{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3127", "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": 3127, "subject": "Wash Post article on Wolfe: correct URL", "messages": 4, "voices": 4, "first": "2002-04-08T03:09:53+00:00", "last": "2002-04-10T15:53:10+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Nicholas Gevers", "address": "vermoulian at yahoo.com" }, "date": "2002-04-08T03:09:53+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Wash Post article on Wolfe: correct URL", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Apologies--it appears the URL I gave for my Washington\nPost article on Wolfe is defective. All the Sunday\narticles on SF, including ine, can be found here:\n\nhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/sunday/bookworld/\n\nI hope that works better!\n\n--Nick Gevers." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Alice K. Turner", "address": "aturner6 at nyc.rr.com" }, "date": "2002-04-08T11:09:41+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Wash Post article on Wolfe: correct URL", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Try this for a direct link:\n\nhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62473-2002Apr4.html\n\n-alga" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Apologies--it appears the URL I gave for my Washington\nPost article on Wolfe is defective. All the Sunday\narticles on SF, including ine, can be found here:\n\nhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/sunday/bookworld/\n\nI hope that works better!\n\n--Nick Gevers.\n\n__________________________________________________\nDo You Yahoo!?\nEverything you'll ever need on one web page\nfrom News and Sport to Email and Music Charts\nhttp://uk.my.yahoo.com\n\n-- " } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Straight", "address": "straight at email.unc.edu" }, "date": "2002-04-10T14:24:34+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Wash Post article on Wolfe: correct URL", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Thats a great article Nick. I like the way you linked 5th Head with the\nSun books. Even though I've read half-a-dozen similar retrospectives of\nWolfe's work, this one seemed quite fresh with many orignial and\ninteresting points and emphases. I think the only thing lacking might\nhave been a little more about good Wolfe's prose is. I always enjoy\nreading him even when I haven't figured out what's going on in the plot.\n\nBut overall, a great article. Ought to spur at least a few people to\ngive Wolfe a try. Thanks!\n\n-Rostrum" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2002-04-10T15:53:10+00:00", "subject": "RE: (urth) Wash Post article on Wolfe: correct URL", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I agree with Rostrum, that was a really nicely-done \"intro to Wolfe,\" \nespecially for the (presumed) target audience of folks with no more \nthan a casual knowledge of or interest in SF. \n\nIt's worth noting, that I have generally suspected Wolfe (and especially\nthese books) of being particularly opaque to non-SF readers. He uses the \nrhetorical battery of SF so freely and so extremely that I wonder if \nsomeone with no real experience in the reading of SF might find him very \nhard slogging indeed, might indeed find it nigh impossible to decode.\n\nBut anyway ... I want to question the explicit linking of 5HC to the\n\"Sun\" books. (BTW, I like the term \"Briah Cycle\" and even agree that \nthis is the term that should achieve general currency, but will still \nprobably use \"Lupiverse,\" for personal and selfish reasons). They are \n_thematically_ linked, certainly, and you made that case mighty well;\nbut I question how well it serves as an entry point to the Lupiverse\n-- for two reasons:\n\nFirst, and less important, because I'm pretty sure that it does _not_\ntake place in the same universe as the \"Sun\" books. I would be hard\nput to explain why, but there it is. Certainly it lacks any explicit\nintertextual links with the universe in which they take place.\n\nSecond, and far more important, because in many ways 5HC is the _most_ \ndifficult of Lupine texts. I mean this both in terms of \"style\" and\n\"matter.\" \n\nIt's an incredible puzzle-box, but one that does not even tell you up \nfront what the puzzles _are_; you have these three novellas, and they \nseem to be linked somehow, but when you first go through the texts, \nit's hard to even see what questions to ask to find the links. And the \nlanguage of 5HC is the most explicitly and exclusively stfnal of all \nWolfe's novels; the reader is forced to do a huge amount of rhetorical \nunpacking simply to make plot-sense out of the individual texts (and \nthis is particularly so in \"A Story,\" which is precisely the part that \nlooks simplest on its surface). Then, too, 5HC is unremittingly \n_depressing_, possibly the hardest book to tolerate, emotionally, that \nI have ever read. 5HC emphatically should _not_ be given to people who \nare considering suicide (when the rainbow is not enuf); the only bit of\nhope I see anywhere in it is actually external to it, the fact that a\nhuman can and does ask these questions means that maybe, just maybe, we\ncan find better answers to them...\n\n\"And if a bird can speak, that once was a dinosaur,\n and a dog can dream, should it be impossible\n that a man might supervise the construction of light?\"" } ] } ] }