don't you know. Good show. All explained. Tallyho. Sounds like parallel evolution. Lots of mystical views of the futu…
03 Dec 1998, 16:35
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Haig's theory was that the Germans were suffering more by this, and the only way to win the war was by attrition. Maybe he just subtracted the population of the Central Powers fro…
25 Nov 1998, 09:21
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When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. Julius Caesar, II.ii. ok, it doesn't quite work.…
24 Nov 1998, 08:42
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I enjoyed it too, and it certainly seems relevant to the Ascians, but put in this context the idea struck me as utterly implausible. I can't understand how a space-faring culture …
31 Oct 1998, 15:58
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Just a PS: the long-standing tradition in England was that common people were beheaded by the axe, nobles had the right to the sword. Thus many of the more famous executions (such …
23 Oct 1998, 07:50
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That can't be quite right, since until it's horizontal gravity is keeping the mercury at the hilt end. Long ago I used to play with things where what I was later taught to call `i…
20 Oct 1998, 07:58
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Oh, that's neat. If you're a Protestant, and believe in justification by faith alone, you don't need the merit, and don't get to transcribe the Catholic Encyclopedia. (Well, mayb…
15 Oct 1998, 15:57
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absolutely... even if I can't follow Severian's family tree [is there a pun about this at the Inn of Lost Loves? maybe I shouldn't start this one off] it does appear to be pretty …
14 Oct 1998, 07:51
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For a time I thought so, but I finally found the film wasn't ambiguous enough: there seemed to be just the one interpretation that finally worked, unless he had some impressively c…
12 Oct 1998, 07:46
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I have to pipe up and admit that I have worries along these line. The great strength I find in Wolfe is the overarching themes and links between them. Having all the characters t…
10 Oct 1998, 13:22
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Maybe this is obvious, but I don't think the phrase "grown from the body cells of exultant women" has to imply cloning as we know it. Nothing else is quite as we know it; I can wel…
07 Oct 1998, 10:12
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I do find it hard to escape the implication that Severian's real father is intended, and that somehow Severian and Thecla combined have worked out who he is --- what else could it …
22 Sep 1998, 10:30
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(I've been away, which is why I'm referring to something discussed several megabytes ago.) The Chinese pillow episode in Peace has a possible literary precursor in `Das Glasperlen…
11 Sep 1998, 14:54
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This is the quotation I was scrabbling for before. The old orchard and the herb garden beyond it had been so silent, so freighted with oblivion, that they recalled to me the A…
11 Jul 1998, 13:53
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