Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: Morryster's _Marvells of Science_ (SPOILERS for

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 14:05:09 +0000

on 5/6/02 11:47 PM, Michael Andre-Driussi at mantis at siriusfiction.com wrote:

> Does THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (1911) have some reference to that title?

Not the 1911 book, apparently, but THE UNABRIDGED DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (2000)
ed. David E. Schultz & S. T. Joshi, iirc.  Unfortunately my library's copy
is charged out, so I can't check the context.

> Yes, then Lovecraft used it later, but I've misplaced the note on which
> story that was.

"The Festival" (as the magic Google rapidly revealed).

> The indirect quote that Adam refers to is not included in the Bierce story,
> nor is it germane to that story, yet the story itself is rather germane
> toward PEACE as a whole, or so it seems to me

Perhaps I'm being dense, but I'm not sure how.  The Bierce story  is about a
man so affected by something he reads in a book that it leads to his death;
Weer certainly reads a lot, but I don't think his reading was responsible
for his life having gone sour.

--Adam

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From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 03:14:29 +0000

>for his life having gone sour.

Actually I wasn't thinking of that angle!  Even though I've often wondered
about the relationship between "Life" and "Books" in PEACE, and "Life's
true experience missed while reading books" and "Weer's possible attempts
to make his life retroactively better by rewriting it as fiction" . . .

No, I was just referring to how in "The Man and the Snake," the victim has
an authentic experience, including transport back in time, under conditions
that are not really authentic.  That tradition of ghost stories, where it
is all explainable as being some naturalistic thing in the end . . . yet
still, something real happened to the victim, if only a hallucination.

This ghost-story "which is it" aspect, as well as the implied "power of the
book" part (especially as Gold reads to Weer from "The Necronomicon" that
he wrote, and it seems to be really working in its weird way), was all that
I meant to point toward.

(And how did that goofy toy snake get in the room, anyhow?  It starts to
remind me of the mumble-mumble at the end of DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC
SHEEP?, but of course PKD takes the dingus and runs a PKD pattern with it.)

(Just a misplaced child's toy?  A gag item, left over from some holiday
party? I wonder if a story has ever been published about, say, "The Whoopie
Cushion of Enlightenment"?)

=mantis=

Sirius Fiction
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
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http://www.siriusfiction.com/

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