The Guild's Revolutionary

Gwern Branwen · 22 Nov 2009, 02:49 · from 2009-November.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:49:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Guild's Revolutionary
In-Reply-To: <84D73864-A63A-4CC8-AD9F-CF9C7B400D25 at io.com>
References: <mailman.1.1258841747.28662.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4B086F89.10809 at verizon.net>
	<84D73864-A63A-4CC8-AD9F-CF9C7B400D25 at io.com>
Message-ID: <cbf55b100911211849m66b4c8d9ud68118e142dcafad at mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 21, 2009, at 4:54 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
>> Fascinating!
>>
>> The "apparatus" is clearly a Kafka reference, and one that has been in my memory since I first I read that story as a child.
>
> It strikes me that we could probably learn a lot if there were some way to get everything in Wolfe that seems obvious to some reader and pile all of those together in one place. ?For instance, I was all aboard the "Nessus is Buenos Aires" train when I read _BotNS_ first at 13 or 14, because I was also in the throes of a Borges phase and Master Ultan was obviously, clearly, no question about it, Borges. ?Same with "Baldanders."
>
> Later I found out this might be controversial.
>
> I strongly suspect if we actually put everything together that each reader had always said "Well, DUH, I didn't mention it because I thought everyone knew it already," then we'd actually discover a lot of stuff.
>
> Sort-of-speaking-of-which as someone-who-likes-Baum-way-too-much (although I think Wolfe is Just Plain Wrong about Ruth Plumly Thompson), man, "The Eyeflash Miracles" is brilliant.
>
> Adam

It would be nice, but it's hard to do. I mean, if I were reading
through _Shadow_ again and I saw the Kafka ref, I wouldn't say 'hm, I
wonder if that's on THE LIST already; I'd better get up, go to my
computer, fire up my browser, and check'. I'd just go 'Kafka' and
continue on. The best way would be to have a webpage of the text of
_Shadow_, in a wiki perhaps, and then one could read the text instead
of one's book and on reaching that line go, 'why, I see no footnote
link, despite it quite obviously being a ref; I think I shall add it.'

Of course, the hard-to-do part is that annotated _Shadow_ pages are
copyvios, and while Wolfe has been very obliging of Andre-Driussi, he
is also listed as co-author and still I don't see very much quoting in
my _Lexicon Urthus_ (at least, nowhere near as much as I would've
used), which suggests to me that Wolfe takes his copyright seriously.

-- 
gwern

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