Loose ends

David Stockhoff · 29 Apr 2009, 13:31 · 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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:31:12 -0400
Subject: (urth) Loose ends
In-Reply-To: <mailman.36304.1240976422.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.36304.1240976422.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <49F856A0.3000805 at verizon.net>

interestingly, my first reaction to your relation of that scene is that there is indeed some explanation. The nature of it may be hidden, but it exists. And Severian is just pretending to be ignorant of it.

For example, the guy may recognize him as an exultant, and hate him for that. Or he recognizes him for an executioner, whether he is in fuligin or not. Or the guy hates him because Thrax is a small, shitty town and Severian is a stranger.

Any of these is sufficient and tells us more about Severian than about the tales. Further, I'd guess that Wolfe is in fact reminding us to look for those explanations. Severian is basically saying "A certain type of coincidence does not occur in narratives," though it may very well occur on nature.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:19:22 -0700
From: Robin Dunn <bigbadgerjohnny at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 56, Issue 58
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Message-ID:
	<ccc836b60904281419n3c566f73yfcda4556ed74ba29 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Fascinating discussion of the moral parts the Neighbors play vis a vis
human settlement on Blue--

One thought I had is that it can be counterproductive to some extent
to expect that every creature we find in Wolfe fits into a detailed
bestiary that he had planned.

Severian narrates at some point in Thrax that he rarely reads tales
where strangers are encountered, no dialogue results, but some
nameless hatred is still there between men.  As I recall Severian has
this thought when he passes some guy that glares at him, without any
explanation.

Part of what I always liked about Wolfe is that he's willing to have
so many loose ends, and he's willing to introduce incredibly complex
ideas and characters almost as side-gags, before moving on to
something completely different.

I guess what I'm saying is, sometimes the crazy shit goes down, and we
stay in the dark  ;) 

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 090428-0, 04/28/2009
Tested on: 4/29/2009 9:31:13 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

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