{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3497", "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": 3497, "subject": "PEACE: ghost of Christmas", "messages": 3, "voices": 2, "first": "2002-10-21T20:26:37+00:00", "last": "2002-10-22T15:09:43+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com" }, "date": "2002-10-21T20:26:37+00:00", "subject": "(urth) PEACE: ghost of Christmas", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Having made my rule about ghosts, then yes, Mr. Tilly was killed by the\nghost of his wife (case solved!), and Santa Claus switched the presents for\nMab and Mrs. Weer (case solved!).\n\nWeer asks his mother if Santa will bring presents for grandpa and she says\n\"If he's been a good boy\"! And what do you know!\n\nNo doubt you think I'm kidding, being frivolously silly.\n\nI am not.\n\nI confess I had never before seen that the Christmas book \"from Santa\" was\nthe green book, the one and only book that serves Weer in the same oracular\nfashion that the brown book serves Severian in TBOTNS. Previously I had\nthought that \"The Princess and Her Three Suitors\" and \"The Tale of ben\nYahya and the Marid\" were inventions by Weer to explain his life after the\nfact -- they are not. They are stories from the green book, which is the\nfirst book that Weer ever possessed, the first book he ever read on his\nown. The book is truly magical and the stories tell about the world around\nhim: specifically about his aunt Olivia's courtship in the egg hunt and his\nown adventure in the gold hunt.\n\nSo Weer really did start to read those stories at the age of five, and they\nremain unfinished because he stopped reading them.\n\nThis makes another echo with the china pillow story: Weer is a man who has\nseen his future (\"The Tale of ben Yahya and the Marid\"), just like the\nChinese hero, yet Weer does not recognize it as his life until it is upon\nhim, because he has been deluded by his own self-generated dreams of\nhimself and Margaret Lorn. That is to say, he has drugged himself with the\nvision of the easy life, then the obstacles come up and thrash him around\nuntil he wakes up as a 40-year old man in the \"haunted city\" of the Marid\nstory, but since he never finished reading that one, he has to work his way\nthrough it and to the end. Judging from the outcome, I'd guess that in the\narabesque story the woman he loved (Olivia) whom he thought he had found\nagain (Lois) turned out to be a treacherous ghula (that \"digging up graves\"\nimage is pretty strong in the interplay between Weer and Louis).\n\nWhile I'm writing about pillow echoes, I will point out that Weer's\n\"Chinese garden dream,\" in which Weer (AD 2274) dreams about being 25 again\n(AD 1939), has, I believe, image-ties to the china pillow story (the walls\nand the plain, especially); furthermore, it is exactly the case of an old\nman (well actually he is dead) successfully revisiting that grim and\nfrightful time when he stood on the cusp of his life's adventure. He does\nthis and is not censured for it.\n\n=mantis=\n\n\nSirius Fiction\nbooklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley\n29 copies of \"Snake's-hands\" until OP!\nhttp://www.siriusfiction.com/" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Roy C. Lackey", "address": "rclackey at stic.net" }, "date": "2002-10-22T05:12:05+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) PEACE: ghost of Christmas", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "mantis wrote:\nHaving made my rule about ghosts, then yes, Mr. Tilly was killed by the\nghost of his wife (case solved!), and Santa Claus switched the presents for\nMab and Mrs. Weer (case solved!).\n\nWeer asks his mother if Santa will bring presents for grandpa and she says\n\"If he's been a good boy\"! And what do you know!" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Whoa, now! Since when did Santa Claus get to be a ghost?!\n\nI posted about the switch two years ago. Teenage Den was right about who\nswitched the gifts--it was his grandfather, for sexual favors anticipated\nand received that night. The old man was _not_ a good boy. The proof is the\nlayout of the house. There were two upstairs bedrooms. When Bella and Della\nwere girls, one room had been theirs; the other had belonged to their\ngrandmother. (22) Mab now slept in the old grandmother's room. Den and his\nmother slept in the girls' old room. Mr. Elliot's bedroom was on the first\nfloor. (27) Grandpa Elliot told Den: \"I just come down myself to have a look\nat these here candles before I puts them out and goes up to bed.\" Note the\ncoming down and going up. Christmas morning he \"came down and shaved\". (25)\nElliot spent that cold night with Mab, who couldn't put her present under\nthe tree.\n\n-Roy" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com" }, "date": "2002-10-22T15:09:43+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) PEACE: ghost of Christmas", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Roy wrote:\nWhoa, now! Since when did Santa Claus get to be a ghost?!" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Santa Claus is something of a chimerical creature -- part saint (Saint\nNicholas), part elf, part burglar . While he does not appear as himself\nin \"A Christmas Carol\" as one of the ghosts of Christmas, he seems rather\nclose to at least one of them. What category of being is he, then?\n\"Imaginary being, seasonal\"?\n\nIn the present example [heh], I'm thinking of him as being a ghost, albeit\nof a higher order than most, and entirely benign. That is, his name was\nvoiced and so he was summoned (this really is a critical key of PEACE), he\ndid his magic without being heard or detected, he vanished." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I posted about the switch two years ago. Teenage Den was right about who\nswitched the gifts--it was his grandfather, for sexual favors anticipated\nand received that night. The old man was _not_ a good boy. The proof is the\nlayout of the house. There were two upstairs bedrooms. When Bella and Della\nwere girls, one room had been theirs; the other had belonged to their\ngrandmother. (22) Mab now slept in the old grandmother's room. Den and his\nmother slept in the girls' old room. Mr. Elliot's bedroom was on the first\nfloor. (27) Grandpa Elliot told Den: \"I just come down myself to have a look\nat these here candles before I puts them out and goes up to bed.\" Note the\ncoming down and going up. Christmas morning he \"came down and shaved\". (25)\nElliot spent that cold night with Mab, who couldn't put her present under\nthe tree." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Which is great for determining the switch of the water for the pearls! But\nit cannot explain the switch of the book (which presumably was a mundane\nbook bought by one of the adults). The obvious switch of water for pearls\nis the cover for the more important switch; in a similar way the obsessive\nimportance of the Christmas knife that Weer searches for is a cover for the\nmagical origin and magical nature of the book.\n\nWolfe did a trick like this in TBOTNS. Thecla has a number of books\nbrought to her, and we know that one of them, the brown book, becomes this\nhighly important item for Severian. We see it throughout the four volumes,\netc. But in fact, one of the unnamed volumes that Thecla got from the\nlibrary was [Canog's] THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. In this way, the brown\nbook, while as oracular as Weer's green book, acts in TBOTNS as the\nChristmas knife does in PEACE, to hide or obscure the presence of another\nitem.\n\nI would also like to point out that the green book itself is congruent with\nthe (green) china pillow, because Weer reads the green book before nodding\noff to sleep. (Perhaps its hidden title is \"The Book of Dreams\"?) But\nmainly it shows him his future just as the pillow showed the hero his\nfuture.\n\nThe green book tells the future and Gold's forgeries warp the past; in this\nsense, then, Lou Gold is, er, the anti-Claus, in that he is the author of\nlies based on the past.\n\n(If grampa did do the switch, then it was clearly not premeditated, since\nhe showed young Weer the situation at that time. Risky, if not stupid, of\ngrampa to make the switch after showing Weer, since as a little kid he is\nvery likely to blurt out what he knows, causing all sorts of trouble. From\nthis standpoint it makes more sense for Della to make the switch, she not\nknowing that Weer and grampa had met in secret at around midnight.)\n\n=mantis=" } ] } ] }