So who is the child in Baldander's bed? [was: Juturna, the Missing Sister]

Jack Smith · 29 Jul 2010, 09:18 · 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: jack.smith.1946 at gmail.com (Jack Smith)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:18:14 -0400
Subject: (urth) So who is the child in Baldander's bed? [was: Juturna,
	the 	Missing Sister]
In-Reply-To: <8FA6C6ECAA124B32AB901D5F368B2A01@jill>
References: <SNT123-W31A23C4CE90783EED35F9CFA70 at phx.gbl>
	<ADFFCBFB-23A0-490F-B4EA-0534B85CAB40 at liftingfaces.com>
	<AANLkTikkC05XL0xQ-QbdhZPVjPbsUiCXsgVHiLYYP4gO at mail.gmail.com>
	<924139.11675.qm at web50701.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
	<8FA6C6ECAA124B32AB901D5F368B2A01@jill>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikmhH-4ax3evJX1N623kP=KNMsm1chf=Bo_L=y7 at mail.gmail.com>

Severian uses the word "catamite" and so something must suggest a sexual
element to him.  But I like the idea that the child is Baldander's son (or
his Number Five).


On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 4:11 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

> From: "Jerry Friedman" <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
>
>> From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>>
>>  On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Ryan Dunn <ryan at liftingfaces.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> is it definitely a catamite? or is that theoretical as well?
>>>>
>>>
>>> That's Severian's interpretation of what he sees. He could, I suppose,
>>> be wrong...
>>>
>>
>> People keep saying this, but Severian tells us twice that he doubts the
>> boy is a
>> catamite.  At least so far.
>>
>
> So who/what is he?  The only other possibility I can think of is that he is
> Baldander's son.  I have tended to assume that Baldanders started out as a
> normal man until he started modifying himself, but we also know that the
> modifications have extreme effects such as mental instability evinced as
> moodiness and violent rages.  So the fact that the child appears to be
> retarded doesn't necessarily mean anything. Perhaps Baldanders has started
> the modifications earlier on his son/replacement, or perhaps Baldanders
> started like this too.
>
> On the other hand, Talos seems to go wandering the world after Baldanders
> takes up an aquatic lifestyle - if the child is Baldanders' one might expect
> him to stay and look after it.  But it may well be that the local villagers
> burned the castle down and disposed of everything there.  (Not for the first
> time.)
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>



-- 
Best wishes,
Jack
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100729/c633f1b0/attachment.htm>

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