Seawrack and the Mother

Marc Aramini · 18 Sep 2012, 21:11 · from 2012-September.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: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:11:01 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Seawrack and the Mother
In-Reply-To: <CAD2109eooFg5hMfiEjKLhhhqS5BXVnK=AwkO27iNnrC1dn5q_A at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1348002661.18235.YahooMailClassic at web160701.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

I rather fancy that the pirate girl became the seaweed multilimbed thing that rises from the depths, but I need to check their proximity in the text (recombination hybrid of trees/seaweed from the island and the body of the pirate girl).? Does the four armed thing come up AFTER the pirate girl falls in the water? Is that near in time?? Don't remember now.

--- On Tue, 9/18/12, Mark Millman <markjmillman at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mark Millman <markjmillman at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Seawrack and the Mother
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Tuesday, September 18, 2012, 12:49 PM

Folks,

On Tuesday 18 September 2012, David Stockhoff wrote:

> . . . But the larger point is that once again we have two
> parallel plausibilities and little help from the narrator.
> We also have a plain indeterminacy: if Seawrack was
> not the pirate girl, then why does Wolfe put them so
> close together? What happened to the girl and where
> did Seawrack come from? Wolfe does this all the time
> with his characters.
>
> Furthermore, is it too complex to suggest that Babbie
> attacked Seawrack because he recognized her as the
> pirate girl Horn shot at? If he hit her in the arm, Babbie
> would have known who it was, smelled blood, and torn
> it off defending the boat. Her arm could have suffered
> both injuries without messing up anything [this last is
> in partial response to Sergei, whose perspective on
> this scene baffles me though I understand his reaction
> to Leeism]. A gunshot wound would explain why she
> wanted to get on the boat.

And later, Lee Berman wrote (not as a direct reply):

> . . . Regarding Babbie's apparent guilt over Seawrack,
> I dunno. It sounds familiar but I was reading ahead and
> couldn't find where that is described. Seawrack is ini-
> tially afraid of Babbie. But even if it was Babbie who re-
> moved Seawrack's arm rather than Horn's shot, I don't
> see how that changes things much. It still seems like-
> ly that Seawrack was on the "pirate ship" which was
> The Mother and had been following Horn's ship for a
> while before taking permanent residence.

Here's an alternative hypothesis that may explain all of the observed
facts, and may have the additional benefit of shedding light on
Seawrack's name:

The pirate ship is just that:? a pirate ship.? (Whether the Mother may
have any influence over its crew or the crew's actions is another
question.)? Horn's shot kills or knocks overboard the girl pirate, who
(or whose body) is then used by the Mother to create Seawrack, her
agent.? The first time that Seawrack tries to climb on to Horn's
sloop, Babbie attacks her (whether he recognizes her as the pirate
girl isn't important to this idea) and severs her arm.? She returns to
the sea, where the Mother repairs Seawrack to the extent of sealing
the wound, and sends her back to Horn's sloop.

Given Seawrack's name, I suspect that Horn's shot killed the pirate
girl, but it's not, strictly speaking, necessary that it did.

Best,

Mark Millman
_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120918/26629ba3/attachment.htm>

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