9 Ways to Read GW by Neil Gaiman

Mark Lewin · 03 Mar 2007, 07:27 · from 2007-March.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: mark.lewin at gmail.com (Mark Lewin)
Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2007 07:27:25 +0000
Subject: (urth) 9 Ways to Read GW by Neil Gaiman
In-Reply-To: <BF005EBC-B8CF-4551-9008-F1E3E014CA8B at tcnj.edu>
References: <547653.18800.qm at web32106.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<45E753B2.5050403 at majitek.com>
	<BF005EBC-B8CF-4551-9008-F1E3E014CA8B at tcnj.edu>
Message-ID: <14f560d30703022327n5c50e7fev7459e022bd97dcff at mail.gmail.com>

... and here are two other authors' suggestions on how to read GW from the
same magazine (Fantasy & SF):

Michael Swanwick: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwms0704.htm

Michael Andre-Driussi: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwma0704.htm

Mark

On 02/03/07, Matthew DeLuca <deluca22 at tcnj.edu> wrote:
>
>   How to read Gene Wolfe:
>
> 1) Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there.
>
> 2) Do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far.
> It's tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at
> any time.
>
> 3) Reread. It's better the second time. It will be even better the
> third time. And anyway, the books will subtly reshape themselves
> while you are away from them.Peace really was a gentle Midwestern
> memoir the first time I read it. It only became a horror novel on the
> second or the third reading.
>
> 4) There are wolves in there, prowling behind the words. Sometimes
> they come out in the pages. Sometimes they wait until you close the
> book. The musky wolf-smell can sometimes be masked by the aromatic
> scent of rosemary. Understand, these are not today-wolves, slinking
> grayly in packs through deserted places. These are the dire-wolves of
> old, huge and solitary wolves that could stand their ground against
> grizzlies.
>
> 5) Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It's a knife-throwing act,
> and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes,
> earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing
> the knives.
>
> 6) Make yourself comfortable. Pour a pot of tea. Hang up a DO NOT
> DISTURB Sign. Start at Page One.
>
> 7) There are two kinds of clever writer. The ones that point out how
> clever they are, and the ones who see no need to point out how clever
> they are. Gene Wolfe is of the second kind, and the intelligence is
> less important than the tale. He is not smart to make you feel
> stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.
>
> 8) He was there. He saw it happen. He knows whose reflection they saw
> in the mirror that night.
>
> 9) Be willing to learn.
>
> - Neil Gaiman
>
> http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20070303/992d3d41/attachment.htm

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