Dionysus

James Wynn · 09 Dec 2010, 23:08 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:08:52 -0600
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
In-Reply-To: <A6E152BE7B344F35B8318BAC8F861923@jill>
References: <SNT123-W65D3EA4F11C803A59948C7CF2E0 at phx.gbl>
	<A6E152BE7B344F35B8318BAC8F861923@jill>
Message-ID: <4D016184.8090602 at gmail.com>

>> Lee Berman-
>> 2. The suggestion is that Gene Wolfe, in associating Dionysus with 
>> parasitic lianas, is not
>> misinterpreting but engaging in word play as he often does. Nobody 
>> here thinks Gene Wolfe
>> is confused as to the meanings of "Theseus" and "thesis" but some 
>> think he is engaging in
>> word play there. Nor do we think Gene Wolfe is a dunce who thinks the 
>> mother of Romulus and
>> Remus, Rhea Silvia, was named for a Bird Of The Woods. Word play again.
>
> Gerry Quinn-
> I think this would be a somewhat obscure word-game.  To get it one 
> would have to identify Dionysus as the son of Thyone, 

There's a real leap. That's about as obscure as identifying Cain and 
Able as the children of Eve. Or Mary as the mother of Jesus. Or Romulus 
as the child of Rhea Silvia.

> and then *misread* his association with vines - in other words, see 
> him called 'god of vines' and not realise that this meant grape vines.

Umm....I can't imagine why anyone would be expected to miss that 
association since the inhumi feed on the red, red wine of the human 
body. I guess unless the lianas (grape vines ARE lianas, btw) had humans 
growing on them and the inhuma extracted the blood by mashing the people 
with their feet, this would be just too hard an allusion for anyone to 
pick up on.

> Is this word-play supposed to be just a joke, or something useful to 
> understanding the story?

Funny this should be asked. When I claim the word play surrounding the 
Story of Frog has something to do with understanding the Book of the New 
Sun, people accuse me of building castles in the sky.

I'm going to quit now, because if I say anything more it would be really 
uncharitable.

u+16b9

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