Sev's family tree

Lee Berman · 27 Jan 2011, 13:40 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 08:40:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) Sev's family tree
Message-ID: <SNT123-W3197037CEB07618AA68CFACFFE0 at phx.gbl>

>Son of Witz: I don't see any reason to suggest he is a woman though. Wasn't that what you said, Lee?

I have said that if the old person is seen as a woman some important things about this story are clarified
for me. I also cited two specific collections of items from the text which allow and even suggest this character 
could be a woman.

Your responses have been:

>I think you are putting way too much into these imagined gender confusions and homosexual guesses. 

>If they meant anything, they would reverberate through the subtext.

>I think while you are sniffing for clues, you might be missing the extremely potent symbolism...

So you are saying my efforts to understand the story are misguided and a waste of time and meaningless. 
I should be devoting myself to the correct interpretation not this rubbish.

Mr. Thalassocrat has an interpretation of the story which is completely opposite to yours. In this case
your response is:

>Here is a perfect example of an alternate reading that is absolutely suportable with the text.

You challenged my idea that there might be gender blendings and confusions in BotNS and I took the time
to list quite a few examples of them. The result seems to have been a waste of time. You are still insisting
my ideas are self-invented and have no basis in the text.

Contrast that with Mr. Thalassocrat's theories which propose "Magic Genes", an invented family in Nessus sired 
by Casdoe's father, Fechin as the patriarch of Severian's family, angels as demons and Severian as a moral 
cripple.

Your response to his ideas- "Rad!". To my ideas, "Pft!". (I like Mr. T's ideas, of course)

Often, an assessment of whether an idea is supported by the text is based more on who is speaking than the text
itself. "Not in the text" is a criticism which has frustrated more than one person here. Because no matter how 
one might try to demonstrate that something IS in the text, spend an hour or two researching and documenting
from various places in the text, it is too easy for the criticizer to then ignore it all and keep repeating,
the brief, effortless: "sorry, it's not in the text". There is more going on in this List than simple knowledge
seeking. There are personalities at work.

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