interview questions

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 05 Jan 2011, 20:42 · 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: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 12:42:50 -0800
Subject: (urth) interview questions
In-Reply-To: <528D4179BC7945AFBFD3273F8EDF02D9@jill>
References: <AANLkTinuN5nbYWSpFwdYyDi=-3PX-dRQN9fQd7uK6KP9 at mail.gmail.com>
	<967498.11110.qm at web114719.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<528D4179BC7945AFBFD3273F8EDF02D9@jill>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=viAjJBkiVHRacTtKksWw5pfnEV3NEEj6SWmqq at mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

> We also have Word of God on the issue:
> "I decided to present the Sandwalker story as a legend or story that Marsch
> had uncovered, rather than as straight reportage, because I wanted to keep
> all three stories set in roughly the same time frame?the "present" of the
> opening novella. Since the period in which the Sandwalker scene was?in terms
> of the "present" found in the rest of the book?taking place in the distant
> past of the planet, it made more sense to say, "Here's a legend that has
> survived from that period" rather than simply jumping into the past and
> presenting it directly."
> < http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/wolfe46interview.htm?>
>
> If I am interpreting that correctly, there's nothing unreliable there
> personal to VRT/Marsch, and really no indication of anything
> unreliable except in terms of characters presented within it, as would be
> the case if it were presented directly, which is an option Wolfe avoided
> only for stylistic reasons.

I disagree: as soon as he puts the story in the mouth (or pen) of
VRT/M, we must ask why VRT/M is telling the story, and to whom. It
doesn't look like a formal anthropological paper, or even an
anthropological presentation of a legend, so what is it and why is it
and who is it for?

Wolfe is too careful a writer (imo) to simply make such a "stylistic"
decision and _not_ consider its "meaning." (Insert standard lecture
about the dubious distinction between style and content.)

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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