Peace: the fate of Lois

Gwern Branwen · 24 Feb 2010, 14:52 · from 2010-February.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: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:52:57 -0500
Subject: (urth) Peace: the fate of Lois
Message-ID: <cbf55b101002240652yba44b3j6332e0c50ed5c00 at mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 12:21 AM,  <blackwilbo at cs.com> wrote:
> ?Peace: While digging in a pit for the treasure, Weer's shovel it's a rock
>> and gives off a spark. Lois thinks it's the treasure and pulls her little
>> (hidden) pistol. The next thing we learn from Weer is that Lois has left
>> town. Do you believe that? I don't. He buried her in that pit.
> I've been looking at Dougherty's telling of the tale of St. Brandon.? It's
> an allegory of relationship of Den and Lois.? St. Brandon is Den's good
> side, the king of the rats is his dark side, and Pussy is Lois.? Brandon's
> ship is the ship of matrimony and signing the ship's articles is the
> marriage ceremony.? They marry, quarrel a lot (Pussy vs. king of the rats)
> and after 2 or 3 years she leaves him.? About 2 weeks after that, he goes to
> see Louis Gold.
>
> This is not coming out of thin air.? All??the other details match up.
> Verifying that is left as an exercise for the reader.:-)
>
> blackwilbo


I wonder about that. Allegories and analogies are treacherous
territory. Who is the Angel, then, and what are the pieces running off
into the woods?

If this story is an allegory of a key event in _Peace_, why does it
show up nigh identical (as far as I noticed) shorn of its _Peace_
wrappings as a standalone story in _Book of Days_?

(Also, it's a good thing to trim your emails to include only the
context necessary.)

-- 
gwern

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