fifth head owlet- wolf

David Stockhoff · 02 Apr 2013, 12:16 · from 2013-April.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2013 08:16:17 -0400
Subject: (urth) fifth head owlet- wolf
In-Reply-To: <1365998CAE3546DD85FD736F67D45A9D@Rover>
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Yes, Gerry. An organizing principle must organize. You and Marc have 
been going back and forth about evolution/devolution and genetic 
stagnation and copies of copies and hosts and parasites (e.g., when one 
species infiltrates another) and what happens when vastly different 
species/minds meet one another, and you can't even make a broad guess at 
what it is that a "skin" joke might organize in this case? When Wolfe 
writes the same ideas over and over, repeating the same themes at wildly 
varying scales?

I'm proposing, without attempting to work it out very far because I 
haven't read the novellas in years, an explanation for a few odd 
descriptions that nothing else that has been brought up so far seems to 
explain. The proposal is based solidly on what Wolfe has done in the past.

That kind of post is what this forum is for, and at least partly what 
Marc's let's-see-what-sticks posts have been meant to inspire. I can't 
make sense of it myself, and neither can you. This forum is not just for 
stomping on anything you don't like. If you don't see something, just 
say you don't see it.

For all we know, the mites are the true, animating planetary 
intelligence, at least when they have bodies to infest. They'd be small 
enough to ride bubbles.

On 4/2/2013 6:23 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
>
> From: David Stockhoff
>
>> Peritonitis, exactly. It need not have any meaning. It only needs to 
>> be an organizing principle.
>
> An organising principle must organise.  What is organised by this 
> storm of putative connections?  [And 'odd' things that are not really 
> odd at all? Can't a hungry girl falling asleep under a tree dream of a 
> planet seen through the branches as a giant fruit?]
>
> 5HOC is not Peritonitis, in which there is an explicit disconnect 
> between the description of the protagonist as a humanoid hero and as a 
> microbe, which the reader is invited to make of what he will.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
>
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