Standard Wolfean riddle

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 12 Aug 2010, 17:26 · from 2010-August.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:26:42 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Standard Wolfean  riddle
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W9F5A8E2FFA34663F2BE25CF970 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <961067.12656.qm at web84106.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Exactly.

--- On Thu, 8/12/10, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
Subject: (urth) Standard Wolfean  riddle
To: urth at lists.urth.net
Date: Thursday, August 12, 2010, 10:35 AM



>David Stockhoff- On the use of the word "cognates":
>I think this is a standard low-grade Wolfean riddle. If a Wolfe 
>character says to a narrator, "I once met a man very like you, who had 
>the same look and carried himself the same way, and held his cigarette 
>just like that, but he called himself by a different name then," how 
>would you interpret that?
 
>"Once upon a time, there was a race of beings with two arms and two legs 
>who called themselves Men. They were very like you, with the same hopes 
>and dreams, but they lived far away from here, both in space and in 
>time." How would you interpret that?
 
>I read both as strong hints of the obvious, with a dash of doubt.
 
 
Interestingly, I just made a very similar comment responding to a different
poster:
 
>Lee Berman- Wolfe could have made it crystal clear that it was Severian's race in 
>Briah which? created the Hierogrammates and it is Severian that he reveres, but at 
>every turn he doesn't, using language which simultaneously provides us a conclusion 
>and casts doubt upon it. It could be said that he does this in all his work. 
>We are meant to be kept off balance.

We must be careful or risk being accused of being the same person. Stockberm?
David Lee Hoff?? ;- ) nevermind. brunians is gone.
 
Speaking of SilkHorn, isn't that a prime example of what we are speaking of? We
have a guy who keeps insisting he is Horn, searching for Silk, while everyone 
around him keeps saying, "Uh, dude, you are a tall, slender guy with white hair 
and a black bird named Oreb on your shoulder".
 
In that case (like the Dorcas riddle), I think most readers figure it out.
Other Wolfean riddles are more difficult to solve, as we've seen. ??? ???????? ?????? ??? ? 
_______________________________________________
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/20100812/6ad45915/attachment.htm>

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