Dionysus

Lee Berman · 07 Dec 2010, 17:55 · from 2010-December.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2010 12:55:03 -0500
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
Message-ID: <SNT123-W924CF06ED5FC26287FEABCF2C0 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn- My purpose is to challenge your theory with logical analysis, not satire. And what 
>exactly is your problem with the reference?  People are citing with a straight face everything 
>from Erich von Daniken to Gilligan's Island, and building huge castles of conjecture about Greek 
>gods not referenced in the text, and nobody bats an eye!  

Heh! good response Gerry. Provides some insight into your thinking. The "people" you mention are 
all me, I'm afraid. I noticed some eyes batting. Didn't you?  I hope you weren't offended by the 
pop culture references. There is both a light-hearted and more serious aspect to them. 

Did you not notice that I was prompted to mention them in response to Ryan's first hand report that 
Gene Wolfe's only exposure to Pinocchio was the Disney movie? I think many forget that as Gene Wolfe
is writing he is not just some cloistered scholar surrounded by musty classics. He is the father (and
grandfather) of a medium-sized family and if his wife and children manage to make appearances in his
stories (I have knowledgeable confirmation that they do), is it so shocking that references to family
favorites from pop culture might also creep in?

If your purpose is to challenge people's theories with logical analysis, it explains a lot. I also get
the impression you might be skimming the theories, ignoring the things that make sense to you, ignoring 
the things you don't understand and jumping right to the parts for which you can make a clever criticism.
I would hope that a sincere attempt at analysis would involve actually understanding the theory first.
Such understanding would involve acknowledging the parts which do make sense to you and asking sincere
questions about the parts you don't understand. "That was good, James, I can see that". "James, I don't 
quite get this section, could you explain it to me?" These are not the sort of posts I can remember seeing 
from Gerry Quinn.

An example in regard to my Father Inire theory: 

>....building huge castles of conjecture about Greek gods not referenced in the text.

Before making that statement I would expect you to at least once have asked me, "could you explain
where in the text that part is referenced?". That's if you really wanted to understand the theory. 
Instead you jump to the conclusion that there is no referencing. My impression of your attitude is that 
if you can't see something on your own, it isn't there.

I will pretend you actually did ask that question about Greek gods and give a thumbnail answer, just for 
fun. I would answer that at the superficial level, Typhon and daughter Scylla are among the most explicitly
mentioned Greek gods referenced in BotNS, with the understanding that gods and monsters become more difficult 
to distinguish as one goes backward in ancient Greek history. So that is a starting point. Greek mythology
and genealogy are referenced.

Next I would go to the old Boatman on the Lake of Birds. The visual imagery and association with the dead of
that character prompted the original members of this board to refer to him, sometimes without qualification, as
Charon. Could be an incidental association but if  we look into the mythological parentage of Charon we find: 
Erebus and Night (Nyx). These are both named characters in BotNS. So Greek mythology and genealogy are again 
referenced. A secondary launching point.

And so on. I've spent 6 years assembling my Father Inire theory and, of course, I'm not going to put it all here.
But all my ideas in the theory are referenced from the text just as those two associations are.  I am happy to 
answer any questions about it that people might have. For example, a board member recently asked me how the Erebus 
and Night connection related to Noctua. I consider that a knowledgeable, thoughtful question and I answered in kind.

For me that's how increasing the understanding of Gene Wolfe's work progresses. Sharing ideas and asking questions.
But if the "logical analysis" process is what works for you I encourage you to continue, by all means.

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