Subject: (urth) Ted = Goldwurm?

From: Mr Thalassocrat <thalassocrat08 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:56:20 +0000

Griffins were supposed to guard gold. Not exactly dragons, but as Jake
Jacobson says (p214), "Sort of like a dragon".

Not wedded to the idea, but I like it more than Ted = Ambrosius.

It might explain why Ieulan run's away from Ted's ghost, if that's what it
was (Emlyn at any rate seems to be afraid of Goldwurm, and wouldn't
necessarily know that he's been dead for a couple of years).

Ted's ring might be Goldwurm's weapon of power. Doris gives it to Bax just
after commenting on Bax's/Ambrosius' ring. Her explanation of why she does
this makes zero sense to me. Perhaps she did it because she's planning on
inducing Bax to give her the other one - as a wedding ring? Maybe Ted's
spirit is guiding her in this, somehow - he sees Bax's ring & recognises it
as Ambrosius' weapon of power.

Maybe that's why Ted's ghost wants her to be with Bax, and why it tries to
protect Bax (it doesn't want anybody else to get the ring).

Ted's ghost is actually pretty ineffectual - but maybe that could be
expected of the ghost of a presumably relatively junior warlock who never
found his master's ring. (He's not good with werewolfs - Lupine dismisses
him with a word, and he doesn't turn up to help out during the werewolf
attack on Bax and Doris, despite Doris wishing he was there.)
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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:53:56 +0000

Andrew wrote:
> this makes zero sense to me.

It makes no sense at all. First she tells Bax that she wants him to wear
Ted's ring so that she can see it now and then. When she next speaks it is
to say that the sight of it breaks her heart. Then why did she have it in
her purse? She came prepared to give it to him.

That lunch was only the second time she had even laid eyes on him, and the
first time she had seen the opal ring. Something changed from her
perspective after their brief first meeting at the real estate office. She
trumped up an excuse to see him again, so she may have learned something in
the meantime that caused her to start acting like a gold digger. I can't
imagine why any woman would hand over her dead husband's ring to a virtual
stranger. It's just not done.

But maybe I'm being too hard on her. That is, maybe she was subject to
forces beyond her control and we have been making too much of the import of
Ted's ring. It may have been nothing more than a gold ring, and Bax acquired
it for the same reason he got the opal ring and the gold coins and the stash
of cash -- his ignorant use of the triannulus.

Between Doris's lunch note and her arrival to pick him up, Bax got out the
triannulus. Its three rings were still aligned to fish but "the pointer had
wandered away." (33) More importantly, he first noticed at that time that
"When the rings were aligned to fish, several other things fell into line as
well." Recall that among the glyphs were some that "may be indecent." (26)
We aren't told which other glyphs also lined up or where the pointer had
wandered away to, but it would be a good bet that one of those glyph
alignments was "indecent", and its magic is what put Doris and Winker in the
sack with Bax.

-Roy

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From: Mr Thalassocrat <thalassocrat08 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:19:35 +0000

> alignments was "indecent", and its magic is what put Doris and Winker in
Absolutely - I was going to say something along the same lines but work
intervened. I was thinking that perhaps the  "other things" might just have
been "women". Bax does of course get 3 women: Doris, Winkle and Millie
(assuming Winkle counts).
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From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:40:14 +0000

Just on Doris' motivation: she does admit in her letter that money was a big reason she was interested in him. I took that to mean that, initially, she was using him (she needed to take a potential client out, knew he at least had a house, soon learned he was inheriting profitable land, etc.), but, over time, her feelings might have changed.

But one of the reasons that I was initially attracted to the "all a scam" possibility was how it seemed like so many people in this book at one point or another are trying to scam someone else.

________________________________
From: Mr Thalassocrat <thalassocrat08 at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Fri, April 30, 2010 2:19:35 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) Ted = Goldwurm?

