the circus of Dr. Lao

Sergei SOLOVIEV · 14 Oct 2011, 16:54 · from 2011-October.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: soloviev at irit.fr (Sergei SOLOVIEV)
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:54:56 +0200
Subject: (urth) the circus of Dr. Lao
In-Reply-To: <4E985FF0.8080404 at clueland.com>
References: <SNT123-W38C3D8C3CE874AD322F4C5CFE10 at phx.gbl>	<CAMBsQ=L2fMRmRh2aGpoV+tPQY3WyBVTJ231CPigT2btkt3nNJg at mail.gmail.com>	<4E984D27.8070001 at verizon.net>
	<4E985FF0.8080404 at clueland.com>
Message-ID: <4E986960.9070502 at irit.fr>

Did Gene Wolfe ever mention the book called "The circus of Dr. Lao"? 
It's a curious
book, first published in 1935 by Charles G. Finney. I recently got a 
second edition -
University of Nebraska Press, 2002. There is curiously many parallels 
with GW writings.

The story goes that to a small town, Abalone in Arizona, comes (in 
1930-es) the circus
of Dr. Lao. Then the development goes along surrealistic/magic lines, 
but the style
sounds very modern.

Direct parallels:
1) there is a catalogue of characters, like in the BotLS and BotSS
books - in somewhat similar style
"Dr. Lao: A Chinese
Mr. Etaoin: A corrector of errors
Appolonius of Tyana: A legend
...
Teddy Roosevelt: An American President
...
"
2) there is a Hound of the Hedges - it is a green dog who uses 
photosynthesis, like the Green Man
in the BotNS

3) There is a Gadarene Swine (one of the swine from the Bible, Jesus 
sent devils into
it) like in the short story about the Pig in Chains by GW.

4) There is a She-werevolf.

5) A Mermaid

6) A lot of dialogs (GW mentions that he loves dialogs) in particular, 
between human and
non-human personnages - Mr. Etaoin speaks at lenght with the Sea Serpent.
...

Best

Sergei Soloviev

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