Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Weekly blog links

Gwern Branwen · 14 Apr 2009, 03:40 · 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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:40:39 -0400
Subject: (urth) Weekly blog links
Message-ID: <cbf55b100904132040oc52841fy64f04215222e190 at mail.gmail.com>

A nice discussion of "The Toy Theater" in _The Best of Gene Wolfe_:
http://www.locusmag.com/Roundtable/2009/04/reading-gene-wolfe.html

"...Does anyone have any better answers than this? I'm ducking a whole
series of issues, I realise: is the narrator a reliable one? Is Lili,
in turn, reliable in her claims about Stromboli? Why does the narrator
give us so few clues about what he himself is feeling? (In this, he's
very much like other Wolfe protagonists.) That a story of, I guess, no
more than 3000 words can generate so much exegesis (and a feeling that
you've still not exhausted it) is a huge tribute to the density that
Wolfe achieves in his best short fiction."

-- 
gwern

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