Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Gerry Quinn · 18 Dec 2011, 15:51 · 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: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:51:05 -0000
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <4EED55BC.4040200 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W50A9FF8908A2C4EB5FA2CACFA30 at phx.gbl><37C4859FAD55407DBA8779047C8C609B@Rover><4EEAA211.7070705 at verizon.net><6A0F475423584142B0FA666A0E93F682@Rover><4EEAB8C6.100 at verizon.net><5054BA56E99A4B28A66D90C447EEEE44@Rover><4EED2143.9010706 at verizon.net><B313F102F2A041C7A3735F37FC4B34E4@Rover><4EED3115.20902 at verizon.net><D443B595307C4CB79D5809B6C766449C@Rover><4EED383D.2070000 at verizon.net><9DC7581DE8B242049D6A8A31A25F9185@Rover><4EED46F9.8080601 at verizon.net><8101814B5E9B4CB18A26CADF6D32487E@Rover>
	<4EED55BC.4040200 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <BFDA7381D0234F6EB6507D236F84DCCA@Rover>



From: David Stockhoff 


> On 12/17/2011 9:15 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > > But they also tell us what's being subverted and thus a clue
> > > as to why. It's not a question of "if Dorcas is Sleeping Beauty, then
> > > who's the witch"? There is no poisoned apple. But if there is a witch,
> > > it's Severian.

> > The story of Sleeping Beauty involves witches and poisoned apples now? 
> > It only remains for Lee to propose that Father Inire is all of the 
> > Seven Dwarfs. But anyway, that error is not important, but it points 
> > to the real error: you neither know nor care whether you are talking 
> > about Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, because you are just riffing on 
> > stuff in your head which has completely lost contact with the text.

> You keep getting stuck on this, Gerry. There is no poisoned apple in 
> BNS, therefore there is nothing to clearly reference either story. The 
> witch and the sleeping woman are the key parts. There is no 1:1 
> relationship.
You are flailing desperately, in my opinion.  Severian was certainly not responsible for Dorcas?s death, so placing him as the witch (or wicked fairy, in the canonical version of Sleeping Beauty) is absurd.  If you want to change every aspect of the story, and even what story it is, what is the point of your argument?  When you say ?there is no 1:1" relationship?, then, given the sort of relationships you are apparently willing to propose, you are tacitly admitting that there is no relationship at all.  Because admitting the sort of relationships you are proposing now would imply that every book should be discussed as if it reconstituted the Library of Babel.
There is a vague resonance with Sleeping Beauty when a beautiful woman is resurrected.  Just as there is a vague resemblance between Dr. Talos and a stuffed fox.  Discussing the stuff that you are suggesting is meaningful ? for example the ?enchantment? you claimed Dorcas is under ? is the equivalent of discussing the horsehair Talos is stuffed with, and what colour horse it came from. 
- Gerry Quinn
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111218/d6b49424/attachment.htm>

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