Silk corrupted?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 22 Jan 2009, 23:55 · from 2009-January.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: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:55:57 -0800
Subject: (urth) Silk corrupted?
In-Reply-To: <49790517.9010300 at verizon.net>
References: <mailman.10963.1232665712.2909.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<49790517.9010300 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <1f7617370901221555l6ffc9d9ft1213041e835c0b1 at mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:45 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
> These are 2 separate ideas: (1)
>
> What is key here is that we are interpreting a work by a writer who
> takes the position that Jesus was a unique historical figure, the sole
> Theoanthropos and Redeemer, an event which will not and *can* not
> be repeated. This is *Wolfe's* position,
> and
> (2)
>
> to interpret his work in a way that violates this position is to do that
> work a violence which I cannot condone.
>
> _I_ do not _accept_ Wolfe's position. I _acknowledge_ Wolfe's position. This
> is my point.

We are in agreement so far. It is necessary, in interpreting Wolfe's
work, to acknowledge his positions. To do otherwise is to
wilfully misinterpret.

> And it hardly does violence to anything except certain people's
> assumptions---which I reject _as assumptions_. Especially assumptions to be
> forced on the debate as though they were _facts_. Do you see the difference?

I do indeed. It is an *assumption* (or a belief) that Jesus is the unique
etc. It is a *fact* that Wolfe takes this assumption as a starting point
for his work. This fact should always be taken into account when
interpreting relevant aspects of his work.

As a result, it is legitimate to say that Severian is "Christ-like," but
not to say that he is "a Christ." The former fits the writer's
intent and assumptions; the latter does not. Unless you take an
extreme postmodernist "death of the author" point of view -- with
which I have very little sympathy, though I _do_ believe that the
text is the text and the author is not a privileged interpreter --
anyway, unless you take that position, saying that Severian is
"a Christ" is precisely what I say: a violence against Wolfe's work.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
http://www.danehyoakes.com

I once absend-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a
restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand
Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce. -- T. Pratchett

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