>alignments was "indecent", and its magic is what put Doris and Winker in the
Absolutely - I was going to say something along the same lines but work intervened. I was thinking that perhaps the  "other things" might just have been "women". Bax does of course get 3 women: Doris, Winkle and Millie (assuming Winkle counts). 

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:01:43 +0000

> (assuming Winkle counts).

That reminds me. It has to do with the issue of who compiled the list of
characters, which lists Winker as: "Baxter Dunn's name for a friendly
Japanese girl." That's not right. Winkle is the name Bax came up with for
the talking vixen. He later mentioned several times that he didn't even know
the name of the young woman who came to his bed. He first learned her name
when she introduced herself to Orizia: "This lowly person is called Winker
Inari." (147) Orizia was miles away in a "trance", her psychic visit.

Is this significant, or just a mistake by Wolfe? Or is it an obscure clue?
Or does it say something about the fictional Compiler?

Keep in mind that Bax heard that name while in what Orizia insisted was a
dream state, despite Bax's claim that he had actually climbed out a window
and gotten lost in the woods. It was while still in the woods that he got
the "faint" phone call from Hardaway about the meeting that night with the
lawyer, Trelawny. The phone call came while he was still engaged with
Orizia. So I suppose that it could be argued that the name Winker Inari came
out of Bax's head and that he did come up with that name.

-Roy

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From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:11:55 +0000

That's an odd point, but interesting. My gut reaction is just error when Wolfe was putting together the list, but that's not as interesting as speculation. heh.

Calling her "a friendly Japanese girl" seems to me like something "outside the fiction," perhaps, and making her out to be a facefox a kind of fabrication. And on that note, I found it odd that the Asian waitress mentioned that Winker was Chinese, even though she was supposed to be Japanese. (219) So is she just generally fluent in all Asian languages? Foxes sure have a lot of cultural leeway, apparently.

And I found the "dream" explanation odd as well. Since Orizia was still far away, perhaps it was a dream state (or something else psychic) for her even though Bax could physically move to faerie because of the house? But I'm not sure if that actually explains anything substantially, especially not about Winker's name. Perhaps because she's his familiar, anything she does is actually his doing?

----- Original Message ----
From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Fri, April 30, 2010 1:01:43 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Ted = Goldwurm?

-Roy

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From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:19:13 +0000

Another small point that may not be significant at all, but after the final showdown, Martha tells Bax: "You have seen the Riverman. ... Not many can say that." But he saw *three* hairy giants, and they emerged from the forest, not the river. And since we have so many other things called River- in this book (the motel, the suburban development that the Skotos Strip becomes), is this whole Riverman thing bigger than just another example of general "faerie" weirdness that Bax encounters?

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From: Eugene Zaretskiy <eugene.zar at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2010 22:37:52 +0000

> That's an odd point, but interesting. My gut reaction is just error when Wolfe was putting together the list, but that's not as interesting as speculation. heh.

As someone who picked up his first Wolfe book a few years ago, I have
a question: have there been any _confirmed_ errors in Wolfe books? I
know that there was a typographical error or three in TBotNS with
regards to spelling of some unusual words. Have new editions of any of
Wolfe's books ever fixed errors that were significant to the
understanding of a certain sitation? Has Wolfe ever commented about
anything like that?

>> intervened. I was thinking that perhaps the ?"other things" might just
> have

-- 
Eugene Z
http://blog.eugenez.net

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From: Mr Thalassocrat <thalassocrat08 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 01 May 2010 15:18:55 +0000

<snippety>

> ... that caused [Doris] to start acting like a gold digger.

"Griffin" is an excellent name for a gold digger - because that's just what
griffins did, at least in some old fables. See the wikipedia article on
griffins for a quote from one of them.
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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 04:43:43 +0000

Craig Brewer wrote:
>
> And I found the "dream" explanation odd as well. Since Orizia was still
far away, perhaps it was a dream state (or something else psychic) for her
even though Bax could physically move to faerie because of the house? <

That whole scene is weird. Physical description seems to weigh in Orizia's
favor. Bax climbed out the window, got lost in the woods, met Orizia, took
the phone call from Hardaway, met Winker, then they made their way back to
the house. They couldn't get fat Orizia through his bedroom window, so Bax
and Orizia started walking around the house, looking for a door. They came
to another window where old Nick was tapping. Nick climbed out the window
and Bax climbed in it, as his cell phone was ringing.

