The Sorcerer's House Questions (Major Spoilers)

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 19 Apr 2010, 16:31 · from 2010-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: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:31:37 -0700
Subject: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
In-Reply-To: <4BCC83D6.9080202 at verizon.net>
References: <mailman.95616.1271692205.1573.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4BCC83D6.9080202 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <w2q1f7617371004190931i35e84367qc8e14c9a824dd8b8 at mail.gmail.com>

"All statements are in some sense true, in some sense false, and in some
sense meaningless." - the Principia Discordia.

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:24 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
> Can we put this together with John's post and call this "the reification of
> narrative desire"?
>
> Any story is, naturally, true and false at the same time, in exactly that
> way. Storytellers are hopeful liars. Readers are hopeful consumers of lies.
> And so on. Sorcerers take it one step further.
> That's fantasy (entertainment).
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:14:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Subject: Re: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
> Message-ID: <106850.13854.qm at web37606.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> I'm with you on this.
>
> I think a big part of it has to do with how the last few chapters start to
> talk about the nature of what a sorcerer does. Earlier, I mentioned how
> similar Martha's description of magic words are to Bax's description of
> lying. A lot of it comes down to controlling context and influencing how
> people will receive what gets said. (I.e., Bax has no idea what the magic
> words mean, but he can "sell" them, and that makes him a powerful sorcerer.
> Even the triannulus seems to come down to interpretation (the pictures are
> quite abstract, apparently, and Emlyn and Bax see either a fox or a wolf,
> depending on what they want...and Emlyn even suggests that sometimes it's
> hard to tell when the spell is finished since it often depends on symbols).
>
> But if being a sorcerer is being a powerful story-teller, so powerful that
> you can make lies (or at least empty words) have real power, then perhaps it
> is possible that the story could be both true and false at the same time.
> And that's an idea I really like.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>



-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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