The Two Katherines

Ryan Dunn · 16 Aug 2010, 21:01 · 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: ryan at liftingfaces.com (Ryan Dunn)
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:01:16 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Two Katherines
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W36C571C52F56073C968F82CF9B0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W36C571C52F56073C968F82CF9B0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <F4DE5781-7085-4BCC-895B-A336168D2300 at liftingfaces.com>

On Aug 16, 2010, at 4:53 PM, Lee Berman wrote:

> If the hilt was indeed heavy then why didn't WOlfe say it was heavy?  Why
> did he instead take pains to describe the  blade of the sword as light? 
> A heavy blade would accomplish WOlfe's goal of making Severian lose his 
> balance better than a heavy hilt. You keep ducking the question- why does the 
> light weight blade feel heavy? From the text, without speculation, no ifs or 
> maybes.  Can you answer?

Besides calling the blade batten with an old hilt, where does he go to "pains to describe the blade of the sword as light"?

Wolfe says that from the moment the sword is picked up, Severian thinks it's heavy. The batten could be double sided with beads inside to shift the balance the way Terminus Est does. The tip of the blade could be of a heavy lead then covered with tinsel decoration. Who knows?

The point is the blade is described as false. Severian claims to have hit a fake mechanism. He calls it a wax head. And the "beheaded" Katharine rises up after the beheading to put on the fake head in a slight of hand maneuver common to cheap magician stagecraft.

I'm not sure what I'm defending anymore, other than I believe the text as it's written, not that there is some subversive trick played on Severian that he cannot see. I don't see why they would have him kill somebody as a trick. Nor do I see why a real person would have to be killed in order to provide smeared blood on the wax head.

...ryan

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