That much *seems* okay, but it's not. In the very next sentence (149), Bax
got out of bed and answered the phone call from Doris. In the first place,
the window he climbed through to get back in the house was not the same
window he climbed out of. The window he entered the house by was probably
not even in his bedroom. But even if it had been the same window in the same
bedroom, he should not have been in the bed. It had been established earlier
that the master bedroom was very large and his big bed was in the center of
the room (138), not under a window. That makes it all seem like a dream, but
. . .

-Roy

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From: Stuart Hamm <hammstu at sbcglobal.net>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 05:06:34 +0000

Speaking of which...
I woke from a jet lagged dream with the thought that it was Ted who killed Bax to replace HIM and get the house so he could get? to fairie.....hmm....don't have the book with me or anything, just a thought that I woke up with...hmm..

???????? ? ? 
?Mobile — (415) 786-3624
STUHAMM.COM
FACEBOOK/STUARTHAMM
myspace.com/stuhamm
Skype? stuart.hamm
? ?? 

--- On Sat, 5/1/10, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Ted = Goldwurm?
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Saturday, May 1, 2010, 9:43 PM

-Roy

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From: stoneox17 at aol.com <stoneox17 at aol.com>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 15:26:38 +0000

Roy wrote
> > intervened. I was thinking that perhaps the  "other things" might 
just

> Or does it say something about the fictional Compiler?

It is not a mistake; Winker is Baxter's name for her. Actually, when she
introduced herself to Orizia, she said her name was Winkle Inari, but 
she
was speaking with a Japanese accent ...

Peter

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 19:50:03 +0000

Craig Brewer wrote:
> Another small point that may not be significant at all, but after the
final showdown, Martha tells Bax: "You have seen the Riverman. ... Not many
can say that." But he saw *three* hairy giants, and they emerged from the
forest, not the river. And since we have so many other things called River-
in this book (the motel, the suburban development that the Skotos Strip
becomes), is this whole Riverman thing bigger than just another example of
general "faerie" weirdness that Bax encounters?<

I tend to think that the Riverman (or Rivermen) is just another example of
Wolfe's catch-all notion of faerie. He did this before, in CASTLEVIEW, where
there was a Big Foot-like creature (or creatures) who really had little to
do with the Arthurian story. Also werewolves and phantom hitchhikers.

-Roy

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From: brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 20:02:19 +0000

It's not Wolfe's catch-all notion of faerie.

It's the picture of faerie common to people who believe in such things.

.

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Mon, 03 May 2010 05:20:08 +0000

> was speaking with a Japanese accent ...

Could be. But if so, she can and does turn it on and off. And where did the
Inari come from? Was it really Inali? She had no accent when she phoned Bax
when he was having lunch with Doris and Jake (219), and she spoke words with
a number of "r"s and "l"s. It was only when Bax asked her if she spoke
Chinese that she said, "Riddle bit speak." That was obviously affected.

I will note than during that phone conversation he twice called her Winker.
But when he wrote the above quoted line he attributed it to Winkle. In the
scene I outlined earlier (dream/psychic visit), Orizia seems to have
experienced Winkle/Winker only as a fox, yet Orizia offered her hand when
they introduced themselves. Bax was clearly seeing her as, "the girl who
called herself Winker Inari" (147). In the scene she also spoke the words
"sorry" and "love" without any difficulty. I can't imagine what Orizia saw
when Winker was trying to help pull her through Bax's bedroom window (148).
Was she using teeth or hands?

It's a puzzler.

-Roy