AEG - borrowings

Jordon Flato · 15 Apr 2009, 16:14 · 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: jordonflato at gmail.com (Jordon Flato)
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:14:06 -0700
Subject: (urth) AEG - borrowings
In-Reply-To: <43866923-D8FC-4898-B4EA-A9C3B5879A2C at goosemoon.org>
References: <NGECKNKNFCCKJFJGAFLHMEJBDMAA.stephenhoy at yahoo.com>
	<43866923-D8FC-4898-B4EA-A9C3B5879A2C at goosemoon.org>
Message-ID: <273409710904150914r3990e954ga35bada7bc1a73a8 at mail.gmail.com>

The Invisibles is great.

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:00 AM, Allan Anderson <rubel at goosemoon.org>wrote:

> I was going to postpone commenting on this for a couple of days while I
> finish the book, but I can't help myself.
>
> So far, I'm thinking that any and all "borrowings" fit nicely into An Evil
> Guest's nature as a sort of tribute piece, a stylistic pastiche. Maybe no
> one thinks anyone would care about a implicit literary reference. I'm
> delighted to hear about these connections you've discovered! When I read
> "Gideon Chase", I thought of the character "Gideon Stargrave" (aka King Mob)
> from the comic book series The Invisibles. He's another horror/sf writer who
> becomes more than that profession might seem. But it's very possible that
> Grant Morrison referred to Mo's novel in his own choice of names: what makes
> The Invisibles relevant, I think, is the books' conscious blending of genre,
> reality, and fiction. It's an unique story, but also very much a borrowed
> patchwork shirt. And pulpy stories of the type AEG seems to want a family
> relationship with, well, they have always dipped a range of  sources. So
> it's completely appropriate, to my mind.
>
> But here's my question: at the cast party, someone tells Cassie she looks
> like she's seen a banshee. Aren't Banshees often seen washing bloody
> clothing, as a death omen? Is that the mountain's laundress?
>
> Okay, I'll shut up and get back to reading.
>
>
> On Apr 12, 2009, at 12:02 PM, Stephen Hoy wrote:
>
>  Fernando Gouvea recently noted a curious coincidence between Wolfe's
>> 'Peace'
>> (1975) and Bartis's 'Tranquility' (2001), each work sharing a central
>> character named Weer. Gouvea also noted certain stylistic similarities,
>> enough to make us wonder about the extent of the parallels. Let's take a
>> look at a couple of similar items in AEG, and see if we can detect the
>> existence of an invisible line between literary theft and literary
>> allusion.
>>
>> While reading An Evil Guest, I noticed that the character Gideon Chase
>> shares a name with a central character in Timothy Mo's historical novel,
>> 'An
>> Insular Possession' (1987). This might be a curious coincidence. It also
>> might be intentional. It's impossible to know with any certainty without
>> asking the author (and perhaps not even then).
>>
>> Suppose that it's not a coincidence. Suppose Wolfe read 'An Insular
>> Possession' some years ago, and suppose that when he invented the
>> character
>> of the wizard, he chose the name Gideon Chase as a reflection of some
>> aspect
>> of this character, intentionally reinforcing the idea of Chase as a figure
>> bridging the gap between the two cultures colliding in AEG. Is there
>> anything wrong with that?
>> Let's take another case: the trembling mountain and the laundress. As Marc
>> Aramini pointed out in October, Wolfe reviewed a work with a similar
>> motif,
>> Cory Doctorow's 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town' (2005). After
>> reading both works, it's hard to believe that Wolfe was not
>> self-consciously
>> referring to Doctorow's mountain & washing machine, and, further, that
>> Wolfe
>> fully realized Doctorow or any reader of 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone
>> Leaves Town' would recognize the motif in AEG. Is there anything wrong
>> with
>> that?
>>
>> To each of the above, I'd venture a guess that there's nothing wrong with
>> either act, but I have very different reasons for each guess.
>>
>> In the case of the name Gideon Chase, it's not clear that Wolfe borrowed
>> from Mo. Assuming there is a conscious borrowing, there are very few
>> similarities between the two characters. Personally, I doubt that readers
>> familiar with both works would suspect Wolfe chose the name as a conscious
>> reflection of Mo's character, but the possibility exists.
>>
>> In the case of the mountain and laundress, it's possible Doctorow and
>> Wolfe
>> each borrowed from a common source, perhaps some work transcribing
>> Algonquin
>> legends. It's also possible Wolfe asked Doctorow's permission to use the
>> idea--although one might expect to see a word or two about it in AEG or
>> perhaps even in an interview about AEG.
>>
>> But assume Wolfe borrowed these two things without explicit advance
>> permission, somehow slipping them past the legal team at his publisher.
>> But
>> is this any different from Wolfe's explicit use of a Baskin-Robbins in an
>> early chapter? Does anyone imagine that either Mo or Doctorow would object
>> to Wolfe's particular use as they appear in AEG?
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Urth Mailing List
>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20090415/84dd0bec/attachment.htm>

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