antechamber antics

Roy C. Lackey · 08 Jul 1999, 06:52 · 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: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net>
Subject: (urth) Re:antechamber antics
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1999 06:52:14
Message-ID: <urth-v0027-0130 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0027/0130.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

mantis wrote:

>>On the murky side (as if--never mind!):

Remember how Uncle Gene says in CASTLE OF THE OTTER (eaten by CASTLE OF
DAYS) that the enamel of the pictures in the religious book link to the
enamel work sold by Dorcas and done by her nameless husband?  And how Uncle
Gene would let us work out the rest?<<

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Are you sure about that source? I don't find it in OTTER, but I do find
what you posted Feb. 27, 1997 to the whorl list:

>>Gene Wolfe's lure (plea?) for Oracular Reading (that is, a reading
more mantic than mantic):

"It seems to me that we can reasonably make two assumptions about
these four books.  The first is that they are books Thecla might
reasonably ask to borrow, and the second is that they all must have
something to do with Severian.  Note, for example, that the pictures
in the book of devotions are enameled and that Severian will soon
encounter Dorcas; Dorcas comes from a family once engaged in the
manufacture of cloisonne, and she once lived in a shop where it was
sold.  Cloisonne is a colored decoration of enamels.  In the rest of
this essay, however, I will concentrate on the first assumption, not
wishing to deprive you of the legitimate pleasure of deducting the
connections" (Gene Wolfe, PLAN[E]T ENGINEERING, NESFA Press, p. 9).

-------------------=3Dmantis=3D <<

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Also, the cloisonne-work was not made by Dorcas's husband. He just
lugged it to the shop and put it on the shelves. Her father and brother made
it. (I, XXII)

Roy

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

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