the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes

Lee Berman · 20 Jan 2011, 20:18 · 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: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:18:55 -0500
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes
Message-ID: <SNT123-W205F3F2A971EB7CF313A3CFF90 at phx.gbl>

>Antonio Pedro Marques:  I think it's a common idiom. 'I feel (...) that you're really my older
>sister' doesn't mean Mint thinks Chenille is her sister, but simply that
>Chenille evokes in Mint the same feelings an older sister would. People do
>speak that way.

They do. But my continued point is that these are not people. They are creations with a purpose
in everything they say and do.

With all the praise that has been heaped upon Gene Wolfe's writing I think the most frequent 
criticism I've seen is in regard to  his character development. Not that he is terrible at this, 
but I will agree with those who say it isn't his strength (in comparison to other great authors).

Nobody can be good at everything and I think Wolfe is willing to sacrifice character development
because it isn't really his goal to create memorable characters. In fact I think too richly 
developed characters would distract from his ultimate goals. He uses his characters to obliquely 
address important (to him) ideas and to force his readers into a certain mode of thought process 
which relate to those ideas. (God, religion, death, identity, politics, to name a few).

So if Mint says such a thing to Chenille, I don't think it is just pointless chatter to illustrate
female bonding; to show these two women share emotional...whatever. There is some deeper meaning 
to it, and "identity" is a pretty good starting point when it comes to most Wolfe mysteries.

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