The Two Katharines

Lee Berman · 16 Aug 2010, 03:59 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:59:16 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Two Katharines
Message-ID: <SNT123-W49A451D02CC1BE257D6C0FCF9B0 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson- the blade of execution is wood and tinsel.

Yes a thin wooden batten with lightweight tinsel.

Yet when Severian first takes up the sword, "It was very heavy".

When he lifted the sword, "I feared it would overbalance me".

Using all his available strength, he sends the "false" blade down. 
For an instant it seemed to meet resistance then thudded into the
block, which fell into two. The maid's head, all bloodied,  
tumbled forward..

I used to think it was just Severian being drunk. Now...

Well, there are certainly some theatrics going on. I just can't
be sure which audience is being fooled. Would the guild really 
use fake blood from a wax head as their most sacred chrism?

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