Travelin' Jahlee

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 18 Aug 2005, 05:07 · from 2005-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Thu Aug 18 05:07:39 2005
Subject: (urth) Travelin' Jahlee
Message-ID: <20050818120736.A176833C23 at mailserver5.hushmail.com>

Roy objcts:

>An objection I have is her presumed imprinting with Chenille's 
>spirit. I
>don't think her mother(?) fed on Chenille on the _Whorl_.

I'm not wedded to Chenille as Jahlee's soul parent. In fact, J 
seems much more umm regal (in her demon-whore kind of way) than 
Chenille. She also doesn't seem to have any recognition of 
Chenille. But who knows ...

Roy also said:

>Jahlee expressed similar sentiments on her death bed, a time when 
>she had
>nothing to gain or lose by lying.

Sorry - don't understand this one???

>
>I keep thinking of Tennyson's "Ulysses". I won't presume to quote 
>it, but I
>can see (or think I do) so much resonance with _Short Sun_. Recall 

>it, or
>read it again is all I can ask. I first thought about it when you 
>reminded
>me about the Neighbor looking toward "the western stars" when 
>speaking of
>his new home. Maybe I'm just getting to be an old fool, but that's 

>my
>answer. The poem also puts me in mind of Silk's return to the 
>_Whorl_ at the
>end of RTTW.

I can see what you mean with this, but the ending of RTTW is to me 
more triumphant & less elegaic than Ulysses. I take away an image 
of Silkhorn sailing thru the galaxy spreading justice & good stuff, 
not going to meet some heroic end.  

Also: Silkhorn just isn't that old, surely. Mid/late forties? But 
he's described as if he's some raddled ancient. I don't really 
understand this. I mean, presumably he's never even had to sit thru 
an all day strategy "brain-storming" session or go entertain 
potential clients who don't speak English or do any of the stuff 
which makes me feel raddled & ancient :) 

The Neighbors, though, are definitely elegaic, and I don't hate the 
idea of them dwelling in some Neighborish Elysium beyond the world. 
It's just not my preferred view of what's going on.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net