{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/192", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 192, "subject": "Digest 4.13", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "1997-08-29T15:07:07+00:00", "last": "1997-08-29T15:07:07+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Ron Crown", "address": "crownrw at slu.edu" }, "date": "1997-08-29T15:07:07+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Digest 4.13", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Alga, no I'm not cephalo, I'm not anything Vironese (yet, anyway.)\n\nWolfe interview: the full question and answer from which Gordon took the\nquote is as follows:\n\nGordon: You marked a bibliography of your stories for me with checks to\nindicate which ones were \"pivotal.\" What do you mean by \"pivotal?\"\n\nWolfe: A pivotal story for me is one in which I feel I have succeeded\nin doing well something I have never really done well before--fairy\nmaterial in \"Thag,\" a certain religious viewpoint in \"Westwind,\" the use\nof second and third person in \"The Island of Doctor Death and Other\nStories,\" the progression from realism to fantasy in \"The Eyeflash\nMiracles,\" even the primitive inventions no one ever actually invented\n(and which no one now notices) in \"Tracking Song.\" Just as \"Tracking\nSong\" is about uninvented inventions of the stone age, \"Straw\" is about\n(partly, of course) uninvented inventions of the middle ages.\n\n\"Tracking Song\" is a wolf totem story, by the way. The protagonist gets\nhis original orientation from a wolf tribe, then lives in a world in\nwhich the roles of moose, lion, deer, mink and so on are taken by\nsemi-human beings. Wolves are winter symbols, of course, and birds\nsymbols of spring.\n\nEnd of interview excerpt. The whole interview is 5 pages long and thus\ntoo long to post here (too long for me to type in, I mean) but if I find\nsome interesting snippets, I'll post those, too.\n\nI didn't express myself well re the robots outside, what I meant was\nthat they could not survive outside in _current conditions_ and thus\ncould not have learned the finger to chin gesture from the other\n\"tribes\" in the story. Of course, they in all likelihood lived on the\nsurface prior to the \"ice age;\" perhaps the underground city was a\nlast-ditch effort on the part of their makers (at least, those not\ngenetically altered, if we opt for that scenario) to survive?\n\nAlga, maybe I missed something in an earlier post but why are you so\nadamantly opposed to the winged creature as bird interpretation? Hey,\nhere's a sudden thought (or maybe a blood vessel just burst), how about\nthe winged creature at the end as a sort of ironic counterpoint, ala\nRobert Frost's \"ice will suffice\", to the Phoenix legend (is there a\nnative american Phoenix legend or is this ancient mediterranean?). \nInstead of Phoenix rising from the ashes, we've got a bird of some type\nrising from melting ice!\n\nSomething I just found out about Jack London's \"The Call of the Wild;\"\nthe working title was \"The Wolf\" or \"The Sleeping Wolf.\"\n\nI'm not so sure about the Fisher-King analogy in T.S. myself; Crooked\nLeg is not that major of a character; nevertheless, he is there at the\nend when no one else from the wolf tribe is.\n\nNo luck with the dictionaries yet but in researching gestures, I did\ndiscover that a common feature of native american sign language (found\nin several tribes, I suppose all those that had dealings with the Sioux)\nwas the hand or finger(s) drawn across the throat from one ear to the\nother signifying the Sioux (Dakotas) as \"cutthroats.\" [!]\n\nRe gestures, I came across an interesting comment, not particularly\npertinent to Wolfe per se, but certainly to science fiction. The author\nof A Cultural History of Gesture points out that not only do gestures\nevolve but that the same gesture can have radically different meanings\nin different times. For example, slapping the thigh is usually\nassociated with a guffaw in our culture, in ancient Rome it meant anger.\nThe author concludes \"The time traveller would be well advised to learn,\namongst much else, the ancient art of gesticulation.\" Reminds me of L.\nSprague de Camp's famous essay on \"Language for Time Travellers\" which\ndealt wholly (as I remember it) with spoken language; but how many\nscience fiction writers have thought to apply notions of change to\nunspoken language as well? \n\nFinally, I have an Iranian colleague at work; I asked her about the name\n\"Nadan Jaffarzadeh\" in SAN. \"Jaffarzadeh\" is a perfectly normal last\nname; the \"zadeh\" component is found frequently. But \"Nadan\" in Farsi\nis not a name, but a noun/adjective meaning \"ignorant,\" \"unaware;\" it\ncan even be used as a polite way of saying that someone is stupid. \nWhatever else it may imply in SAN, it certainly implies a fallible\nnarrator (but we knew that already, didn't we?)\n\nBTW, (forget that \"finally\" above) since we're broadening the parameters\nof the list and Dan Simmons has been mentioned in that connection, y'all\nmight be interested in John Clute's online review of Simmons' latest\nentry in the Hyperion series. It's at:\nhttp://www.scifi.com/sfw/current/excess.html. He has some interesting\ncomments comparing Simmons and Wolfe. Indeed, I've been reading Clute's\nLook at the Evidence and it seems he can hardly mention Wolfe without\nmentioning Simmons and vice versa.\n\nRon Crown" } ] } ] }