Pike's ghost

David Stockhoff · 29 Nov 2011, 22:15 · from 2011-November.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: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:15:54 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <AA48E7283ACB4391B7E03B1DCEE1D772@Rover>
References: <SNT123-W181DB1759DF9C702FEE0B0CFB30 at phx.gbl>
	<AA48E7283ACB4391B7E03B1DCEE1D772@Rover>
Message-ID: <4ED5599A.3090001 at verizon.net>

On 11/29/2011 5:01 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> > In this case there is a clear, easy to see connection between this 
> painting and Severian's
> > encounter with Typhon.
> There is zero connection. Typhon has an erection when he is excited by 
> the exercise of power. Porno-Pas has two erections in Blood?s 
> painting. But these have nothing in particular to do with one another. 
> Erections are not uncommon in hard-core pornographic images; it is 
> their absence that would be surprising.

I AM impressed!

Along these lines, I argue that Severian is not an important character 
and narrator in BNS. After all, novels usually have protagonists as well 
as narrators. It would be a poor novel that lacked either. Therefore, we 
should pay not attention to what Severian says or does.

Still, Gerry again has a point. The scene is in a brothel. It may well 
be *more* accurate a depiction in some ways than Campion's. But that's 
irony, not necessarily evidence of historical proximity.

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