Is Agia a Robot?

John Watkins · 21 Jun 2010, 04:43 · from 2010-June.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: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:43:06 -0400
Subject: (urth) Is Agia a Robot?
In-Reply-To: <4C1D637F.2040704 at verizon.net>
References: <AANLkTik8q4okRfHDUjNPoRh68A6eWmfNwUq7cf5HfOQd at mail.gmail.com>
	<4C1B8EE9.6090706 at verizon.net>
	<36006D71-A703-4BE6-AB12-C541923ADD88 at liftingfaces.com>
	<4C1B97F1.7020902 at gmail.com>
	<6F357DDC-786A-45FC-8C3B-1BB454062421 at liftingfaces.com>
	<4C1BB20D.4040700 at verizon.net> <4C1BF06B.6040207 at gmail.com>
	<B1084096-1609-4646-871C-2BADE99CAB82 at liftingfaces.com>
	<4C1BFB0C.5060009 at io.com> <4C1C01FE.8020206 at verizon.net>
	<1dff316488fc42f85415e9747fe7b944.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<4C1C0512.2040908 at verizon.net>
	<8AC1B1AC-C5A8-4824-A6A5-2B17E597558A at liftingfaces.com>
	<4C1C1E8E.2060009 at verizon.net> <4C1CBAC1.9070701 at verizon.net>
	<4731274a877f648ef5ab97bfc57cfcfe.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<4C1CC42D.1040602 at verizon.net>
	<414bd9fdc0075e2200c7aaafbf3991ce.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<4C1CC9EC.9050605 at verizon.net> <4C1CE866.4050802 at io.com>
	<4C1CF943.8020606 at verizon.net>
	<112913.49195.qm at web50707.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
	<BB5D45B3-CBD4-4464-BE84-F58E8A3B987F at liftingfaces.com>
	<4C1D637F.2040704 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikDU5ixl6iFpqNopGHU7XoyG62NyRIvAGRldEZk at mail.gmail.com>

If only Gene Wolfe had written another text, possibly a short story,
exploring the idea of puppets in boxes.  Then maybe someone wiser than I
could draw wisdom from that text and apply it to the problem of the
paracoita, which is beyond me.

I will make a few observations that, while not wise, may spur others to
wisdom.

1)  It seems that delicate and/or doll-like characteristics are attributed
to several women in the story, but that Hethor meant one particular
paracoita--we may just be dealing with a motif, rather than a puzzle with a
definite character as the solution, and there may be red herrings...like a
sickening crack of bone on stone being described as as sharp as a metallic
clang.  Or not.

2)  Severian dreams of marionettes that seemingly represent him and
Baldanders.

3)  In Urth, Severian-as-White-Fountain describes Severian-as-Man as a
"marionette of flesh".

4)  An inveterate punster who was also a devout Catholic might be taken by
the term "marionette."  It might conceivably please him to make several
female characters in a single work "marionettes" in one sense or another.

5)  Why lemonwood?  After all, the classic wood for a doll that comes to
life is pine.  Per Google, the Howdy-Doody marionette was lemonwood.

>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100621/85806be4/attachment.htm>

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