interview questions

Jerry Friedman · 04 Jan 2011, 18:49 · 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: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 10:49:17 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) interview questions
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W3C70FA1AC9F48F33CAA4BCF080 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W3C70FA1AC9F48F33CAA4BCF080 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <758345.75636.qm at web114707.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>

...

>Jerry Friedman: I don't think we have to have prejudices on every point.
>
>I do, especially in evaluating fiction. We are analyzing the words of another 
>human being through the 
>
>filter of our own brain which has been shaped by unique genetic factors, 
>upbringing, culture, nationality, 
>
>unique personal experience, etc. Nobody has exactly the same brain, therefore we 
>all have prejudices.

Well, if you want to use the harsh word "prejudice" for that, you can, but don't 
expect everyone to understand you.  For me, "prejudice" suggests making one's 
mind up or coming close to it in advance, which I don't think is necessary.  
Also, the context of my comment was that you'd said that a certain 
interpretation didn't suit you, and I was pointing that we don't always have to 
have that kind of prejudice.

>Choosing a "best" conclusion to a Wolfe puzzle requires using your unique brain 
>and thus, by definition,
>is partially a product of predjudice.

Not necessarily in a way that keeps us from seeing the right answer.  As far as 
I know, whatever we bring to our interpretations, everyone agrees that Number 
Five's last name is Wolfe and that Dorcas is Severian's grandmother (at least 
after those solutions are pointed out).

>Wolfe has set a trap for us all. We are all human and we all want
>to think "hah! Wolfe has set out all this false evidence for those dummies with 
>other theories. Secretly
>he is writing to those readers with the perception to recognize the truth. LIKE 
>ME!"
>
>That's why he won't answer questions. Look what happened with his revelations 
>regarding Dr. Marsch and
>Urth/Green.

That capitalized exclamation came as a relief--I was afraid you were serious.

Jerry Friedman

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20110104/766e5fbd/attachment.htm>

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