Change of Pace / Peace

Antonin Scriabin · 16 Dec 2011, 21:12 · 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: kierkegaurdian at gmail.com (Antonin Scriabin)
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:12:00 -0500
Subject: (urth) Change of Pace / Peace
Message-ID: <CAM0v-i5_=eFvR9jvh+B_MBYGKeoJvqKQii=6oFxFJ2AuA-6eww at mail.gmail.com>

I don't know if many of you watched the short-lived but well-executed HBO
miniseries, *Carnivale*.  Basically, it was a pseudo-end times supernatural
mystery / thriller set during the Great Depression (dust-bowl Midwest),
alternating between the stories of a young "Avatar" of good (a man
traveling with a circus / carnival) and an "Avatar" of evil, a preacher in
(I think) California who gains a large following.  Anyways, I noticed some
parallels between it and *Peace*, during the portion in which a character
in the book (I can't remember if it is the narrator himself or a
story-within-a-story) apprentices with the man turning to stone.  The young
man goes, for some reason, to visit a neighboring carnival, where he finds
a mother-daughter "burlesque dancer" team (just like in the TV show) and a
character named Scudder (the last name of the Avatar of good's father in
the TV show).  "Scudder" is far from a common name; I can't think the
similarity is coincidental!  The carnival scenes in *Peace* also take place
in a Depression area Midwest town.  I seem to remember a few other
interesting similarities between *Peace* (which was written 28 years
earlier) and *Carnivale* that I will try and remember.  Anyone notice this
/ know if the HBO writers were fans of or influenced by Wolfe's work?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111216/bba2f809/attachment.htm>

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