The Sorcerer's House Questions (Major Spoilers)

Gwern Branwen · 27 Mar 2010, 14:57 · from 2010-March.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: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:57:38 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
In-Reply-To: <e11bddb61003270734m40c4cd8frb28668b108748627 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <44fb53d11003191442y48191c3ataaac84d798b8b983 at mail.gmail.com>
	<b12d82081003222138q4670afa3m4f2b34e187c18198 at mail.gmail.com>
	<cbf55b101003230601q4e16f289qbd590f7295bd9db7 at mail.gmail.com>
	<b12d82081003231331o2b7b812ft75ea33e771445c9c at mail.gmail.com>
	<cbf55b101003231421p46eb0171xfcdcc5862af81e5c at mail.gmail.com>
	<b12d82081003231437p78ef4ad3h51100921272843e at mail.gmail.com>
	<cbf55b101003231553r57707c42lfb9d6ed34fe2d324 at mail.gmail.com>
	<e11bddb61003261825q5ba9f501xfd488cb4c59bf821 at mail.gmail.com>
	<cbf55b101003270648y3440a04bxd208bb7c9d21a3a1 at mail.gmail.com>
	<e11bddb61003270734m40c4cd8frb28668b108748627 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <cbf55b101003270757s59414b19s491b465d3562678e at mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 10:34 AM, Thomas Bitterman <tom at bitterman.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 9:48 AM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The hound of horror would be very checkable, especially if the
>> archives really do bristle with stories.
>
> And it's the only thing the Compiler sources.? All small towns have ghost
> stories.
> Bax wove this one into his story. It's always handy to have a few true
> things in
> even the biggest hoax.
>
> If we assume the Compiler is not Wolfe that leaves the question of what kind
> of
> book this is supposed to be.? The Compiler is trying to pass it off as
> non-fiction
> in the sense that the people, places, letters and many of the events
> actually
> existed/happened.? The Compiler does not indicate that he thinks Bax killed
> George.? That makes this a colorful missing person story, with some
> questions
> about how it came to be written.
>
> First, how did the Compiler find out about the story in the first place?
> There is
> no indication that the story, even while it was happening, made much news in
> Medicine Man, much less the outside world.
>
> Second, how did the Compiler get all the letters he did?? He credits Millie,
> Shell's
> daughter, and Mrs. Pogach for providing the letters they had.? However,
> there are
> letters in the book that that group can't account for:
> - the letters to and from Doris
> - letters that were sent to Bax (assuming the senders did not keep copies)
>
> Bax knew about the story because he was there.? And he got all the letters
> because
> he either wrote them or received them.? He kept copies to help keep his
> story straight.

If the compiler is Bax, then why does he drop in quite explicit hints
that the letters' dates have been tampered with and that Bax may be
lying about how he obtained the house etc.? Wouldn't Bax just omit
those points or say 'I removed dates for brevity, like I edited the
language'?

If the answer is that Bax is performing a triple-fake, adding those in
to defuse suspicion that the events are fake - then I think you've
gone a little far down the rabbit hole.

-- 
gwern

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