Silk is Calde!

Gwern Branwen · 05 Nov 2008, 19:34 · from 2008-November.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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 14:34:23 -0500
Subject: (urth) Silk is Calde!
In-Reply-To: <8476d0320811051111i190c8020i4e534f33f89c717d at mail.gmail.com>
References: <W105682042980281225910611@webmail32>
	<cbf55b100811051100m32420264nb09b20922c3500e7 at mail.gmail.com>
	<8476d0320811051111i190c8020i4e534f33f89c717d at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <cbf55b100811051134k7b663b1fm6355df0dcdc2df8d at mail.gmail.com>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Bruce Hayles
 wrote:
> The interview you quoted is available online. Are all the interviews in
> Shadows of the New Sun available online?
> bruce

No. Some are, but many aren't. For example, I just tried googling some
quotes from an interview by Nick Gevers and by Melissa Mia Hall, and
no dice.

It's a pity, because some of the material is really good. For example,
Gene's essay "Books in The Book of the New Sun" has a lot of
interesting material on the Ultan scene. I quote the end:

"...In writing the legends, I have supposed facts and old stories to
have become confused with others, a rascally technique which has
earned me at least one vehement accusation of plagiarism.* Thus, for
example, the custom of an academic thesis is confounded with the
legend of Theseus in "The Tale of the Student and His Son.'
The fourth book, as the astute reader will have guessed long ago, is
_The Book of the New Sun_ itself. And now we are come again to the
notion of recurrence, of the library folded in upon itself like the
Klein bottle. This notion of recurrence seems to me to circle our
Earth (you may spell it as you like) like the Midgard serpent which
clasps its tail in its mouth and is brother to the wolf Fenris. For
the library of Master Ultan is in _The Book of the New Sun_, and _The
Book of the New Sun_ is in his library. And you are the readers of
that book."

Some of his essays like "Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing
Multivolume Works" are just intrinsically interesting. I would quote
the ending from that as well, since it was an very eloquent one, but
it appears I forgot to make a copy. :(

* This is a reference to *another* interview, in which Wolfe mentions
a person who wrote to him about TBotNS's 'Frog' story, saying that 'no
one else saw it, but I saw how you stole from Kipling there'. Wolfe
replies, I'm glad you liked it and could appreciate it. The fellow
responds, 'Don't do it again.'

- --
gwern
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEAREKAAYFAkkR9T0ACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oKIQACeK9Qh6KBa0oYO6iThk7rSWwTf
U4oAnRI7VhMiz9hQ0ttciFPKj39dbufP
=YsqL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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