GUTs and so on

Craig Brewer · 24 Aug 2010, 21:02 · 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: cnbrewer at yahoo.com (Craig Brewer)
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:02:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) GUTs and so on
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=WhxCStPvwQ4w-JaVYaOuikcJ7=DgXWDxABSCN at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTi=WhxCStPvwQ4w-JaVYaOuikcJ7=DgXWDxABSCN at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <451888.50799.qm at web37602.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

I think (almost) all of us have been guilty of that at some point, myself 
included. (I know I've got some weird ideas about TWK and Sorcerer's House.)

But one thing that I always want to know is how the details or the baroque 
theories do more than point out some hidden plot point. As much as I disagree 
with MOST of Borski's stuff, say, one thing I appreciate about him is that he 
will occasionally take a step back and reflect on why his theories matter and 
how they might change our general understanding and even thematic 
interpretations. One thing I like about Wolfe is that the puzzles that I'm 
pretty sure are there and are there to be solved are usually there for a pretty 
interesting reason, rather than just being puzzles to be solved. That Severian 
may have died and come back (either resurrected or as an eidolon) multiple times 
in BotNS, say, has all kinds of philosophical and theological ramifications for 
the story. Guessing that some minor character may be his second cousin once 
removed by hidden marriage on his step mother's side, however...not so much.

In the most recent case, I'd want to know not just IF Fava is Hy, but I'd also 
want to know how that changes what we're supposed to think about Silk/Silkhorn 
in terms of his prophet-status, etc.

----- Original Message ----
From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Tue, August 24, 2010 3:34:48 PM
Subject: (urth) GUTs and so on

Sometimes ... and I want to be clear that I'm not singling anyone out
here ... nor is this a recent but rather a recurring thing ... I get
the feeling that there's a competition going on, whose rules I am
unaware of, but the objective of which seems to be the erection and
successful support of the most baroque and prima facie implausible
theory concerning some Lupine matter; the prize being simply the gasps
and awed admiration of our fellow Wolfeans, and that this competition
is rather like a circus act, in that the value is not in the thing
done but in its difficulty.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

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