Wolfe being clear on 5HoC

Hmpf MacSlow · 07 Sep 2006, 18:59 · from 2006-September.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: hmpf1998 at gmx.net (Hmpf MacSlow)
Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:59:34 +0200
Subject: (urth) Wolfe being clear on 5HoC
In-Reply-To: <BAY103-F17E989834E667218AE572AD7360 at phx.gbl>
References: <BAY103-F17E989834E667218AE572AD7360 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <7.0.1.0.0.20060907205430.019f9b60 at gmx.net>

I am very amused by Wolfe explaining how Severian 
was mainly born from his desire to finally have a 
character of his that people could do at masquerades:

"As I sat there being instructed I was sulking 
because no one had ever done one of my characters 
at a masquerade. It seemed as though I had done a 
lot of things that people could do at a 
masquerade; but when I started to think this over 
more carefully, I realized there were few, if 
any, characters who would fit in with what Sandra 
and the others were saying. That led me to start 
thinking about a character who would fit?someone 
who would wear simple but dramatic clothes. And 
the very first thing that came to mind was a 
torturer: bare chest (everybody has a chest, all 
you have to do is take your shirt off), black 
trousers, black boots (you can get those 
anywhere), black cloak, a mask, and a sword! Here 
was an ideal, easy SF masquerade citizen."

(Totally unimportant in the grand scheme of 
things, I know, but... funny. To think that 
Severian sprung from such, errm, mundane 
concerns. Mundane? Well, okay, rather the 
opposite... but, you know what I mean. *g*)

Great interview. Thanks for the link.

Hmpf

>The interview is from 1988, has some interesting background on Wolfe's life
>and family as well as other topics.   For those interested, here is a link
>to the whole thing:
>http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm

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