Mani and Thor

Peter T. Cash · 15 Oct 1998, 23:22 · from urth-v0020.mbox · original

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: "Peter T. Cash" <PTCash at ibm.net>
Subject: (urth) Mani and Thor
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 23:22:03
Message-ID: <urth-v0020-0033 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0020/0033.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

alga said:

>But yes, with reservations about Erebus, Abaia & co., who are echoing the
>more dualist parts of Revelation.  I said that Dr. Talos's play is
>Manichaean. Which it certainly is--the gothic tradition to which
Baldanders,
>Talos and all horror novelists belong is necessarily dualistic.

"Privatio boni" won't do for Gothic novels? _Necessarily_ dualistic?
Umm...well you are a micro-organism of definite opinions, so I'll just
gently suggest that I'm not convinced.

When you say that the play is "Manichaean", I take it that you mean it
implies a dualistic cosmology or theology. I suppose that it does; but then
it implies lots of things. Indeed, the play struck me as a somewhat tacky,
improvised kitchen-sink composite of just about every apocalyptic-second
creation myth that I'd ever heard. (I'm surprised the Aesir don't put in an
appearance.) I suppose this is in keeping with a play-within-a-novel that is
a "grand sword 'n sorcery revision of the New Testament". I really like that
assessment, by the way.

Sgt. Rock

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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