Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v010.n066

From: Bobosmash <bobosmash at aol.com>
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 04:46:27 +0000

Greetings to all,
   Long time listener, first time caller. After reading the latest post. I 
feel I need to reread OBW again, immediately. 

  -- The Venus thing is an interesting guess.  Perhaps, through the 
relativistic 
effects of vast interstellar travel over the three hundred years or so the 
ship was in transit (if I'm remembering correctly), it did manage to do a 
boomerang/Planet of the Apes deal and head back to Urth after the new sun 
arrived, encountering a flooded Urth (which fits with New Sun) and a green 
Venus.  However, what happened to the remaining seven planets?--

    I like this idea. I like it a lot. I feel the lack of the rest of the 
system is pretty insignificant. It's the far future. Many civilizations 
(including Urth ( both terrestrial and extraterrestrial nature )) seem to 
have the engineering skills to do away with those useless hunks of dead rock. 
No asteroid belt either. I would think that the biggest factor against a 
pretty reasonable sounding guess is the fact that Gene Wolfe is never that 
easy. 

   After I finish OBW again, I'l try to contribute something a little more 
constructive to this very helpful tome. 

Pete Clark 

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.com

---

From: David Langford <ansible at cix.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 14:11:00 +0000

Josh Levitan wrote ...

[snippage]

> I have a feeling that Wolfe's given us enough info to figure out what 
> the secret is currently.  It reminds me of that Borges story, "The 
> Mystery of The Phoenix(?)" (something like that) in Ficciones, where he 
> talks around the secret rite of the cult of the Phoenix and supposedly 
> gives enough info to figure out what the rite is (although I've always 
> been too dense to figure it out).

Where does it say that Borges gives enough information? My reading of "The 
Sect of the Phoenix" (also translated as "The Cult of the Phoenix") is 
that it's a joke, practically a shaggy dog story, deliberately blurred by 
anti-information. Drop the teasing physical details about "the cork and 
the slime", or push them sideways into metaphor, and ...

[Does Borges need spoiler space on this list? Oh well:]

... it does seem very much as though the Mystery Rite, which is despised, 
trivial, not talked about, abstained from by the very virtuous, yet 
somehow never dies out and may indeed have become instinctive, is 
ordinary human sexual intercourse.

Dave

David Langford
ansible at cix.co.uk | http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/