Drotte-Roche mixup

Gerry Quinn · 17 Apr 2011, 20:13 · from 2011-April.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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:13:28 +0100
Subject: (urth) Drotte-Roche mixup
References: <BANLkTi=GxiaEL7ie42YrMrp1K5m__eWLsQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9431077F99BB45B59D06489890764663@jill>


From: "Tony Ellis" <tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com>
> Jeff Wilson wrote:

>> We do know that various office functions are still being expected of Sev
>> as he writes. Time passes, Dr Talos comes and goes. Sev could as easily
>> gone a final weekend trip, moved his bowels, and approved a dozen
>> executions between writing "Roche" and "Drotte".
>
> He takes a break on page *two* of his memoirs? In the middle of
> writing an exciting bit? I don't find that very persuasive. Moreover,
> the reason we know about these little interruptions is because
> Severian tells us when they happen. If Wolfe wanted us to think that
> Severian had made a memory slip across such an interruption, he could
> have written it that way.

Some supporting evidence that Severian is hard to interrupt when he gets 
into the flow of writing:
"I have also ordered that Nicarete be brought to me, and when I was writing 
of our capture, a moment ago, my chamberlain entered to say she waited my 
pleasure." (The Claw of the Conciliator)

The capture was some 25-30 pages earlier.

Hopefully some functionary of Severian's made sure that Nicarete was 
supplied with tea and buns while she waited in Severian's antechamber...

- Gerry Quinn

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