Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Gerry Quinn · 16 Dec 2011, 21:05 · from 2011-December.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: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:05:46 -0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <4EEBACAC.3050904 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W12E7EC80127A6FC3AAA72CFA00 at phx.gbl><CAGB0RZ5LU6ie01JTpK7whmfmD5=i9gBCApHtWedS5iiJypuu3g at mail.gmail.com><4EEB9E32.3020801 at verizon.net><6E921A413E7B431FB44CCB3668352728@Rover>
	<4EEBACAC.3050904 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <C9214EA6F0CB4522912BE2AD857ED723@Rover>



From: David Stockhoff 

On 12/16/2011 3:31 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> *From:* David Stockhoff mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net

> > You?ve accused me of illiteracy twice recently, if I recall correct. 
> > On both occasions, you were attempting to make far-fetched 
> > correspondences between fairy lore and elements of the Solar Cycle 
> > (which in fact uses fairy lore less than most Wolfe). When I refused 
> > to discuss the Neighbours as if they were literally fairies (because 
> > they are different
> > from them in numerous ways), you accused me of illiteracy.
> > And today, you claimed that the House Absolute is a fairy palace, and 
> > accused me of illiteracy when I demurred.
> > On neither occasion were you able to elaborate your contentions into 
> > anything meaningful. Hence, I suppose, the descent into insults.

> No. I was simply pointing out that you seem to know nothing about 
> Faerie, being unable to recognize it when it appears, but feel free to 
> behave as though you do, and yet also to abuse anyone who brings it up 
> in discussing Wolfe. 
I have never abused anyone for bringing it up (it must require a hard neck for you to accuse me of abuse in this thread).  What I have done is asked you to be specific with regard to what you are arguing.  In the case of the Neighbours, for example, in the context of what a Neighbour whose consciousness had entered that of a man would notice as odd, you demanded that I answer in terms not of Neighbour characteristics, but in terms of fairy lore.  The absurdity of this can be pointed up by considering the question of whether he would miss his wings.
Or how about his underground life?  Because *today*, of course, it seems that fairies live underground, in accordance with your ill-thought out argument du jour.  Do the Neighbours live underground?  If not, where does that leave your argument on that occasion?  Wingless and buried, it would seem.
Your accusation of illiteracy is a transparent device to divert the discussion from the works of Gene Wolfe, into some nebulous body of extra-textual material which need never be defined.
- Gerry Quinn
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111216/0287f07d/attachment-0001.htm>

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