"been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Jeffery Wilson · 09 Sep 2013, 12:17 · from 2013-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: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeffery Wilson)
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 07:17:14 -0500
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
In-Reply-To: <522DB5D4.6080403 at verizon.net>
References: <52290769.660c320a.7def.fffff916 at mx.google.com><1378442246.57552.YahooMailNeo at web124504.mail.ne1.yahoo.com><1378489682.63899.YahooMailNeo at web124506.mail.ne1.yahoo.com><522A4070.4070407 at irit.fr>
	<5B8EEAEF-B206-4F5D-A277-349B6C60AD19 at gmail.com><1378614309.6288.YahooMailNeo at web124502.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<522C7085.3060202 at verizon.net>
	<D75A571ED1584BAF8820AA540F92E8CF@Rover>
	<522CA3B6.70903 at verizon.net>
	<0398640b3bd4fdc0229df649e074727b.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
	<522CFCDD.7050807 at verizon.net>
	<690beeb630bc6319504d98f7fd6f8fe4.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
	<522D34C0.10503 at verizon.net>
	<d798f9434718e3eb44d6d00f26d3d9b6.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>
	<522DB5D4.6080403 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <522DBC4A.6080206 at clueland.com>

On 9/9/2013 6:49 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
> On 9/9/2013 12:35 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> I would think that any volume of plastic would indicate either enough 
>> time
>> for new petroleum to form, or that not enough time had yet passed for
>> processed plastic to crumble.
>
> Exactly. Severian doesn't call it plastic, but he refers to colored 
> bits of something, so it has already crumbled.
>
> Possibly it's a stretch and simply put there as a general clue to 
> Severian's post-oil extraction time period. Since there could have 
> been a vast amount of it lying around (probable; in fact I always took 
> it as a bit of a joke, sort of dinosaurs-to-oil in reverse) I'd think 
> it would be difficult to get a good estimate of how long it would take 
> for all of it to disappear.

Ah! "..../the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks 
of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at 
all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of 
tumbling in the clamourous sea."

/I can see the confusion of plastic with glass by unilluminated people, 
but it should be too light to mix with sand, and perhaps should be as 
familiar as Sev says prosthetic limbs are. /
/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130909/93e0c906/attachment.htm>

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