Dionysus

Andrew Mason · 08 Dec 2010, 19:43 · 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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 19:43:47 +0000
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
Message-ID: <AANLkTikg=RVG=4PLLfCafjTqGJO4+FN4h=7nUSHukzwZ at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote: .
>
> Moving on, Borksi or Ryan or I might propose a solution or pattern or way of thinking which solves the
> puzzle for us or helps overcome the cognitive distress. Again this should not be taken as an open
> invitation to argue.

But once ideas have been put out in public, they are a legitimate
subject of  argument. You may not find criticism of your ideas
helpful, if they efectively solve, for you, the problems you find
troubling, but you aren't the only audience for my responses. It's
reasonable that others, who are trying to make their mind up about
what is happening, should consider both your ideas, with the reasons
that support them, and also the problems that they raise.   Is Inire a
shapeshifter? Well, there are some things that it would help to
explain if he were; on the other hand, the ways in which we know he
disgusies himself suggest that he is not. Is Inire Severian's
grandfather? There are some similarities between them; on the other
hand, there is a passage in the books which directly addresses
human/alien breeding, and suggests that while he might be someone's
father, he couldn't be someone's grandfather. And so on.

> I will suggest that our purpose here should be to help each other. Invalidating each other as people is
> not helpful to anyone as far as I can tell. If you feel the need to criticize, be sure it is *constructive
> criticism*. If you feel the need to tear down someone's puzzle solution or any part of it, you should have
> a better solution *immediately* available so that the building process is sustained. If all we have is
> demolition and destructive criticism, what will be the result?

That seems to me a very limited idea of constructive criticism. If we
are to move forward in understanding the works, we should look at the
ideas people have come up with, but we should also look at the
problems that they raise. Considering those problems may help us come
up with better ideas and move towards more effective solutions. To
demand that people must have a better solution already worked out
before they make any criticisms halts this process. And in any case,
if I entered the debate with 'here is my brilliant solution', I would
feel immensely arrogant. Pointing to a problem, which you may be able
to overcome, and in any case might spur others to come up with ideas,
strikes me as actually more cooperative and more of a real
contribution to discussion.

> Twelve years ago, this board was still wrestling with puzzles and problems which were of universal interest
> and could be solved with simple Sherlockian detective work and logic and thus subject to being proved wrong.
> Now, it seems everyone, even newbies, knows that Commonwealth people have Saint names, that the geography,
> flora and fauna of the Commonwealth is S. American, that Yesod and Briah are Kabbalah terms etc. I think there
> is still a great utility in fact-checking each other, but the vast bulk of conversation has moved beyond that.

Well, there are new people coming in, who are still interested in the
basic questions. But beyond that, I think there is probably still
material, to be solved by Sherlockian means, that no one has worked
out yet. We know that Wolfe overestimates his readers' intelligence.
He puts things in which he thinks we should be able to work out, but
we don't. (It was just recently revealed that a character in one of
his stories is called Mary Christmas; he expected people to get that;
from the reaction on the list, it seems no one had.) I suspect, for
instance, that we are meant to be able to work out the names of many
of the major nameless characters in _New Sun_, and to determine more
of Severian's family tree than we have so far established with any
certainty. While this is so, addressing the issues in a puzzle-solving
spirit still seems profitable.

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