interview questions

Roy C. Lackey · 26 Dec 2010, 06:35 · 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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2010 00:35:00 -0600
Subject: (urth) interview questions
References: <30174.89037.qm at web58204.mail.re3.yahoo.com>
	<8E25C17A-871A-41CC-B9B2-0FCBFA19E96E at liftingfaces.com>
Message-ID: <00f501cba4c7$0c1c0080$51d24a0c@rclackey>

Ryan Dunn wrote and quoted:
>More specifically, the interviewer (Gevers) is not actually interested in
Wolfe as a human being and accomplished writer, he is interested in Gene as
a decoder ring for books he liked. It's wildly missing the point. To be in
the presence of a great author, and only be trying to desperately "go for
broke" to get answers to intentional mysteries is more than disrespectful,
it's achingly naive.<

...ryan


On Dec 25, 2010, at 6:51 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:

> Well, as far as the interviews go, I think sometimes Wolfe is more open
than others.  I agree, Jordan rubbed him the right way as someone whose
world view Wolfe respected, Gevers just wants the quick and easy solution
and tries to trap Gene into an answer by his "comprehensive" list of options
so that Gene can't get away with any answer, becuase evasion will just look
like affirmation.
>
> There is a reason Wolfe writes the way he does, and sometimes mysteries
should be left open. Questionable interview tactics, honestly, and showing
what I feel to be a real lack of respect for the writer's aesthetic goal.  I
have a feeling Gene thought, I want to write a story where it will be very
hard to answer the normal questions: who, what, when, where, why, but one
where the didactic message is plain and exposed, an inverted novel.  And to
just kind of throw that question in there with those permutations seems
disrespectful in a way, but he forgot Urth/Yesod, Urth/Verthandi, etc, but I
still think Wolfe did not appreciate the question and became intentionally
terse.
>
> I put no stock in what he tells Gevers, and great stock in what he shares
with Jordan.
--------------------------------

What the hell? When did Nick Gevers start using the initials "JJ"? At least
get the facts straight.

-Roy

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