Digest urth.v027.n002

Dan Parmenter · 20 May 1999, 14:55 · from urth-v0027.mbox · original

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: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v027.n002
Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 14:55:40
Message-ID: <urth-v0027-0007 at digest.urth.net>
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From: Geoff Alex Cohen <gac at cs.duke.edu>

> Ultan has an assistant, Cyby, who is described as: "...a stocky, very=20
> erect man of forty or so with a flat, pale face." and  "Cyby had a high=20
> square forehead, from which his graying hair was in retreat. It made his=20
> face seem small and a trifle babyish..."
>=20
> Now, this is a fairly decent description of Wolfe, especially in 1980.
> Also, the symbolism of Cyby as apprentice to Ultan implying Wolfe
> seeing himself as the apprentice to Borges is too good to be an
> accident.

I've often wondered if Cyby was based on anyone.  For a while I was
convinced that he was based on Norman Thomas DiGiovanni, the
controversial Borges translator.  The one photo of him I'd seen seemed
to fit Wolfe's description of Cyby, but it's not exactly a detailed
description.  Wolfe is quite bald and was by then, but that hardly
disproves your hypothesis.

Lex Shellac


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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