{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3835", "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": 3835, "subject": "Castaway with Spoilers", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "2003-02-07T19:39:24+00:00", "last": "2003-02-08T19:53:26+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "cilluff1 at optonline.net", "address": "cilluff1 at optonline.net" }, "date": "2003-02-07T19:39:24+00:00", "subject": "RE: (urth) Castaway with Spoilers", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Blattid writes, prompted by Mantis' gender comment:\n\n<<> So we are all in agreement that the narrator is female?\n\nHuh?!? Sputter!?! \n\nYou know, the question of what sex (or age, or race, or any \nother physical characteristic) of the narrator never came up \nin my mind. Not once. In two readings less than two days \napart ... \n\nSo, uh, any particular reason for thinking this? (I don't\nthink the \"I love you\" is intended that way...)>>\n\nI read it as a man, but the passage that tipped me that way really can go\neither way: \"...I was sick of talking to the other guys in the crew. I'd\nbeen talking to them ever since I signed on, and I knew what they were\ngoing to say and the games they wanted to play and what all their jokes\nwere.\"\n\nI had read \"the other guys in the crew\" as modifying the narrator, making\nthe narrator male, but it just as easily could refer to the stranded gent. \nThe \"the games they wanted to play\" line though does have sexual\nconnotations to it, although that doesn't necessarily make the narrator\nfemale. I also thought her bawdy jokes of \"was it as good for you as it\nwas for her...\" seemed like a \"guy thing\" to say, but I guess that is\nsexist of me and there's no reason a woman couldn't say that.\n\nI do however like idea of the narrator being female -- she is the\nantithesis of the Gaia, a nice duality. She is the embodiment of the white\nworld, anti-nature (White Goddess? I've never read that but it makes you\nthink...), where not only do they not have trees but they try to make the\nstranded gent forget about leaves entirely. He speaks to her, just as he\nspoke to Gaia, because she is the embodiment of this anti-nature. She\nwould like to know how to make him see the trees and hear the birds, but\nShe cannot do that anymore.\n\nIncidentally, I do agree that the earth is \"the\" castaway as well the\nstranded gent, which is why I've described him (clumsily) as the stranded\ngent. Note that the title actually isn't \"The Castaway,\" it is simply\n\"Castaway\" -- it refers to both earth and the man, so there is not any\nsingular \"the\" castaway, and it also lets the word act as a verb -- the\nstory is about how we castaway earth and nature, first on the planet\nitself, and then by pounding its memory out of this last natural man, a man\nwhom we also castaway as having a \"blown\" mind. Note also that all that\nwhite \"suck[ed] the color out of everything except blood. Only it never\nsucked the color out of him, and that made him special to me.\" Well, if\nhe's alive, and has blood, why SHOULD it suck the color out of him? Also,\nwhy should that be special to her -- because she and everyone else no\nlonger have blood or color.\n\n- Shell " } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "James Jordan", "address": "jbjordan4 at cox.net" }, "date": "2003-02-08T19:53:26+00:00", "subject": "RE: (urth) Castaway with Spoilers", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I took the narrator as female, because of the \"games the other guys play\" \npassage. And I agree that it works thematically. Also it \"felt\" as if the \nnarrator was especially interested in the \"woman\" on the planet, which \nseems in a way more appropriate for a women. (E.g. \"What was this other \nwoman like?\") Also, the fact that the man was so interested in talking with \nthe narrator, after years of talking only to another \"woman,\" indicated to \nme that the narrator was female. He was used to talking to a woman.\n The \"I love you\" was said by the stranded man to the old woman, \nover and over, and seemed to comfort her.\n I speculate that Atrothers is an alpha privitive before the word \n\"troth,\" and would mean \"unmarried ones\" -- another image of sterility.\n Obert means \"otter.\"\n Yarmouth is a river's name:\n\nFor example, the river Yar was first mentioned by the ancient Greek \ngeographer Ptolemy, in the second century A.D. The word is believed to stem \nfrom an old, pre-English, Celtic word \"gar,\" meaning something like \"shout\" \nor \"cry,\" and probably referring to the loud sounds made by rushing water \nat the Yar's mouth, when tides were changing.\n\n- English River Names, as reviewed (scroll down a ways) at:\n\nhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/A2CRUETJKX1WA5/1/ref%3Dcm%5Fcr%5Fauth/103-6356536-1614238\n\n Interesting that both of the man's companions had water names. \nFirst the Otter died, and then the River died.\n\nAnyway, what I found.\n\nNutria" } ] } ] }