Marble on Urth

James Wynn · 02 Jun 2011, 12:49 · from 2011-June.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:49:47 -0500
Subject: (urth) Marble on Urth
In-Reply-To: <183166.20392.qm at smtp817.mail.ird.yahoo.com>
References: <BANLkTinXcJr6aK+XjMj4v8WwjDzWhm8EtA at mail.gmail.com>	<4DE57004.5080703 at gmail.com>	<006401cc2090$e0468840$d8cd4a0c@rclackey>	<4DE6B587.8060700 at gmail.com>
	<183166.20392.qm at smtp817.mail.ird.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4DE786EB.3040805 at gmail.com>

>  "Enormous darkness high overhead, blotting the sun-drenched field, 
> the straggling line of servants in which she had stood, and the 
> soldiers' precise column. She had seen it descend from the sky, at 
> first a fleck of black that had seemed no bigger than a flake of soot; 
> [...](CALDE, 285)
>
>
> Mo Holkar:
> the "it" that descends from the sky is the "enormous darkness", the 
> subject of the previous sentence (ie. a ship above them, which first 
> appeared high up as a fleck of black but is now enormous), not the 
> line. A line of which she was herself an element couldn't appear to 
> her like a fleck. Also, if talking of a line of chems of which she and 
> the soldier are elements, they wouldn't say "it" was dirty.

One other thing...the "enormous darkness" is not the subject of this 
sentence. In fact it is not a sentence at all, but a sentence fragment. 
The enormous darkness carries no more weight than the "straggling line 
of servants" and "the soldier's precise column".

But at the least the line and the column are closer to the pronoun "it" 
than the the darkness. The lines are "descending" from the skylands 
until it disappears into a little dot. Possibly that dot was the opening 
from which they entired the cargo area. Perhaps not.

J.

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