The Two Katharines

Jeff Wilson · 16 Aug 2010, 04:39 · 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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:39:36 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Two Katharines
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W49A451D02CC1BE257D6C0FCF9B0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W49A451D02CC1BE257D6C0FCF9B0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4C68C108.9000604 at io.com>

On 8/15/2010 10:59 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>
>
>> 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? 		 	   		

There's no indication or reason that the *blood* is fake. It might be 
animal blood if no recently dispatched clients or willing donors were 
available at the time.

Severian can't have been completely fooled into really beheading a 
person because he's supposed to turn the blade aside to *avoid* striking 
the maid, and he's not drunk because the feasting comes after. But the 
importance of the day is not to be underestimated in its effect on human 
perception; as I recall from my wedding day, that  little ring was heavy 
like a barbell and slick as an eel.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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