Fish and Caves

Gerry Quinn · 29 Dec 2010, 21:17 · 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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 21:17:56 -0000
Subject: (urth) Fish and Caves
References: <SNT123-W146E587ED1F3035CA74E11CF1D0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <B01BB3EFEB954E159E18DBED9AFAAE71@jill>


From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
>
>>Gerry Quinn: I thought you raised some interesting associations, but there 
>>was nothing
>>really specific to grasp. Some of those fish associations are likely 
>>meaningful - others
>>probably are not.  How do we decide which are which?
>
> Gerry, once again I won't pretend to understand the basis of your 
> probability estimates.
> Treating fiction like a scientific assessment seems to miss the point. I 
> suspect you are not
> actually counting and calculating anything in your estimates but simply 
> using your intuition to
> decide what you like and, most often, don't like, just like the rest of 
> us.

I made no estimates - I just noted that if one free associates ad infinitum 
on the subject of fish, a proportion of the associations that come up will 
probably have no meaningful relation to the text.


> Now for me, ever since I learned that Wolfe did not invent any of the 
> strange terms or names which
> are found in BotNS I have been operating on the basic assumption that 
> there is not a single passage
> or word which does not have significant meaning, with most having meaning 
> on several levels.

Even if this is assumed, not every association of every word will be 
meaningful.


> So you asking which parts of the book are meaningless is, for me, an odd 
> question which betrays
> an unfulfillng quest. I consider it a possible goal to read BotNS and have 
> none of it seem like
> pointless gibberish (as parts of it must, to the first-time reader). I'm 
> actually pretty close
> to this goal. I have a long way to go for Long and Short Sun though. Your 
> quest to maintain
> meaninglessness is sort of interesting but not really something I could 
> ever share.

Where do I suggest that parts of the book are meaningless?  I have said that 
some possible interpretations of parts of the book must be wrong.  I 
wouldn't have thought that would be very controversial.

- Gerry Quinn

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