Patera Incus

James Wynn · 16 Aug 2010, 09:44 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 04:44:55 -0500
Subject: (urth) Patera Incus
In-Reply-To: <005101cb3d08$971ec540$f4cf4a0c@rclackey>
References: <SNT123-W537E347BAF46EE639CED1CF980 at phx.gbl>	<A1EA69F072294007B1115BEBC592DCEA@jill><4C66931D.9050001 at io.com>	<4C66EFCC.3000903 at gmail.com><003001cb3cc1$55090400$99d14a0c@rclackey>	<4C688C17.9050202 at gmail.com>
	<005101cb3d08$971ec540$f4cf4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4C690897.8060409 at gmail.com>

  Roy,

I don't think you and I are going to come to an agreement about this. 
Your statement "The two underlined parts of the [first] note are not 
related" is an "Uncle Andrew" moment. I don't see how to get over it.

For me the repeated derivable occurrences of the word "hymen" and it's 
connection to Incus's name are just too compelling. They are not 
coincidental.

> [snip]Bittersweet had tinkered with an old porter chem. Hearing about it wasn't
> good enough, and he was bitterly disappointed.

Let's address this from Wolfe's point of view. Why two elaborate 
attempts at a letter that (by your reading) reveal nothing to us that 
was not carefully explained in the previous page of text?

> A better point to address would be why Incus would use an elarorate message
> to make such a personal revelation in the first place.

Because it gives Wolfe a chance to reveal something about Incus. 
Something which is not accomplished at all by your reading--because by 
your reading nothing at all is accomplished. I can see that this is "a 
better point to address" from your perspective since the original 
question is not resolvable for you.

> In any event, Incus
> did plan to personally deliver "a clear straightforward message" to Fulmar's
> valet, and I very seriously doubt that the message to be delivered to a
> valet had anything to do with a surprise revelation about gender issues.

I imagine the letter to the valet would have looked much like the first 
note.

> valet had anything to do with a surprise revelation about gender issues.
> [snip]Trivial? Then, by that logic, the chapter titles in SHADOW don't mean
> anything either, in which case the face on the greasy coins can be
> Tzadkiel's or anyone else imagined. No, Marble is not a human woman, but in
> Wolfe's Sun Cycle chems are designated male and female and the pronouns just
> come with the usage. That is a spurious argument.

Hm...so you conflate my assertion about the character list to chapter 
titles and textual clues, but *my* argument is spurious?  It would be 
rather stupid for Wolfe to develop a subtlely alluded "Pope Joan" 
character and then paste "she" all over the character list. The 
character list is not intended as a spoiler.

Look, Roy, your counter-argument is founded on two very tenuous 
assertions to my mind: That Wolfe had Incus toil over two expansive, 
apparently risky letters when a brief, to-the-point note would have 
sufficed *from the author's perspective*. That the deliberate emphasis 
on the words "a woman" and "myself" in the first letter have no literary 
value (they don't connote any that would not be perfectly obvious if the 
emphases were not there).  Wolfe's stories are not read like that, and 
they shouldn't be. When a pointless artifact is dramatically laid on the 
table, it's not pointless. When a character who is important to the 
incidental inner circle of characters is discussed but never appears on 
stage, it's not because the discussion was mere flourish.

u+16b9

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