Hut/Ultan's Library/Catherine

brunians at brunians.org · 06 Apr 2009, 20:27 · from 2009-April.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: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 16:27:55 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) Hut/Ultan's Library/Catherine
In-Reply-To: <COL109-W6FFEC8AFA0135B5451095D7840 at phx.gbl>
References: <COL109-W6FFEC8AFA0135B5451095D7840 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <6666.67.142.130.16.1239049675.squirrel at brunians.org>

It should be pretty easy to establish whether Wolfe ever met Borges in
South America.






.

> James wynn writes:
>
>>At the time of this event, Severian had not eaten any corpse;
>>so, why did he feel that he himself was dead? I suppose it is
>>not absolutely required, but this pairing seems to imply they
>>were "were dead" for the same reason...
>>whatever it was.
>
> I could go with D. Stockhoff's rather direct explanation:
>
>>Well, they were both underground in a musty place of great age,
>>where data was literally entombed, like the dead. Where the knowledge
>>of the historians that Ultan desires is also entombed; where the whole
>>of Urth is entombed. Who wouldn't get a creepy feeling? The place is
>>symbolic of death.
>
> but also,
>
> I don't suppose all Wolfe's protagonists function as the author's
> avatars but some do, and surely Severian. I can't help but see the
> meeting of Severian and Ultan as part of a fantasy of Wolfe to meet
> with Jorge Luis Borges. Two avatars feeling dead together in a book
> could be the mirror image of two live guys meeting in the real world.
> Perhaps it wasn't just a fantasy and Wolfe really did meet Borges in
> his library in Buenos Aires and that S. American trip provided much
> of the inspiration for BotNS.
>
> ah, I dunno...
>
> -bsharp
> _________________________________________________________________
> Windows Live?: Keep your life in sync.
> http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_allup_1a_explore_042009
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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