theories

Gerry Quinn · 24 Oct 2011, 12:05 · 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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:05:35 +0100
Subject: (urth) theories
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W61AE816729F26E6089C419CFEF0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W61AE816729F26E6089C419CFEF0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <AF2D39ED77CF4712B444EEDA2B78891C@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> > Gerry Quinn: As for Inire as the old boatman, I really don?t understand why 
> > people take such ideas seriously.

> What's wrong with taking it seriously because an intelligent reader who is
> highly familiar with BotNS sees it? Perhaps you consider me stupid?

That?s why I?m asking the question.  I can?t understand why such a person finds this and similar ideas sufficiently attractive to persist with it, for the reasons I gave.  That is to say, it seems to me that ?Fr. Inire as boatman? offers little in the way of explaining anything, it poses a lot of very obvious questions that are very hard to answer, and it seems to obliterate the character and storyline of a major character, Dorcas, as we have understood them.  Hence my question:

> >So tell me.  Where?s all this ?Inire is the boatman stuff? getting us?
> >Can somebody explain how they understand Dorcas? character and story in this 
> >picture?

> Who exactly is "us"? Why not say "me"? Is trying to herd everyone here into
> one gelatinous, like-thinking, single minded clusterfuck really your idea of 
> "getting somewhere"?

I asked merely asked for *somebody* to explain it.  Ryan, I think, came up with the example.

> Gerry, if you don't find any merit in my posts, I don't think you should read them 
> or respond to them. Instead you incessantly, relentlessly respond to them and are 
> now seem to be calling for a vote to have them banned from discussion.

Noting their consequences and asking a question about them is hardly calling for them to be banned from discussion.

> Anyway, if you read the text with care you will find much about the character Dorcas
> which is mysterious and unexplained.  Likewise with Severian. For me, idenfifying
> Father Inire as inhabiting key places in the story solves these mysteries and 
> explains the unexplained. 

Excellent!  So what is the new understanding of Dorcas? character and storyline that the theory of Father Inire as boatman gives us?

> If this doesn't work for you then don't read my posts. Or come up with your own theories.
> Or just be quiet for a while. Why try to nudge this forum away from a particular topic? 
> If you don't like it simply don't participate.

I?m merely asking a question about the topic.  Is that against your rules?

- Gerry Quinn

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111024/1f58e7aa/attachment.htm>

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