Father Inire guises

b sharp · 05 Jul 2008, 14:59 · from 2008-July.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: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 10:59:23 -0400
Subject: (urth) Father Inire guises
Message-ID: <BAY103-W159BF296C8F461DD42C1BCD79A0 at phx.gbl>

Jeff Wilson writes:

>One of the ways of telling a person is dead is that opposing muscle 
>groups are relaxed, so it would not be unusual for a person often in the 
>grip of strong emotion to look more youthful in death, or a wry necked 
>person to lay straighter now that the abnormal muscle tension is gone.

>And why would Inire spend years trolling alone, again?

Jeff if you are trying to make argments for why Dorcas' husband might not
be  Father Inire you are breaking down an open door. I agree, he might not
 be. But I think he could be.   If you are trying to argue he couldn't possibly 
be, that's a different story and you'll need more definitive proof,  I think.  

If he was Father Inire then I doubt he was really spending so much time poling 
around. More likely it is a designed act to draw Severian into resurrecting Dorcas. 
Yep, he lies. But so does Severian, Apheta, Tzadkiel, even the old autarch who
says he doesn't lie.

On the other hand, who knows.... perhaps Father Inire, who has 1000 years to get
his work done has a lot of free time on his hands.

You seem to prefer prosaic explanations, in this case the similarities between 
Dorcas' husband and Father Inire are explained by you  as an attempt at character 
dialog irony by Wolfe.  His young appearance in death is a sort of anti-rigor 
mortis that relaxes the muscles.  There are other examples where you reject a
fantastic explanation in favor of a humdrum one.  Occam's razor as Roy likes to
invoke?

For me, Occam is a prinicple for real world applications. This is a story. Some authors
 are the sort that would spend pages finding incredible descriptive beauty in a rock or 
something. Gene Wolfe seems the opposite to me. He seems like a guy with a lot of 
fantastical ideas in his head who likes to veil them behind mundane and overly casual
descriptions sometimes.

Since he is very careful about reavealing anything it is hard to know which portions of
his stories are veiled fantaticisms and which are really mundane.  The one slip up I know
of is where he seems to accidentally spill the beans in an interview that yes, VRT was
written by a Shadow Child who has killed and replaced Marsch.  With that as my model
I am willing to guess that other hints at fantastic scenarios can be believed, if only you 
guess correctly.
_________________________________________________________________
It?s a talkathon ? but it?s not just talk.
http://www.imtalkathon.com/?source=EML_WLH_Talkathon_JustTalk

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