Inire as a hierodule

António Pedro Marques · 08 Jul 2010, 01:43 · 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: entonio at gmail.com (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ant=F3nio_Pedro_Marques?=)
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:43:19 +0100
Subject: (urth) Inire as a hierodule
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W232C05ED7A461B5A506E84CFB30 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W232C05ED7A461B5A506E84CFB30 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4C352D37.7030803 at gmail.com>

I'll try to present my point of view in more general terms.

When we connect real world dots, we don't do it guided by our impressions of 
how the order of the universe woud be neater. We do it according to how the 
connections may give us a new understanding of what's going on. You don't 
address a criminal case, for instance, by asking yourself what given 
connections might result in a more stylish architecture of the crime.

Imagine if you were reading a mystery and your attempt to find out what had 
happened was based not on the story itself but on the type of person the 
author was more likely to prefer as a criminal, or the way a given solution 
would make the plot fall into some esoteric category you think the author is 
fond of.

If I were the author I wouldn't like it. I'm here telling you a story, doing 
my best to make it lifelike or vivider than that, full of hard-crafted 
uniqueness, and there are you trying to make it all fit some stock model. Of 
course, a kindly author might not let show disappointment, if after all such 
exercises make the book enjoyable to you.

I don't think good authors write cryptic books with the intention of having 
a legion of readers trying to figure out the author's thought processes or 
raw devices. The clues that are there are meant for the reader to figure out 
the world being described. The line between the two lies where the reader's 
endeavours address the story given (in itself, as if it were not art but a 
real chronicle), or the inferred artistic process.

If I sound acrimonious it's not on purpose. It's just that I find your 
efforts quite good - probably better than I'd manage myself - but misguided.

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