The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by Rudesind

James Wynn · 07 Jul 2010, 21:42 · from 2010-July.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:42:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) The mystery of the image of an astronaut cleaned by
	Rudesind
In-Reply-To: <4C34EF25.7030109 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W256DB5C8585628C8109423CFB30 at phx.gbl>	<520E36C4-BC0B-4DFE-8F64-BC9EB1D9BF4C at liftingfaces.com>	<4C34A1F4.6030501 at gmail.com>	<F7C7A8D7-66C9-4746-9662-C742E53311FE at liftingfaces.com>	<AANLkTilkfznBstbta55hgfGmNqnPuJiBaxTBg1nk4CNf at mail.gmail.com>	<4C34C6AF.9060709 at gmail.com>	<4C34C8AF.70507 at gmail.com>	<152f839bbd02f83fc03a5318462443d7.squirrel at brunians.org>	<4C34D82D.5070500 at gmail.com>	<4C34DA51.8040901 at gmail.com>	<4C34ED71.2020108 at gmail.com>	<4C34EDED.3070502 at gmail.com>
	<4C34EF25.7030109 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C34F4E3.9020109 at gmail.com>

On 7/7/2010 4:18 PM, Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
>
>>
>>> But *if* Wolfe had written Superman and the etxt didn't show 
>>> Superman and
>>> Clark were the same guy, our speculation that they might be *would*
>>> lead to
>>> a richer reading. We would postulate they were the same guy because 
>>> that
>>> would take the story to a whole new level, not because of some esoteric
>>> motivation for weaving the alter ego theme into it.
>>>
>>> Whereas no one has yet explained just what the
>>> considering-that-some-characters-in-the-BNS-are-Inire brings to the
>>> table.
>>> Lee points to it enlightening Inire's nature and motivations, but I 
>>> find
>>> that sketchy. Could your camp do some more sketching, perhaps?
>>
>> What's the narrative advantage of Dorcas being Severian's grandmother?
>
> I'm not talking about narrative advantage. I'm talking about 
> speculative advantage.
>
> And as a side note I'm against the idea of narrative advantage. I 
> don't see that real life employs it, why should fiction?

Okay. What's the speculative advantage to Dorcas being Severian's 
grandmother?

I remember when the grandmother theory was posed. There was no more 
textual evidence for it than this Hairy Inire theory. The only reason 
it's not sitting on the "Half-baked Theory" pile today is because Wolfe 
uncharacteristically confirmed it to a questioner.

I think the real test is: "Do the accumulated facts form a real pattern 
or only a perceived pattern?" Almost anything you say about Wolfe's 
fiction *could* be shunted with "who cares? This won't change my opinion 
on the story." If you feel that way, fine. Go on to the next post. You 
have nothing to add. People post these theories because they see what 
looks like a deliberate pattern. They want someone to say "It couldn't 
work because..." or "Here's something else that fits that pattern...."

u+16b9

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