Sev's family tree/gender bender

Lee Berman · 01 Feb 2011, 04:04 · 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: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:04:01 -0500
Subject: (urth) Sev's family tree/gender bender
Message-ID: <SNT123-W53ECD55402C2EF25A8DDAACFE50 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn- Lucky the alzabo didn't get him.  It would have become the terror 
>of the countryside, wandering around telling stories about Fechin for hours to its 
>victims, until in despair they threw themselves into its jaws...

Heh, that's pretty funny!

Was just rereading that Casdoe section. An interesting quote supporting my Agia=assassin 
guess, requiring mistaken gender:

>"Women and tailors hold the blade beneath the hand, according to the proverb, but 
>Agia stabbed up to open the tripes and catch the heart from below, like an accomplished 
>assassin."

Also regarding gender misidentification- the old person starts his/her Fechin story with:

>"His face wasn't a monkey's face at all [apparently someone thought it was]. Fechin was
>handsome--the handsomest around. he could always get food or money froma  woman. He could
>get anything from women....

>I had a piece of paper the schoolmaster had given me. Real paper....

>But Fechin loved to draw, and while we walked I thought about that, and how his face would
>look if he had paper to make a picture he could keep....Fechin didn't know I had it, but I
>took it out and showed it to him, and tore it in two....

..and the light of it [the sun] on Fechin's face was more than I could stand. It made my eyes
water"

The attraction the old person has for Fechin's face doesn't seem very masculine to me, unless 
in a homosexual way. But Fechin can get anything from women, even a precious piece of real paper.
The old person being a woman explains a lot of this for me.

And as Mr. T has suggested, having Casdoe's family linked to Severian makes some thematic sense
also. (if Mr. Monkey-face can be connected to both family trees. heh. Well, Fechin gets whatever
he wants from women, including children...Casdoe/Dorcas, Severian/Severa...I dunno. Might be a
connection.)

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