The Waif

Matthew Groves · 06 Mar 2009, 01:52 · from 2009-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: matthewalangroves at gmail.com (Matthew Groves)
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 19:52:00 -0600
Subject: (urth) (Urth) The Waif
In-Reply-To: <fc75340d0903051340w5ec4ee19vd65166204cce0054 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <fc75340d0903051340w5ec4ee19vd65166204cce0054 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <39ed084f0903051752h67b02500k119591558daf6d71 at mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Mike Legedza <mike.legedza at gmail.com> wrote:
> For one thing, there's a minor line in one of Nyman
> Pryderi's lesson where he mentions that the students are going to school in
> an old truck, and when you read the description of the classroom (long and
> narrow, with wooden walls and a metal roof), you see that they are actually
> inside a truck FOR school.? I don't know if they have trucks in the sun
> books...or if they did, I think they'd probably call it by a different
> name.? Maybe there's a bunch of trucks running around in the Short Sun books
> that I just haven't gotten to yet.

Heh, no, no trucks in Short Sun.  Also, I reread the story and near
the beginning the other boy is eating bread and soup, and there's no
way he's faking.  The inhumi don't eat food.

? Also, about your wondering where Niman
> comes from...Pryderi explains that Niman is a corruption of the term
> "Near-man".

Yes, but I was wondering if there were a meaning outside of the story
to which Wolfe was alluding.

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Stephen Hoy <stephenhoy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Niman is also a Hopi word meaning "Home-Going". Hopi traditionalists
> celebrate a summer-solstice festival by this name, a sort of annual dance of
> farewell to the gods. The underlying idea is that the gods will return as
> rain.

Excellent.  Bin's stomping on the flames is a rain dance, and that's
what causes the downpour (perhaps along with the human sacrifice).

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