666 Saltimbanque St.

Lee Berman · 04 Jan 2011, 01:27 · from 2011-January.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: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 20:27:47 -0500
Subject: (urth) 666 Saltimbanque St.
Message-ID: <SNT123-w519B3A3542D2EAE95A8192CF080 at phx.gbl>

>Jerry Friedman: Jerry Friedman is sure that "saltimbanque", meaning "clown", couldn't possibly 
>be a clown-clone pun, because that would be beneath Wolfe.  Not.

Erm..are we talking about the Gene Wolfe who wears a Texas bolo tie, a Chicago moustache and 
quotes Roger Rabbit and enjoys Pinnochio, the Disney movie? Some here have attempted to paint
Gene Wolfe as an academic elitist, divorced from pop culture and cheap humor. I think they succeed 
only in painting themselves that color.

Anyway, clown might be a pun on clone. But since Gene WOlfe inserts his name into the story as
an author, I lean toward the "saltimbanque" interpretation as performer/trickster. With the not-
so-subtle allusion to The Great Deceiver. But could be all of the above.

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