This week in Google Alerts: cartoonists

Gwern Branwen · 11 Nov 2010, 00:03 · from 2010-November.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: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:03:41 -0500
Subject: (urth) This week in Google Alerts: cartoonists
Message-ID: <AANLkTik50xCQ4La-m+9eAqDOmHVxyG1_RzimxfMxeg6z at mail.gmail.com>

> "Moreso than Stephen King, who I haven?t read that much of, Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite authors. He wrote this one series called The Book of the New Sun or something ? a four-book series he wrote in the ?80s about a torturer who gets banished from his guild because he showed someone mercy, so he walks the earth and gains more power as he goes. Anyway, he?s written a shitload of stuff, and his newer books I don?t love ? his newest one is called The Sorcerer?s House ? but he just always introduces all this shit and it doesn?t ever quite do anything. There?s one series of three books he wrote with this character who can?t remember anything, so every chapter is a letter to himself, and you sometimes get the idea that Gene Wolfe can?t remember what?s in his books. [Laughs] Like, they kind of don?t correspond, you think it?s going to do this and it does that, and there?s literally no payoff. It?s almost like?if you read the thing at the end that tells you the background, it?s the most interesting stuff. There?s little bits of this really rich world, but there?ll be this weird mundane story in it. I think that was a big influence: suggesting something grand but telling something mundane. On one level, I could have gotten a little more grand with the actual story. I think that was part of my learning curve. But I like the idea that there?s all this stuff out there but you?re getting one little corner of it."

--Brian Chippendale,
http://www.comicsbeat.com/2010/10/27/creators-review-corner-brian-chippendale-on-gene-wolfe/

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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