the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes

António Pedro Marques · 19 Jan 2011, 17:33 · 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: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:33:46 +0000
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes
In-Reply-To: <4D3714DD.60500 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W22A1C8BEC139996AEE7C58CFF60 at phx.gbl><AE57A63D945E41419F2ED50836CB6060@jill>	<4D3703CA.2000204 at gmail.com>	<4DCEC654C050496C9AE26EC65906119A@jill>
	<4D3714DD.60500 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4D37207A.4000103 at gmail.com>

James Wynn wrote (19-01-2011 16:44):
> On 1/19/2011 10:23 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> Anyway, that's beside the point. Some of these people - and others,
>> such as Mint - can have their not mentioning the resemblance explained
>> away. But ALL of them? Why? It's like Murder on the Orient Express,
>> but with no detective! When has Wolfe ever worked like that?
>
> Interesting. I've often used this very analogy to describe Wolfe's
> novel. I tell people, "If Wolfe had written MotOE, there would be no
> detective. That would be the reader's job. All the story would be told
> by the suspects and and maybe a clever but distracted Red Cap. The
> murder itself would be an incidental event. "

But it's not a good analogy. Gene Wolfe is the opposite of Agatha Christie. 
What GW leaves out of the text can be deduced, and the various parts tie in. 
It's the figuring out of what isn't told that is interesting. AC fills her 
solutions with things nobody could know about. There's no figuring out 
anything, as there is no way to. The solutions are what they are, just as 
they could be anything else, on a whim.
Maybe some see GW as a kind of AC and that may explain why they sometimes 
come up with interpretations that have nothing to do with anything. That 
would make sense for an AC story (if it were possible to make sense of AC 
stories, of course).

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