Agilus and Agia

aaron · 03 May 2013, 13:48 · from 2013-May.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: aaronsingleton at gmail.com (aaron)
Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 09:48:42 -0400
Subject: (urth) Agilus and Agia
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W36080314441D4B14DB3094CFBE0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W36080314441D4B14DB3094CFBE0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAEnJbxDe7FyJPCBy3d5=KbSy30-gMgTiy7czff8DJQ13upeTig at mail.gmail.com>

Ah, Encyclopedia Brown!  I loved those growing up.  I think Rudesind is the
most blatant Inire-like character.  It is from his mouth we first hear the
name Fechin, if I'm not mistaken.  It is also Rudesind who knows the true
context of the Astronaut picture . Rudesind is next seen in the House
Absolute, seemingly unsurprised at Severian's presence there--as if he
expected Sev.  It always seemed to me as if Rudesind implies that the House
Absolute and The Citadel are connected.  There are probably other instances
of his Inire-y behavior, but I am too lazy at the moment to think of them.


On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 8:01 AM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >aaron: Anyone have any good theories about Fechin?
>
> Good theories? I don't know about that. But I think it is a
> reasonable guess to think that Wolfe based part of
> the character on Russian artist Nicolai Fechin. It took some
> digging but I think I have determined, from younger self-portraits,
> that both Fechins have red hair.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Fechin
>
> http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2142/5732351770_766b0948aa_z.jpg
>
>
> http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2142/5732351770_766b0948aa_z.jpghttp://farm3.staticflickr.com/2142/5732351770_766b0948aa_z.jpghttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F8zrQ1ChEuE/USAfEKlT9YI/AAAAAAAAOzs/bzABfvMstzg/s1600/fechin+self+portrait1.jpghttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F8zrQ1ChEuE/USAfEKlT9YI/AAAAAAAAOzs/bzABfvMstzg/s1600/fechin+self+portrait1.jpghttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F8zrQ1ChEuE/USAfEKlT9YI/AAAAAAAAOzs/bzABfvMstzg/s1600/fechin+self+portrait1.jpg
> My not-so-good theory is that Fechin is another incarnation of
> Father Inire. Like Borski, I think that Inire's absence is an
> invitation for the reader to find him, wherever he might appear,
> though I do think I have a better explanation for why Inire would appear
> so many times.
>
> The tools we are given to conduct the search are the constellation
> of things we know about Inire: appearing small, bent, old, monkey-like,
> an association with art and museums, a lech for young human women, and
> perhaps a few others. Each appearance of Inire will demonstrate some
> of the characteristics, but none will display all of them. That's the
> puzzle I think we are presented.
>
> With Fechin we have the characteristics of art, old, monkey-like and
> the lech. Moreover we have Rudesind as a bridging character between
> Fechin and Father Inire, speaking of both as though they were his master.
>
> (not to ignore that Rudesind himself is small, old, bent, monkey-like and
> associated with art and museums. Rudesind describes a painting that Fechin
> made of him when he was a boy. The painting has paintbrushes shown next to
> him. It is an old mystery-solving trope, e.g. Encyclopedia Brown or
> Hardy Boys, where the mystery is solved when it is recognized that a
> painting
> of someone with paintbrushes is a self-portrait)
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>



-- 
Aaron Singleton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130503/91b973b8/attachment.htm>

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