do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

David Stockhoff · 23 May 2011, 11:58 · from 2011-May.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 07:58:52 -0400
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
In-Reply-To: <646642.46492.qm at web114701.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
References: <SNT123-W220B7E3214FF82B9BAC2DDCF710 at phx.gbl>	<AE83B76DDD3A4DCCB4C28DABF86BA1B5@jill>	<4DD6C327.5090406 at gmail.com>	<535089.18349.qm at web114704.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DD6EBE4.5000407 at gmail.com>	<630092.30979.qm at web114707.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DD74F67.8000504 at gmail.com>	<299575.42228.qm at web114711.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DD90ECE.4010607 at verizon.net>	<404096.12922.qm at web114710.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>	<4DD98E28.1030403 at verizon.net>
	<646642.46492.qm at web114701.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4DDA4BFC.6060809 at verizon.net>


On 5/23/2011 12:43 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> Depends how you look at it. There are patterns among primes that I  don't
>> >  pretend to understand. But some primes may be rarer than  others.
> ...
>
> I see you meant that some have rarer properties than others.
Right---thanks for rephrasing me!
>>> Also, this is  fiction,not history.  I don't think Wolfe anticipated what  significance readers
>> would
>>> find in every tiny detail, but this one seems  to have a good chance of
> being
>>> purposeful.
>> >  
>> >  I agree this is  fiction, and that is my point. My theory is derived 100%
>> >  from available  books. Not history. Mine is a literary argument, not a
>> >  historical  one.
>> >
>> >  I think the connection you describe is speculation and must remain  so.
> I agree.  However, the speculative connection I described is entirely from the
> books.  The one you described also involves history (Butler's /Lives of the
> Saints/, Suetonius'/On the Lives of the Caesars/--or is that what you meant by
> "available books"?).
>
>
Yes, I meant those books. I am not sure if we are misunderstanding one 
another because you view those books as history and I do not. But 
consider that Suetonius _chose_ the number 12. There were, of course, 
more than 12 Roman emperors. Suetonius was writing history, but he was 
also telling stories.

And while I am not very familiar with Butler's book, I regard it as both 
more and less than purely factual. The stories of the saints are real, 
but they are unlikely to be all true.


---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 110523-0, 05/23/2011
Tested on: 5/23/2011 7:58:53 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2011 AVAST Software.
http://www.avast.com

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